Chapter 7 #2
That was the arithmetic, and once she had it she could not put it down.
Fifty-two days. The gutter in the rain. The quilts folded so the housekeeper wouldn't find them.
The glass of water on the coaster. The pantry silver — how long were you in there, how long's it take, okay — and the lamb thing on the third attempt, and his hand coming up to her face in the bedroom with the lamp on, and the whole of the fifth week.
She had not been deceived once, on a Saturday, in a study.
She had been deceived on the twenty-eighth of November in a dark hallway.
She had been deceived on Christmas Eve. She had been deceived at the bottom of the back stairs with her hand in his hair, the first time since the fourteenth of November her body had been quiet, and on the twenty-fourth of January in a car going over the bridge when he put his hand over hers and said I'd have backed whatever you said.
Every single day. On purpose. By a man being very, very good to her.
He had not even needed to work at it. He had only needed to let her go on saying ninety seconds to everybody she loved, and stand next to her while she said it.
Imogen turned around and was sick in her own sink.
He came in at ten past seven.
She heard the car, and the door, and his bag go down on the bench in the back hall, and his coat, and then him coming through into the kitchen saying something about the ice at the bend, exactly as he had said it two hundred times.
He stopped.
The lights were all on. She was sitting at the island with a phone in front of her that was not hers, because Astrid had emailed it and Imogen had printed it, and the sheet was sitting on the granite squared up with the edge of the counter.
"Imogen."
"Sit down."
"What's happened?"
"Sit down, Cormac."
He did not sit down. He came as far as the end of the island and looked at the sheet of paper, upside down, from four feet away, and she watched his face and got everything she needed in under two seconds.
He knew what it was from the shape of it.
"Where did you get that," he said.
And Imogen, who had not raised her voice in that house in eight years, heard something come out of her that she did not recognize.
"That's the question?"
"No—"
"That is the first sentence out of your mouth."
"Imogen, that's not—"
"Say the number."
He put his hand on the back of the chair.
"Imogen."
"Say the number, Cormac. You've had eighty-three days. Say it."
The kitchen was very bright and very quiet.
"Forty-one," he said.
"Louder."
"Forty-one seconds." His voice broke on the second word and he kept going anyway, which she would grant him, later, from a very long way off.
"I pressed it. I lifted the cover and I pressed it.
I knew it before the door finished closing and I have known it every second since and I did not tell you. "
"You told me it was automatic."
"I told you the door shuts at ninety seconds—"
"Don't." She was on her feet. She did not remember getting there.
"Don't you dare stand in my kitchen and be accurate at me.
You sat in that study and you let me ask you for all of it and you gave me everything except the one thing, and then you watched me go out and say ninety seconds to Siobhan.
To my mother. You watched me defend you to Siobhan Brennan in your own house—"
"I know."
"Do not say I know—"
"I know. I know. I know." He had both hands on the chair back and he was gray. "Imogen, there is nothing I can say tonight that isn't worse."
"Try anyway."
"I was going to tell you in the first week and I didn't because you couldn't go downstairs.
" He said it fast, the way you pull something out.
"And then after that there was no first week to tell you in.
And every day it got to be a bigger thing I hadn't said, and then you came back to the room, and then it was the fifth week, and then I —"
He stopped.
"Finish it."
"And then I wanted it more than I wanted to be honest with you," Cormac said. "That's the whole answer. There isn't a better one underneath. I had it and I wasn't going to do anything that would take it away."
Imogen stood in the middle of her kitchen.
Outside, down past the terrace, the water was doing what it did in February.
"You know what the worst part is," she said.
"Yes."
"No, you don't. You think it's the button.
" She was steady now, which was somehow worse for both of them.
"It isn't the button. I knew about the button.
I was on that landing, Cormac. I've known since the fourteenth of November exactly what you did — you asked her where I was and you took her word for it, and no piece of paper was ever going to tell me anything about you that I didn't already have. "
"Then—"
"The worst part is the fifth week."
He did not say anything.
"I went back to you," Imogen said, "on the fourteenth of December, and I did it because you told me the whole truth and didn't flinch. That was the reason. That was the only reason. And you were standing there knowing it was the one thing you hadn't done."
"Imogen—"
"You let me choose you with the wrong information.
" Her voice did go then, finally, and she let it.
"You had nothing to do with that. Do you understand?
That wasn't the door, that wasn't ninety seconds, that wasn't a siren at two in the morning with no time to think.
That was fifty-two days of you deciding, every morning, one morning at a time, that you'd rather have me than have me know. "
The clock on the stove went from 7:38 to 7:39.
"I'm going to ask you one thing," she said, "and if you lie to me I will know."
"Ask it."
"Astrid. In December."
Cormac closed his eyes.
"Draycott brought me the review," he said. "It was a real review. The numbers were real. And she was the only other person alive who'd read that log, and I let him run it, and I did not ask myself one single question about why I wasn't stopping it."
"Did you know?"
"Not the way you're asking. Not as a sentence." He opened his eyes. "But if you're asking me whether some part of me was glad — yes. I've known that since about the fourth of January and I have not said it out loud until right now."
Imogen picked up the sheet of paper off the counter.
She folded it in half, and in half again, and put it in the pocket of her cardigan, and she was surprised to find her hands were perfectly steady.
"Get out of my house," she said.