Chapter 8
He did not argue.
That was the first thing, and she had not prepared for it.
She had said get out of my house at twenty to eight on a Tuesday in February and some part of her had been braced for the next four hours — for the sitting down, for the let's be reasonable, for the lawyers, for a man with a firm on Weybosset Street saying the word conveyance in a tone.
Cormac stood at the end of the island for about fifteen seconds.
Then he said, "Okay."
"Okay?"
"It's your house."
"Don't."
"Imogen, it's not a point I'm making." He was still gray. "It's the fact. I put it in your name in November so that a night like tonight could go exactly like this. It would be obscene to be surprised by it now."
And he went upstairs.
She heard him overhead, walking, not hurrying. A drawer. The closet. He was gone eleven minutes and came back down with one bag — the canvas one from the boat, not luggage — and his coat over his arm, and stopped in the doorway.
"There's a patrol at eleven and again at three," he said. "They come to the gate, not the house. If you want them to come to the house you call the number on the fridge and you say the word escort and they'll do it every night for as long as you want."
"Cormac."
"The boiler's fine but the pressure drops if it runs all night, so knock it back at ten. There's a man in Tiverton who'll come in an hour, his number's in the drawer under the phone, not the one on the fridge."
"Stop it."
"I'm nearly done." He shifted the bag. "The north gutter's going to block again in March. Don't go up there."
"I'm not going up on the roof, Cormac."
"You will," he said. "You're a Tillinghast, you'll go up on the roof to save ninety dollars. Don't."
And that — after everything, at eight o'clock at night, at the end of the worst day since the fourteenth of November — nearly broke her. She turned away from him and put both hands on the counter and did not let it.
"Where are you going," she said, to the window.
"Boathouse tonight. Providence tomorrow."
"The boathouse is mine."
"Yes," Cormac said. "May I use the boathouse tonight."
There was a long silence.
"Yes."
"Thank you."
She heard the back door. She heard it shut properly, because it had never once latched right and he had always been the only person in that house who knew how to lift it on the hinge.
And then she was standing in an eleven-room house on eleven acres at the end of a mile of dark road, alone, for the first time since the fourteenth of November.
She did not sleep.
She had expected that. What she had not expected was that she would not be frightened.
She went through the whole house at nine o'clock with every light on, room by room, the way she had not been able to do in three months.
The morning room with its new sash. The library.
The dining room. The front hall. She stood at the bottom of the front stairs, which she had not used since the fifteenth, and looked up them, and then went up them, at a normal pace, and stood on the master landing in front of a panel of painted pine.
02:07:31 MOTION — MASTER LANDING.
That was her. That was a woman in a nightgown coming around that corner at second thirty-one with forty-nine seconds still on the clock and a lit plan view on the wall four feet from a man's hand.
She put her palm flat on the pine.
Nothing happened. There was no feeling in it at all. She stood there for a while waiting to find out what she was supposed to feel in this spot and got nothing back, and eventually went and made tea at eleven o'clock at night in a black kitchen with the lights off, on purpose, to see.
She was fine.
That was the thing that made her sit down on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet at half past eleven and cry for twenty minutes: that she was fine.
Three months of not being able to stand at the bottom of her own stairs, three months of the glass of water on the coaster and the route and the lights on before she started down — and the fear had walked out the back door with a canvas bag at eight o'clock.
It had never been the house.
It had been him. It had been him in the house. She had been frightened of a room and cured by the man who put her in it, and she had called that healing, and it had been the other thing, the thing Siobhan had said on the phone in November with a knife going in the background.
He shut a door. And now you can't be downstairs on your own, so you need him in the house. So the thing he did is the reason you can't leave.
Imogen sat on the floor of her kitchen and was angrier at herself than she had been at any person, living or dead, in thirty-nine years.
On the Saturday she did the pantry.
She chose the hour deliberately: nine in the morning, full light, nothing to prove. She had been in that room twice since November — once with the detective, once in December with both hands shaking and a chair holding the door — and both of those had happened with a man in the house.
This time there was nobody within a mile.
She stood in the kitchen for about four minutes first. Then she crossed the floor and put her hand on the painted latch and found that her arm did not want to do it, which she had expected, and she stood there and let her arm not want to for a while, and then she pushed the door open and walked in and stood in the middle of the floor.
Eleven feet by four. Dust and old polish. The mark on the paint at shoulder height where she had leaned, which nobody had washed off, because Imogen had told the housekeeper twice not to touch anything in that room and had never explained why.
She made herself do the whole thing.
She stood where she had stood. She put her hand flat on the inside of the door at the height where the latch is, and she shut it, and she stood in the dark with the door shut and her hand on a piece of brass that does not lock, and she counted.
She got to two hundred and eleven before she understood that nothing was going to happen.
There was no man on the other side. There was no whistling.
There was a kitchen out there with a boiler ticking in it and a bowl of pears on the island and sixteen acres of nothing beyond the window, and a woman standing in a cupboard at nine o'clock on a Saturday morning, on purpose, to prove something to herself.
She came out at about twenty past and stood in her kitchen and found that her hands were entirely steady.
Then she went and got a bucket and washed the mark off the door.
That took eleven minutes and two goes, because somebody had gloss-painted over emulsion in about 1994 and the surface took nothing evenly, and when it was done you could not see where it had been unless you knew.
She did know. She would always know.
But it was a door in a room in a house that belonged to her, and she had shut it and opened it herself, and nobody had done either of those things for her.
Nuala Reddington said, "Say it again."
"He's out. As of Tuesday."
"Out of the house."
"I told him to go and he went."
There was a pause on the line, and the sound of a chair.
"Mrs. Severin, I want to be careful here, because I'm about to sound pleased and there's nothing to be pleased about." Nuala's voice had changed slightly. "You're aware of the position you're in."
"Tell me anyway."
"You own the property outright, in your own name, conveyed before any proceeding, with his firm's written undertaking not to contest anything in any forum.
He has left voluntarily and without objection.
There is no court in this state that is going to do anything to you.
" A pause. "I have done this for twenty-two years and I have never once had this call.
Usually I'm explaining to a woman why she has to keep sleeping forty feet from him for another nine months. "
Imogen looked out at the water.
"It was the deed," she said.
"Yes."
"He gave me the house in November so I'd be safe, and I used it on Tuesday to put him off it."
"Yes."
"Does that seem—"
"It seems like the only thing that worked," Nuala said. "Which is not the same as tidy. Do you want me to file now?"
Imogen thought about it for a long time, long enough that Nuala said her name.
"Not yet."
"Mrs. Severin."
"I know what I'm doing."
"You don't," Nuala said, not unkindly, "but you're allowed. Call me in a month."
Siobhan came on Thursday and was decent about it for nearly an hour.
She looked at the log. She read it twice at the kitchen island with her reading glasses on the end of her nose, and Imogen watched her get to the last line and stop.
"Auto-seal — not reached," Siobhan said.
"Forty-nine seconds."
"I understand what it means." She took the glasses off. "Im, I'm going to be very careful, because I've wanted to say something since November and I'm not going to enjoy it as much as I thought."
"Say it."
"No, that's the thing. I don't want to." Siobhan turned the sheet of paper around on the counter with one finger. "I've been walking around for three months with I told you in my mouth and now I've got it and it tastes like a penny."
"Siobhan."
"You defended him to me. In this kitchen.
You said he was turning around and I let it go because you'd been in a pantry for four hours and I thought, she gets to have whatever she needs this week.
" She looked up. "That's the bit I'm angry about.
Not him. Me. I knew and I let you have it because it was easier than sitting here while you hated me. "
"That's not your job."
"It's exactly my job. It's the only job I've got."
Imogen put her hand over Siobhan's on the counter, which was not a thing either of them did.
"I'd have hated you," she said.
"For about six weeks."
"Longer."
"Yeah," Siobhan said. "Probably."
She stayed till one in the morning. At some point she said, "Are you going to file?", and Imogen said "I don't know," and Siobhan — and Imogen would love her for this for the rest of her life — said only, "Okay," and poured them both another.
Her mother did not say I told you so, because her mother never said anything so vulgar as a sentence with a point on it.
What Augusta said, on the phone, on Saturday, was:
"So he's at the Providence flat."
"Yes."
"And you're at Winterbourne."
"Yes."
"Alone. In February."
"Yes, Mother."
A silence with a shape to it.
"Your room is made up," Augusta said.
"I know it is."
"It has been made up since the fifteenth of November."
"I know."
"Imogen." Something came into her mother's voice that Imogen had heard perhaps four times in her life.
"I am not going to argue with you. I will simply say this once and then I'm going to talk about the garden.
It is nine hundred square feet, it has a working fireplace, it has been yours since you were six years old, and it is forty minutes up the road.
There is no version of your life in which you need to be sitting in his house. "
"It's my house."
"It is his house with your name on it," Augusta said, "and those are different things. You have known that since Tuesday. That's why you're still in it."
Imogen did not answer that.
"Now," her mother said. "The witch hazel has come out three weeks early and I blame the government."
She worked it out on the Sunday, sitting on the cold terrace in her coat with a cup of tea going cold in her hands.
Her mother was wrong, and her mother was also right, and both of those were going to be true for some months yet.
But the thing underneath — the thing Imogen came to on the terrace, with the water gray and restless under a sky that hadn't cleared all week, and the gutter on the north side already showing a green streak — was simpler than anybody's advice.
She was not going to leave.
Not because of Cormac. Not for a reason that had anything to do with him at all.
She had been going to leave in November and she had gone up the back stairs to the guest wing instead, and she had told herself for three months that it was about Augusta, and about not giving her mother the win, and that had been true, and it had not been the whole of it.
Here was the whole of it: she had stood in her own hall on the fifteenth of November with two doors open to her — the restaurant and the Wickford house, Siobhan and her mother, a bed over a kitchen and a room made up since she was six — and both of those doors led to somebody else's building.
Thirty-nine years old. A name that opened rooms all over that coast. A husband's house, a mother's house, a friend's spare bed.
Not one square foot of it hers until a man signed it over in a panic in November.
Imogen sat on the terrace and let that be true for a while, and it was not a good feeling, and it was not self-pity either. It was closer to the feeling you get when a survey comes back and tells you the sill is gone, and you stop pretending about the floor.
She was going to stay in this house. She was going to stay in it because it was a thing he gave her, and she was going to keep staying in it until the day it stopped feeling like that and started feeling like hers, and she had no idea how long that would take and she was going to do it anyway.
And she was not going to be a woman who could not be alone downstairs after dark.
She went in at four and it was already going gray, and she turned on one lamp in the library instead of all of them, and sat in it, and read nine pages of a catalog she had been picking at for two years.
He sent nothing.
That was the last thing about that week, and it sat strangely.
No flowers, which she had expected within forty-eight hours and had already decided to leave in the drive.
No letter. No long message at one in the morning.
Nothing from a lawyer, obviously; nothing from Lennox, which surprised her more.
On Friday the eleventh day, a text.
The patrol asked me to tell you they can come to the door at 11 instead of the gate if you want. You have to say escort. I'm not asking you anything.
She looked at it for a long time.
Then she typed thank you, and deleted it, and typed I know how the patrol works, and deleted that too, and put the phone face-down on the counter.
She did not answer it.
Two days later the gutter on the north side let go in the rain and put water down the library window again, and Imogen stood at the bottom of the ladder in the wet for about a minute and a half thinking about ninety dollars.
Then she went inside and called the man in Tiverton, out of the drawer under the phone, and paid him two hundred and forty.