Chapter 12
She took the post in September.
Sybil Amory said "thank God" and then talked about her grandchildren for forty minutes, and on the first Monday in October Imogen Tillinghast Severin walked into a building she had worked in for eleven years and found that the office she had been given had a window onto the harbor and a door that shut.
She was extremely good at it. That was the surprise and it was not a small one. She had spent eight years being competent at a thing and calling it a job, and it turned out that the difference between a job and the other thing was about nine inches of desk and the right to say no to people.
And on the fourteenth of November — a Friday — she worked until seven and then drove home over the bridge with the window cracked and did not stop anywhere or mark it in any way.
She did not mark it deliberately. She had thought about it for a week — whether to do something, whether Siobhan should come, whether she would want to be alone in that house on that night — and in the end she came home at half seven and made an omelette and went to bed at ten.
She slept.
There was a text on her phone in the morning, sent at 2:07 a.m.
I'm not going to say anything. I just didn't want the hour to go past with nobody thinking about you.
That was the first one, and it started the winter.
She did not answer it. She looked at it for about ninety seconds standing in the kitchen, and then she put the phone face-down, and then she picked it up and read it again, and then she went and did the compost.
But on the nineteenth she sent him a question.
She had been turning it over since August and she wanted to know, and there was nobody else alive who could tell her, and she wrote it flatly with no greeting because a greeting would have been a whole conversation on its own.
When you went into the room and said where's Imogen and she said she's already in — how long was it between her saying it and you pressing it?
The answer came in eleven minutes.
Three seconds. Maybe two. There was no thinking in it. I've tried for a year to find a thought in there and there isn't one, and I'm not offering that as a defense, you asked how long and that's how long.
Imogen read it standing at the window.
Then she wrote: Did you look at the panel.
Yes.
And?
It was showing motion on the landing. I have no memory of registering it and I am certain I looked at it, because I looked at it four hundred times in the next four hours and I knew what the landing zone looked like lit before I'd been in there ten minutes.
So the honest answer is that I saw it and it did not go in.
I don't know what to do with that and neither does anyone I've asked.
She sat down on the kitchen stool.
Anyone you've asked.
Yes.
Who.
And there was a pause, the first one, about four minutes long.
I'd rather not say. Not to be evasive. If I tell you it becomes a thing I did that you have to have a feeling about, and I've done that to you once already and it cost you fifty-two days.
She put the phone down and went out onto the terrace in her coat and stood in the cold for a while, and when she came back in she wrote:
That's the most annoying correct answer you've ever given me.
I know. I'm sorry.
Don't apologize.
Okay.
That became the shape of it, and it went on for four months.
She would send a question. Sometimes one a week; twice, in January, four in a day.
He would answer inside the hour, every single time, in the same register — flat, complete, and entirely without decoration.
He never once asked her a question back.
He never said how are you. He never said I miss you, which she noticed in the second week and which she was, some days, furious about.
The questions got worse as the winter went on. She did that on purpose.
Did you ever tell her things about me.
Yes. Not cruel ones. That's not a defense either.
I told her you were difficult about the Newport people and I told her you'd stopped wanting to go out, and both of those were true and both of those were mine, not yours, and I said them in a way that made me the reasonable one.
I did that maybe nine times over four years. I have thought about each of them.
Name one.
He named one. It was from 2023 and it was about a dinner Imogen had not wanted to attend after a funeral, and it was so exactly a thing she remembered him being gracious about in the car that she had to put the phone in a drawer for a day and a half.
Why did you say I was in Providence.
I didn't. You did.
You let me.
Yes.
Why.
Because a table of fourteen people were about to find out that my wife was in the house and I wasn't, and I wanted four seconds to pass without that happening, and you gave me the four seconds, and I took them.
I have never been more grateful to anyone for anything and it is the single worst thing I have ever done at a dinner table.
She read that one about six times.
In the second week of February she sent the one she had been circling since November.
She had drafted it four times since the autumn and deleted it every time, because she could not work out what a right answer would even look like, and because she suspected that any answer at all would tell her something she could not un-know.
If the alarm went off tomorrow and we were both in the house and there was somebody with us, what would you do.
The reply did not come in eleven minutes.
It did not come in an hour. She went to bed at half eleven with the phone on the nightstand and it had not come, and she lay there in the dark being furious with herself for having asked, and it came at twenty past one.
I've been sitting here for three hours trying to find a way to say I'd do the right thing, and I can't get it to sound like anything but a man promising. So here's what I've actually got.
I don't know.
I'd like to tell you I'd go out into the hall.
I think I would. I've built the room in my head about four hundred times and in every version I go out into the hall, and that's exactly why I don't trust it — because I've had fifteen months to rehearse it and forty-one seconds is not a rehearsal.
The whole problem on the fourteenth was that there was no thinking in it.
Whatever's in me at two in the morning with a siren going is what's going to happen, and I've spent a year finding out that I don't have as much say in that as I assumed I did.
What I can tell you is what I've changed, which isn't the same thing and is the only part that's mine.
I don't have anyone anymore who I tell things to instead of you.
Not one. There is nobody in my life in that role and there is not going to be, and that's not a promise about a hallway, it's an arrangement I've already made.
Because the honest version is that I didn't fail at two in the morning. I failed over four years and then it presented the bill.
Imogen sat up in bed in the dark with the phone lighting her face.
She read it three times, and then she got up and stood at the bedroom window looking at nothing, and then she went back and read it again.
Thank you, she wrote.
Don't thank me for that.
I'm not thanking you. I'm telling you that's the first answer you've given me that I'd have believed if you'd given it in the study.
Nothing came back for four minutes.
I know, he wrote. I couldn't have given it in the study. I didn't know any of it yet. I'd have said I'd go out into the hall and I'd have meant it and it would have been worth nothing, and you'd have taken it, and we'd have been exactly where we were.
She put the phone face-down and lay awake until four.
It was the worst possible answer and she knew, lying there, that it was also the only one she could have done anything with — because a man who swore he would go out into the hall would have been a man performing a hallway, and she had already had fifty-two days of a performance and she could not have survived another.
He did not come to the house.
Not once, in four months. Not at Christmas, when she half expected something at the gate and got nothing; not on her birthday in February, when she got a message at eight in the morning that said I know you don't want anything from me and I'm not sending anything.
Happy birthday. and then nothing else for six days.
He did unglamorous things at a distance instead.
The flood policy came up for renewal in December and she found it had been quietly moved eleven months earlier to a carrier that actually covered the boathouse, at his expense, in her name, with the paperwork sent to her lawyer rather than to her.
In January the town reassessed and the bill went up eleven hundred dollars, and the abatement application that arrived in her mail in February had been prepared by somebody who knew the sill dates for every window in that house.
He never mentioned either.
She asked Nuala Reddington about it in March and Nuala said, "He's been paying the carrying costs on that property since February of last year," in the tone of a woman who had been waiting to be asked.
"He what?"
"Insurance, taxes, the boiler contract, the patrol.
Through an account, not in his name, and I only know because I went looking in November when you asked me to check the title was clean.
" Nuala paused. "I didn't tell you at the time because you didn't ask me and because you were about to take a directorship and I thought you'd like to enjoy it. "
Imogen sat with the phone against her ear.
"Is that — can he do that?"