Chapter 14
He came at three and she made him stand in the kitchen for the first ten minutes, because she had not worked out where to put him and because sitting down would have meant something.
"I've got an hour in me," she said. "Maybe less."
"Then I'll take less."
"Don't be agreeable."
"I'm not being agreeable, I'm being — " He stopped. "All right. I'll take the hour and I'd like more, and that's the honest version, and now I've said it so you don't have to wonder."
"Better."
"Thank you."
They stood there.
"Sit down," Imogen said.
She had meant to be careful. She had rehearsed it on the Friday in the car, and what she had rehearsed was a structured conversation with an agenda, because that is what you do when you have been made a fool of once and have no intention of being made one twice.
She got about four minutes into the agenda.
"I'm going to tell you what the four hours were," she said.
He went very still.
"I've never said it," she said. "To anyone.
Siobhan doesn't know. My mother doesn't know.
Nuala Reddington has a two-line summary in a file.
I said about nine sentences to you in this kitchen on the fifteenth of November and that's the whole of it, and I've decided I'm not going to be a woman who's got a thing like that in her and hasn't said it. "
"Imogen—"
"I'm not doing it for you." She heard how it came out and did not soften it. "I want that clear. You're not getting it because you've earned it. You're getting it because you're the only person on earth who was there, and it turns out that matters more than whether I like you."
Cormac put both hands flat on the table.
"Okay," he said.
"You don't say anything until I'm finished."
"Okay."
"And you don't fix any of it."
"I'm not going to fix any of it."
"You're going to want to."
"I know," he said. "I've wanted to for eighteen months. Go on."
So she told him.
She started with the water. She had come down for water and she had taken her phone because she always took her phone, and the kitchen floor was cold, and she had run the tap until it went cold, and she had stood with her back to the sink because she always stood with her back to the sink.
She told him about the glass. That it had not sounded like anything. That she had thought, for about a second and a half, that somebody had set a tray down.
She told him about putting the glass on the counter carefully. She had never told anyone that. She said it and heard how insane it was and said it anyway.
She told him about the man in the front hall, and the jacket, and the long thing in his hand she had never been able to identify and had stopped trying to. She told him she had counted. She told him she had been at second seventeen when the man went toward the dining room.
She told him she had gone up the back stairs and along the long hall and that she had thought — and this was the first place her voice went, about nine minutes in — that she was going to make it.
"I had forty feet," she said. "I had forty feet and fifty seconds. I was going to be in that room in four seconds and it was going to be a story we told."
Cormac did not say anything. His hands were still flat on the table. He had gone the color of the granite.
She told him about the rectangle of light on the floor getting narrower.
She told him what she had seen: Fiona barefoot with her hand on the frame, and his back, and his hand flat between Fiona's shoulder blades, low, and his face turned in.
She told him she had said his name at the volume you would use in a restaurant.
"I've thought about that more than I've thought about anything you did," she said.
"Because that's mine. Nobody made me do that.
Two men were in my house and I said your name like I was asking you to pass the salt, and the reason is that I was raised in a house where you don't shout, and I married into a house where you don't make a scene, and at second forty of the worst thing that ever happened to me my body did the only thing it had ever been trained to do. "
"Imogen."
"You don't talk yet."
"No," he said. "Sorry."
She told him about the pantry.
The door with the painted latch. Her hand on it for four hours. The alarm cutting out at 2:09 and how she had thought they'd found the panel. The whistling — she had never told anybody about the whistling and she watched it go into him like something physical.
"Not a tune," she said. "The noise a man makes when he's working."
She told him about the phone. About the brightness going all the way down and the house app and the camera list and SAFE ROOM — INTERIOR, and how it had loaded gray and then resolved, and how the first thing she saw was him sitting on the floor with his back against the wall.
"There's no sound," she said. "Astrid's rule. So it was four hours of a silent film."
She told him about 2:31, and the refrigerator, and the drawer, and the latch going down a quarter inch under her thumb.
She told him about 3:51. That it had come in a full inch. That she had got her shoulder into it. That for about two seconds a man she never saw and never will had pushed against her through three-quarters of an inch of painted pine.
Cormac made a sound and put his hand over his mouth.
"You don't talk," Imogen said.
He nodded. He kept his hand there.
She told him what she had watched. 2:40, the monitor, his hand braced on the wall. 2:52, six seconds of his mouth moving. 3:10, both hands flat on the door for two minutes, and then the fist.
"I understood about then that you knew," she said. "You were watching the cycle and the kitchen kept coming round empty, and I thought — he knows where I'm not. That's the same as knowing."
"Yes," he said, through his hand.
"I said don't talk."
"That wasn't talking," Cormac said. "That was yes."
She told him about 3:34.
She did it flatly and got through it in about eleven words, and then she stopped, and the kitchen was very quiet.
"I'm not going to make that mean something it didn't," she said. "I've had eighteen months and a conversation in Providence and I know exactly what it was. She put her hand on your back because you were breaking and there was nobody else in the room. Anybody would have."
"It's not nothing."
"It isn't nothing," she agreed. "But it's not the thing. The thing is that I watched it on a four-inch screen in a cupboard with two men in my house, and I have never been able to get those two facts to sit in the same head."
She told him the end.
The men going at 4:02 and her not believing it for nearly an hour.
Sitting down on the floor at 4:50 because her legs stopped.
The gray coming up under the door at half five.
The trooper saying ma'am three feet away and her hand not coming off the latch — she told him that, and that it had taken another woman to open the door from the other side, and that she had been sitting on the floor of a butler's pantry with a phone in her lap.
"And then you came down the stairs," she said, "and your phone went off."
"Yes."
"That's the whole of it."
She sat back.
"That's what I did on the fourteenth of November," Imogen said. "Now you know as much about it as I do."
Cormac Severin sat at his wife's kitchen table for a long time with his hand over his mouth.
When he took it away he did not say any of the nine things she had braced for. He did not say I'm so sorry. He did not say I'll never forgive myself. He did not reach across the table, and he did not get up, and he did not cry, although he was very close to it and did not pretend otherwise.
What he said was:
"Thank you for telling me."
And then, after a moment: "Is there anything you want to ask me about it? Because I'll answer anything, and I won't be doing it to get anything."
"No."
"Okay."
"I don't want anything from you about it," Imogen said. "That's the point. I've had eighteen months of your answers and they've all been true and none of them were this. I needed somebody to have it who was in the building."
"I've got it," he said.
"Good."
"Imogen, I'll have it for the rest of my life."
"I know," she said. "That's why I gave it to you."
It was after that that the thing happened, and it was not dramatic, and she would come back to it for years.
She got up to put the kettle on. She had not offered him tea and she did not offer him tea now; she put the kettle on for herself because her hands needed a job, and while she was standing at the counter with her back to him he said, out of nowhere, in a completely ordinary voice:
"Did the muntins get sorted?"
And Imogen laughed.
It came out of her before she had any say in it — a short, wrecked, entirely genuine laugh, at a kitchen counter, eighteen months after the worst night of her life, because her husband had asked about a window.
She put both hands on the counter.
"Don't," she said.
"It was a real question."
"I know it was a real question." She was still laughing and it had gone somewhere else now. "That's what's wrong with it."
He did not say anything.
She stood with her back to him for a while and let it happen, and when she turned around her face was wet and she did not do anything about it.
"I need to say something and I need you to not respond to it," she said.
"All right."
"I'm not frightened of you." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "I want to be clear, because everyone in my life has been waiting eighteen months for me to say I'm frightened of you and I'm not and I never have been.
You have never once made me feel unsafe in a room.
That's not the problem and it never was. "
"Okay."
"The problem is me." Her voice was level and it cost her everything she had.
"The problem is that I went back to you in five weeks.
Five weeks, Cormac. From the pantry. Everybody I love told me not to and I did it anyway, and I have spent eighteen months telling myself that I did it because you told me the truth in the study — and that was a lie I told myself, because I'd have gone back to you if you'd told me nothing at all.
I know that now. I've known it since about last October. "
He did not move.
"I'd have gone back because I couldn't go into my own kitchen in the dark," she said, "and because you were kind to me, and because I wanted it.
That's it. That's the whole mechanism. And the terrifying thing isn't what you did in February, it's that in December I was a woman who would have swallowed anything at all to have her house back. "
"Imogen—"
"Don't."
"I'm not going to argue with it," Cormac said. "I want to say one thing that isn't an argument."
"Say it."
"You didn't swallow it." He had his hands on the table again. "You found out and you put me out of the house inside two hours. That's not a woman who'd have taken anything. That's a woman who took exactly as much as she could stand and then stopped dead."
"That was Astrid. Astrid brought me the log."
"Astrid brought you a piece of paper," he said.
"You'd have got there. You had the question in your hand in the study in December and you put it down, and you spent fifty-two days looking for it, and I watched you look for it, and I moved things so you wouldn't find it.
" He stopped. "Don't let me be the reason you think you're weak. I've already had enough out of you."
The hour was gone. It had been gone for a long time.
She stood at the counter and he sat at the table and neither of them said anything for about two minutes, and it was not comfortable and it was not unbearable either.
"You should go," she said.
"Yes."
He got up. He took his cup — he had not had a cup; he picked up nothing at all, and then put his hand on the back of the chair and pushed it in, which he had never done in eight years of marriage and which she found she could not look at.
At the door he stopped.
"Can I ask for one thing?"
"You can ask."
"Ask me again," Cormac said. "Sometime. Not soon.
I'm not going to ask you for it twice and I'm not going to write to you about it and if you never do, that's the end of it and I'll take that.
" He had his keys in his hand. "But I've had eighteen months of being a phone, and I'd like to be a person in a room if there's ever a Saturday going. "
Imogen stood in her hall.
"I'll think about it."
"That's more than I came with," he said, and went out.
She stood in the drive for a while after the car had gone.
Then she went back into the house and up the back stairs and into the empty room at the top of them, where the light came in off the water through a window that had been bricked around for four years, and stood in the middle of two hundred square feet of lath and new pine.
She was shaking, but not the way she had shaken in April.
I could do this, she thought.
And that was the moment — not the four hours, not the laugh, not anything he had said — that frightened her more than anything that had happened to her since the fourteenth of November.
Because she had spent eighteen months building a life with her own name on it, and a directorship, and a boat catalog, and a man in Bristol who had said at some point, and she had done all of it honestly and none of it was a consolation prize.
And she had stood in a kitchen for ninety minutes with her husband and felt the whole thing tilt.
She did not want to be a woman who went back.
She was very much afraid that she was going to be one anyway, and that this time — unlike the fifth week, unlike December — there would be no dark kitchen to blame it on, and no lie to be let off by, and nothing at all standing between her and the fact that she had chosen it.