Chapter 2 #2
"Because he didn't do it." Jake put both hands on the back of the chair.
"He cleaned up after it. He's been cleaning up after me since I was nineteen years old and I let him do it and I never once asked what it cost anybody, and that's mine too — but it isn't this.
" He looked at the floor. "You asked me what time I landed.
Nobody made me sit in that parking lot for an hour and a half. Gary wasn't in the car."
Laura stood in her kitchen and understood that he had just done the single most honest thing she had ever watched him do, and that it had come about four hours too late to be worth anything to either of them.
The affair was what he had done to her. The six twenty was who he was.
"Okay," she said.
"Laura—"
"I said okay. I heard you." She heard how flat her own voice was, and could not do anything about it. "I believe you. I don't have anywhere to put it."
He took a breath like it hurt him. "Tell me what to do."
There it was.
"See, that's it," she said. "That right there."
"What?"
"You want me to run it." She put her palms on the marble. "You did this, and it's three hours old, and you've already handed it to me. What do I do, Laura. Tell me what to do, Laura. Same as everything else in ten years." She looked up at him. "Figure it out. That's not my job anymore."
He didn't answer. Something moved across his face that she recognized from the Pittsburgh hospital room, and she made herself not care about it.
He was quiet a while. Then he said, "You texted me."
She didn't answer.
"You said you wanted to talk tonight. You said nothing bad." He was working it, she could see him working it, turning it over with the slow care of a man who had just realized there was a second thing in the room. "What was it?"
Her hand was flat on the marble. She looked at it.
Nine words. Someone has been following me since March. She could feel the shape of them sitting behind her teeth.
And she saw, very clearly, exactly what the next few minutes would be.
He would come apart. Then he would put himself back together, because he was good at that, better at that than anyone she had ever met.
Then he would pick up the phone on the console table and call Gary Stern, because that was the reflex, and it had been the reflex for seventeen years, and it would happen before she finished her second sentence.
By Monday there would be a man in a golf shirt in a car at the end of the drive. There would be a plan, and a firm, and a strategy, and a version of her that had been agreed on in a room she was not in. She would become a thing being handled.
And he would need it. That was the part that decided her. He would need it so badly — a reason to stay in the room, a job, a way to be useful to her at the exact moment he had nothing else to offer. I can't leave, she's in danger. He would hold it like a coin.
She had carried it alone since March. It was hers.
"Nothing," Laura said. "It doesn't matter now."
"Laura."
"It doesn't matter now," she said again, and this time it came out hard enough to end it.
He looked at her a long moment and did not push it, and she watched that cost him something.
"I'm going home," she said.
"You are home."
"I'm going to my mother's house."
That landed. She watched it land. He put his hand out and set it flat on the back of the couch, and for a second he looked like a man who'd been hit from the side.
"Tonight," he said.
"Right now."
"Laura, it's two in the morning—"
"I've driven it at two in the morning before."
"Let me—" He stopped himself. She watched him stop himself, which was new. "Can I carry the bags out."
"No."
"Okay."
She went up and got them. It took two trips and he stood in the kitchen for both of them, not helping, because she had told him not to, and the sound of her own boots on the stairs was the loudest thing in the house.
On the second trip she stopped at the drawer under the mail.
The folder was in there, front and back and full. Seven months of plates and dates and the photograph of this kitchen taken from the yard, and the sentence she had rehearsed at this counter that afternoon in the flattest voice she owned.
He was standing eight feet away. She could have said it in nine words.
She thought about what would happen if she did.
He would come apart, and then he would come back together, and then he would pick up his phone.
And by Monday there would be a man in a golf shirt in a car at the end of the drive, and a plan she had not been asked about, and this — the one true thing that was hers, the thing she had carried by herself since March — would be one more item on a list of problems being handled around her.
And she understood, standing with her hand on the drawer pull, that if she gave it to him now he would hold onto it. It would be the thing that kept him in the room. I have to stay, she's in danger. He would need it more than she did.
Laura opened the drawer, took the folder out, and put it in the top of the duffel bag, under her sweaters.
"What's that?" Jake said.
"Insurance," she said. "The roof."
She zipped the bag.