28. Nora
NORA
Itake the easy door. Not because it is easy. Nothing about walking out of a Welling event with my face hot and my name probably moving through three group chats before I reach the curb feels easy. But Miles is there.
He opens the passenger door without touching me. He does not put a hand at my back like he owns the right to steer me. He does not ask if Daniel knows I'm leaving or if I want to say goodbye or if I need to go back in for my coat.
I do need my coat. I left it inside, because apparently I am now a woman who flees billionaire society events without outerwear.
"Your car has heat, right?" I ask, because I need to say something that is not my life is on fire.
Miles looks at me like that almost breaks him. "Yes, Nora. My car has heat."
"Good. Then you're already winning."
His mouth moves like he wants to smile and cannot quite make his face do it. I get in. The seat is cold under me, then the heat kicks on. Miles shuts the door and walks around the front of the car through the rain, shoulders tight, jaw hard.
He is furious. Not loud furious. Miles is quiet furious. Hands steady on the wheel. Eyes forward. Breathing controlled like he's counting in his head because if he doesn't, he'll say something ugly about people with more money than shame.
It should not help. It helps.
I text Bex before he pulls away.
Me: Going home with Miles. Please do not stab anyone with a dessert fork.
Bex: Too late emotionally. Physically, fine. Text me when you're home.
Bex: If he tries anything I will end him.
I almost laugh. It comes out softer than that. A small, ruined sound. Miles hears it. He does not comment.
He pulls away from the curb, and the gallery disappears behind us in the wet shine of Manhattan traffic.
For a few minutes, neither of us talks. The city moves around the car like nothing happened.
Yellow cabs. Delivery bikes. People under umbrellas, while I sit in the passenger seat with my hands folded too tightly in my lap, trying not to think about Charlotte's face when Daniel said wife.
Say it correctly or don't say it near me.
I hate that I keep hearing it. Some needy, starving piece of me took those words and pressed them to my chest like a hot towel.
He should have said them years ago. Before the photos.
Before the calls he did not answer. Before my mother stood in a doorway with clean towels while I brought Daniel's daughter into the world without him.
One sentence in a gallery does not fix that. It still mattered. That is the embarrassing part.
"Do you want quiet?" Miles asks. "Or I can say what I'm thinking and probably make this much worse."
"What are you thinking?"
His hands tighten on the wheel. The fury surfaces again. Careful, but real.
"I'm thinking they had no right to put your child in a headline," he says. "I'm thinking that woman in there knew exactly where to cut. I'm thinking every person who acted like June was a public relations problem deserves to spend the night stepping on loose Legos."
It is so specific and so viciously mild that I blink at him. "Legos?"
"Barefoot."
"You're brutal."
"Only when deserved."
The little breath escapes me. Not quite a laugh, but close enough that my chest aches from it. Miles glances over once, just a quick check.
"There you are," he says quietly.
I look away, because that is a dangerous thing too.
Not romantic-dangerous in the way Daniel is dangerous.
Daniel can stand ten feet away from me and make my body remember being loved by him before my heart has decided whether that is allowed.
Miles is dangerous because he does simple things correctly.
He asks. He waits. He does not make me translate myself.
"I don't know if Charlotte leaked it," I say. The words are just there, tired and ugly between us.
Miles exhales through his nose. "You think she did."
"Daniel thinks she did."
"And you?"
I stare through the windshield at the red lights blurring in the rain. "I think she looked unsurprised. She always looks like that. Like she arrived early to every bad thing in my life and picked the lighting."
"That's a hell of a skill set." His mouth goes flat. "Nora."
The way he says my name is soft, but not pitying. That is worse.
I twist my wedding ring around my finger. I put it back on for the event because Vivienne wanted a united family presence, and I hated myself a little for doing it, and then hated myself more for liking the way Daniel looked at my hand when he noticed. I am a messy person.
"He tried tonight," I say.
Miles is quiet for a beat. "I saw. Bex texted me. There were updates."
"There always are."
"She said he stood up to his mother. And Charlotte."
"He did."
Miles nods once. The motion is tight. He is too decent to make that small. And that is the problem. Everyone is being decent, which gives me nothing clean to throw.
"I'm glad," he says.
"Are you?" I ask.
He pulls to a stop at a light. Red washes over his face. For the first time since he picked me up, he looks directly at me.
"No," he says.
My heart stumbles.
"I'm not glad for me. I'm glad for you, if it made you feel less alone in there. But no, Nora. I'm not sitting here hoping your husband becomes everything you needed him to be."
The honesty lands hard. Too hard. Because Miles has never said it like that before. Not quite. This is not a kind man standing outside my life. This is a man at the edge of it, telling me he wants in.
"Miles."
"I know." He looks back to the road when the light changes. "Bad timing."
"Terrible timing."
"Historically bad."
I laugh, and this time it almost holds. Then it breaks. I cover my mouth because the sound coming out of me is not pretty.
Miles pulls over half a block later, beside a closed florist with buckets stacked upside down in the window. He puts the car in park but leaves the engine running.
"Hey," he says.
I shake my head. "I'm fine."
"You are aggressively not fine."
"Nora."
That one word is enough to undo me. I bend forward and press both hands over my face.
I do not sob gracefully. I do not do anything gracefully tonight, apparently.
I cry in his passenger seat with eyeliner probably trying to leave my face before I can ruin it further, and Miles sits beside me and lets it happen.
He does not touch me. That is the thing. He could. It would be normal. Some small comfort that could become something else if I let it. He does not. He waits until I can breathe again. Then he reaches into the center console and hands me a pack of tissues.
I take one and wipe under my eyes. He watches me with something bare on his face now. Want. Not the polished kind. Not the careful, social version of interest. Real want. Warm and sad and patient, which is honestly a rude combination.
"I don't want to be your emergency exit," he says.
I swallow. The tissue twists in my fingers. "I know."
"I want you," he says. "And I know I probably shouldn't say that tonight, but I'm tired of pretending I'm only being noble.
I'm not only being noble. I want to take you to dinner.
I want to be the person you call when the fever comes back.
I want boring mornings and school forms and you yelling at me because I loaded the dishwasher wrong. "
"I would absolutely yell about the dishwasher."
"I want that too."
Something in my chest folds in on itself. Because he means it. He means the boring stuff. The stuff Daniel skipped because there was always a plane, a board, a call, a deal, a city with brighter glass and richer men waiting to shake his hand.
Miles wants the little life. Or he thinks he does. Maybe wanting a woman in pieces makes men reckless. Maybe it makes them imagine they can love the pieces back together because they have not yet cut their hands on all the sharp parts.
"You don't know what you want," I say.
"I do."
I blink hard. There are tears still sitting in my lashes. Hot and annoying. My lashes do not have the stamina for this life.
"I'm not divorced. I'm not even legally separated."
"I know that too."
"I love him."
That one comes out before I can dress it up.
The car goes still. So do I. Because there it is.
The stupid, humiliating, permanent thing.
I love him. After Singapore. After Charlotte.
After every empty side of the bed. After all of it.
I love my husband, and sometimes I think that love is the worst thing about me.
Miles looks forward. His jaw works once.
"I know," he says again, but this time it costs him.
I wipe my cheeks with the tissue until my skin stings. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry for telling the truth."
"I hate the truth."
"Yeah," he says. "It has terrible timing too."
We sit there for another minute with the wipers moving back and forth and the city pressing around us. Then Miles puts the car in drive. He takes me home. He drives me through the tunnel and out into New Jersey, through streets that look ordinary and blessedly not Welling.
By the time we reach my parents' block, my phone has buzzed five more times. Bex. My mother. Daniel. I do not open his message. I am not ready for whatever he thinks he has the right to say after I left him in a gallery full of people who know how to turn a private wound into a headline.
Miles parks in front of my parents' house.
The porch light is on. Of course it is. My mother leaves lights on like they are prayers.
Upstairs, June's room is dark except for the little yellow star lamp glowing against the curtains.
She is asleep. She has no idea that half of Manhattan spent the evening deciding whether her existence was a scandal. Good. Let her sleep.
Miles turns off the engine but does not move.
"Do you want me to walk you up?"
I should say no. I know I should. Instead I say, "Okay."
He gets out first and comes around, holding an umbrella he must have pulled from somewhere. Again, suspiciously prepared. He walks beside me to the porch, close enough that the umbrella covers both of us, far enough that our arms do not brush unless I choose it.
That is the thing about Miles. He keeps leaving room for me to choose. And I am so tired of choosing.