Chapter 2
She read for four hours and never once found what everyone would assume she was looking for.
There was no hotel. There was no I can't stop thinking about you. There was nothing she could have held up in a lawyer's office and there was nothing she could have described to Bridget in a sentence that would have made Bridget say oh, honey.
they're keeping her overnight. bp is down but they're keeping her
Oh Gordon. Are you sitting in a hallway
I'm sitting in a hallway
Is Nicole with you
she's asleep. no point waking her, she'd just have to sit here too
Nicole remembered the fifteenth of May. She remembered Gordon coming into the kitchen at four in the afternoon and saying his mother had had a scare and was fine now. She remembered saying why didn't you call me and she remembered him saying there was nothing you could do.
She had accepted that. She had made him a sandwich.
She scrolled.
board went long. I'm cooked
the Brighton number came in. 2.1 over
don't tell anyone yet, I want to sit with it
sat with it?
I have now. tell everyone
That one was from a Thursday in September. She had learned about the Brighton number the following Monday, at a dinner, from a man at another table who assumed she already knew and then watched her face while she pretended she did.
She kept going.
she barely asks about work anymore
Do you tell her about it
she doesn't ask
that's not what I said
I know what you said
There was one more. She found it at about half past five and it was the worst thing in the whole three years, and it was nine words long.
It was from a Sunday in October. She remembered the Sunday, because they had driven out to look at a house on the North Shore that neither of them wanted, and had eaten fried clams in the car in a parking lot in the rain and laughed until she couldn't breathe.
It had been the best day she'd had in a year.
She had thought about it several times since, privately, the way you keep a coin in a pocket.
At 9:40 that night, from her husband:
good day today. tell you tomorrow.
Good day how?
nothing. just a good one
He had it in his hand. The whole thing, the rain and the clams and her laughing — he'd had it in his hand at the end of the day and he had wanted to give it to somebody, and the somebody had not been the woman asleep next to him who had been in it.
Nicole put the laptop down. She walked to the sink and turned the tap on and let it run over her hands until they hurt.
she doesn't ask.
She had stopped asking in the spring of the year the name changed. She had asked for six years and then one night at this same counter she had asked how the Whitmore bid had gone and Gordon had said it's complicated, Nic in the voice you use for a child at a funeral, and she had not asked again.
Fourteen years. He had noticed. He had noticed and he had told another woman about it and neither of them had ever once mentioned it to her.
That was the thing she couldn't get her hands around.
It wasn't the roast. The roast was the small end of it.
The roast was the last inch of a rope that went back three years in writing and God knew how long before that, and at the other end of it was a man who had taken his whole interior life — the two a.m. hallway, the number he wanted to sit with, the bad days, the good ones — and moved it into another house.
Not slept with her. Moved in with her.
The window over the sink went gray, then white. She heard the boiler kick. At ten past seven she heard him on the stairs.
Gordon came into the kitchen in his shirt from last night, hair flat on one side, and he looked at her standing at the counter in the dress she'd worn to the Trumbull and he stopped.
"Nic."
She had thought she'd want to scream. She'd sat there half the night waiting to want it.
Instead she was calm in a way that frightened her a little.
"Three things," she said.
"Are you — have you been up all—"
"Three things, and then I'm going to go upstairs."
He put a hand on the back of a chair. He didn't sit.
"Did you read the toast before Whitney gave it?"
"Nicole—"
"Did you read it."
"Yes."
"Did you take anything out of it?"
The pause was maybe half a second. It was long enough for her to watch him decide which answer he was in.
"There was a bit about a deal that went bad," he said. "It wasn't — it would have looked like the company was in trouble. In front of the bank."
"In front of the bank."
"Yes."
"Third thing." She kept her hands flat on the counter. "Who wrote the line about the front desk?"
He went still.
That was the thing about Gordon that nobody outside this house understood.
Other men fidget when they're caught. Other men look at the ceiling and make sounds.
Her husband stopped moving entirely, like a deer that has heard something in a field, and he had done it in negotiations for twenty years and everyone thought it was composure.
"Whitney's the one who writes them," he said.
"That's not the question."
"Nic, it's a joke—"
"That's not the question either." She heard her own voice, level and pleasant, the voice she used on caterers. "Who wrote it."
He said, "I did."
The kitchen clock ticked. She'd bought it in Quincy for six dollars because it was the only thing in the store that wasn't ugly, and it had followed them through the apartment and the first house and had ended up here, in a room that cost more than the whole first year of the company.
"Okay," Nicole said.
"It wasn't like—"
"You've answered two of three badly," she said. "I'm going upstairs."
"Nicole." He came around the chair. "Sit down. Please. Let's—"
"Don't touch me."
He stopped like he'd hit glass. He hadn't been going to touch her. She knew that, and she said it anyway, and she watched it land, and she was not sorry.
She showered for a long time. When she came out he was in the doorway of the bedroom with a mug in his hand, holding it out like a man offering food to something wild.
"I've been sitting downstairs trying to work out what to say to you."
"You've had three years to work it out."
"That's not fair."
"No," she agreed. "It isn't."
He set the mug on the dresser. He turned his wedding ring with his thumb. "Whitney and I have never—"
"I know."
That stopped him.
"I read all of it," Nicole said. "I know exactly what you didn't do. Do you want a medal for it?"
"I want you to know that nothing—"
"Gordon." She was very tired suddenly. "You told her about your mother in the hospital at two in the morning and told me at four in the afternoon.
You sat with the Brighton number for a day so you could enjoy it with somebody, and it wasn't me.
You noticed that I stopped asking about your work, and you said it out loud to someone else, and then you came home and had dinner with me for fourteen years and never said it once. "
His mouth opened.
"If you'd slept with her," she said, "at least I'd know what she had that I don't."
"Nicole—"
"Answer me one thing and I'll stop." She turned around at the bathroom door. "Twenty-four years. When did you stop telling me things?"
He stood in the doorway with the mug going cold on the dresser behind him and he did not say I haven't. She'd give him that for the rest of her life; he didn't say it.
"I don't know," he said.
"Guess."
"I don't—" He rubbed his face with both hands. "It wasn't a day, Nic. There wasn't a day."
"There's always a day."
"Then I don't know which one it was," he said, "and that's worse, isn't it. That's worse than if I could tell you."
It was the truest thing he'd said in twelve hours and she hated him for making her notice it.
Teresa came at nine, the way she came every weekday, and Nicole heard the back door and the particular clatter of the hall closet and understood that she was going to have to be a person for somebody.
She went down. Teresa was already at the sink with the kettle.
"Mrs. Sutton. You're up."
"I'm up."
Teresa looked at her once — at the wet hair, at the four cups on the counter, at the laptop shut in the middle of the island — and then went on filling the kettle, and said, without turning around, "I'll do upstairs first and get out of your way."
"Teresa."
"It's no trouble."
That was all either of them ever said about it. Nicole stood in her own kitchen and was handled, gently and efficiently, by a woman she paid, and thought: this house has a system for a morning like this and I am the last one to find out about it.
At eleven her phone lit up on the counter.
Whitney L.
Hi you. Can we grab a coffee this week? xx
Nicole looked at it for a long time.
Hi you. Fifteen years of hi you. Birthday flowers every June, always the good ones. A card when Nicole's father died that had said the right thing, the actual right thing, better than anyone else's.
She put the phone face down.
It buzzed again twenty minutes later.
Also — Saturday. I've been thinking about it all night. If it landed wrong I'm so sorry, that's genuinely the last thing I'd ever want. You know how much I adore you.
Nicole read it twice.
She wasn't sorry about the joke. That wasn't what the message said. It said if it landed wrong — if. It said the problem was where it landed, not where it came from, and it was signed with an adoration that had been running in writing for fifteen years to everyone except its object.
She didn't answer.
The house phone rang at 1:40.
Vera had already left two voicemails by then.
Nicole had listened to both while she was folding things she had no plan for.
The first one was thirty seconds and was about how she hoped everyone had recovered from a lovely evening.
The second one was ninety seconds and had the word dignity in it twice and the phrase these things reflect on all of us once, and Vera never raised her voice through any of it.
The house phone rang and Nicole answered it because in twenty years nobody had ever called that line except dentists.
"Is that Mrs. Sutton?"
"Speaking."