Chapter 3
She left the Chestnut Street house at twenty past eight on Sunday morning with two suitcases and her father's toolbox.
Gordon carried the toolbox down. She hadn't asked him to and she didn't stop him, and he took it out of her hands at the top of the stairs the way he'd been taking heavy things out of her hands since she was twenty-two, and neither of them said a word about it.
He set it by the door. Then he stood there.
"Where is it."
"Charlestown."
"Charlestown." He said it like a word in another language. "Is it — do you have—"
"It's furnished."
"Right." He was in yesterday's shirt again. He hadn't shaved. "Nicole, this house is yours. If anybody's going to a rented—"
"I don't want the house."
"It's your house."
"I've never once been in a room in it I chose," she said. "I'm not fighting you for it."
That got him. She watched it get him, and she had not meant it as a blow, which was probably why it worked.
Teresa came through with a bag of things from the kitchen — bread, the good coffee, half a chicken, a jar of something — and pushed it into Nicole's hands with an expression that dared either of them to comment, and went away again.
"Can I call you," Gordon said.
"No."
"Nic—"
"You can have your lawyer call mine, when I get one." She picked up the first suitcase. "That's what people do."
"I don't want to do what people do."
"Then you should have thought about it on Tuesday," Nicole said, "at four in the afternoon, with a pen in your hand."
He didn't follow her out. She'd expected him to and he didn't, and she sat in the car at the end of Chestnut Street for a full minute before she could put it in gear, furious at herself, because some part of her had wanted him to make a scene in front of the neighbors and there was nothing dignified in wanting that at all.
The apartment in Charlestown had a stove with one dead burner and a window that looked at the back of a parking garage.
Nicole took it on the Sunday, furnished, for four months, because the woman at the agency said four months and she couldn't stand to hear herself say a year.
She brought two suitcases. She brought her father's toolbox, red and dented, DORAN stenciled on the lid in white paint that had gone the color of tea. She set it on the kitchen floor because there was nowhere else and then she sat down on the floor next to it and stayed there for a while.
At noon a courier buzzed.
The envelope was heavy stock. Inside was a letter from a firm on State Street, three paragraphs, and a page of numbers underneath.
In the interest of resolving matters privately and with minimal disruption...
The number at the bottom had a lot of room in it. It was a generous number. It was the kind of number a man arrives at when he has asked someone to calculate what will make a problem stop.
She read the whole thing standing up in her coat. Then she got out her phone and called her husband.
He answered on the first ring. "Nic."
"You sent me a courier."
"I sent you—" He stopped. She heard him move, a door closing. "That's the firm. That's not — Nicole, I told them to make sure you were protected. That's what that is."
"There's a number in it."
"There has to be a number in it, that's how—"
"You had someone price me," she said.
"That's not what happened."
"It's Sunday, Gordon. It's been thirty-six hours and there's a document in my hand with a total on it." She looked out at the parking garage. "Do you know what you did? You had a problem, so you got a folder made. That's what you do. Trevor got one and the lawyers got one and I got one."
"I'm trying to make sure you're not left with nothing."
"When have I ever been left with nothing?" she said. "I built the first one."
There was a silence on the line with weather in it.
"Come home," he said.
"No."
"Nicole—"
"Stop managing me," she said. "You've been doing it since Saturday and I don't think you can hear yourself."
Bridget Malone arrived at four with two grocery bags, a bottle, and a face like a weather warning.
She looked at the apartment. She looked at the burner. She looked at the toolbox on the floor.
"Well," she said. "It's got charm."
"It's got a garage view."
"It's got character, is what I'm saying, Nic, it's got character coming out of the—" Bridget put the bags down and stopped performing. "I've been calling since yesterday morning."
"I know."
"I was going to drive to Beacon Hill and put a brick through a window."
"That's why I didn't answer."
Bridget put things in the fridge because she couldn't stand still. Eggs, milk, a roast chicken from the place on Sea Street, four kinds of cheese, as if grief were a nutritional deficiency.
"Right," she said, with her head in the fridge. "Say it to me. All of it. I've only got the version off the internet and the version off the internet says decorative."
So Nicole said it. The script with the date on it. The one strike-through. Three years of gray bubbles. May the fourteenth at ten past two.
Bridget shut the fridge and leaned on it.
"He never touched her," Nicole said.
"I don't care."
"That's what I keep—" Nicole laughed, once, badly. "Everyone's going to care. Everyone's going to say at least."
"Then everyone's an idiot." Bridget crossed the kitchen and took hold of Nicole's face with both hands, which she had been doing since they were eleven years old.
"Listen to me. He gave her the two a.m. He gave her the good news first. He gave a woman he isn't even sleeping with the parts of himself he stopped giving you, and then he wrote a joke about your father's neighborhood and let three hundred people laugh at it.
Nicole. That's not at least. That's the whole thing. "
Nicole's eyes went hot. She hated it.
"Sit down," Bridget said. "I'll do the chicken."
Later, with plates on their knees because there was no table:
"You're getting a lawyer," Bridget said.
"He sent one."
"He sent his." Bridget pointed with a fork. "You get one who works for you and only you and you don't sign a single thing until she's read it. Promise me."
"I promise."
"And then what?"
Nicole looked at the parking garage going orange under the sodium lights.
She had been turning it over since two o'clock in the morning, the way you turn over a bolt you can't find the right wrench for.
Everyone knew the next part. The next part was the house in the country and the settlement and the slow tasteful vanishing, and in eighteen months she'd be a woman with excellent handbags at a lunch table in Chestnut Hill, being called brave by people who had laughed at the front-desk joke.
"There's a version of this where I disappear," Nicole said.
"Nobody's asking you to disappear."
"Everybody is. Politely." She set her plate down.
"Bridge. Do you know what happens to a wife in this situation?
She gets a number and a nice statement and then in four years the company's twenty-fifth is on and there's a film with drone shots and I'm not in it, and there's no photograph of the room over the print shop, and there never will be, because I let them write it. "
Bridget was watching her.
"So what," she said slowly, "are you thinking."
"I'm thinking nobody ever fired me," Nicole said.
Monday morning she stood on Farnsworth Street with a coffee she didn't want.
The building was brick, six floors, iron shutters they'd kept because she'd fought for them. She had walked past it maybe two hundred times in ten years, to lunches, to holiday parties, to a photograph on the front steps where she'd been asked to stand on the end.
She got out her wallet.
The badge was in the back, behind an old parking pass, warped a little from a decade of sitting on itself. Her face on it was thirty-six years old.
She held it to the reader and the light went green.
Nobody had ever taken it off. Nobody had ever thought to. That was the part she'd sat with all night, and it was not a triumph, exactly. A person you're actually worried about, you deactivate.
The lobby had her husband's name on the wall in brushed steel. THE SUTTON GROUP.
"Mrs. Sutton." The security guard was already standing. "Are you — is Mr. Sutton expecting—"
"No." She smiled at him. "It's fine, Reggie. I'm going up to four."
The fourth floor was project delivery. It had thirty desks and eight of them were empty and the coffee smelled like it had been on since Friday.
The room stopped.
She had spent twenty-four years walking into rooms that stopped, and every single time the stopping had been about her husband.
This was different. This was a floor full of people who had all seen the same screenshot, and half of them had been in the ballroom, and the noise the room made was the noise a room makes when it doesn't know what it's allowed to do.
Nicole put her bag down on an empty desk by the window.
"Morning," she said.
A young woman two desks over said "Morning" back before she could stop herself.
Nicole took her coat off and hung it on the back of the chair. She sat down. She turned the monitor on, and the login screen came up, and she typed a password that was fourteen years old and got told it had expired.
"Do you need IT?" the young woman said.
"I think I might."
"I'll call them." She was already dialing. She had a hard hat on the floor by her desk with BOWERS taped across the back in silver.
It took the floor nine minutes to tell the sixth floor.
Whitney came out of the stairwell rather than the elevator, which meant she'd run.
She stopped at the end of the row. She was in charcoal and she looked, as always, like the day was going well.
"Nicole."
"Whitney."
"What are you doing?"
"Waiting for IT."
Whitney laughed. She did it a half-beat early, the way she always did, except there was nothing after it, so the sound just sat in the room by itself.
"Can we talk somewhere?"
"No, thank you."