Chapter Three #2
“You told Helena. You didn\‘t tell me.” Elena heard her own voice come
out flatter than she meant it, all the careful warmth she\‘d been
rationing for months finally running out somewhere in the space between
the doorway and his desk. “I didn\‘t know if late meant eight or
midnight, Damian. I didn\‘t know if I should wait or not bother. So I
didn\‘t bother. I ate alone. I called my sister. That\‘s how my Tuesday
went.”
He set his glass down, and for a moment she thought —- hoped, despite
every piece of evidence the last two months had given her not to —-
that he was about to say something real. Instead he rubbed a hand over
his face, the gesture of a tired man trying to locate the energy for a
conversation he didn\‘t have the reserves for, and said, “I\‘m sorry.
I\‘ll do better.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you mean it when you say it,” Elena said, quiet now, all the
heat gone out of her voice and replaced with something far more
dangerous —- a kind of exhausted clarity. “I just don\‘t think meaning
it and doing it are the same thing anymore, for you. I think you\‘ve
been telling yourself you\‘re going to come back to me for two months,
and every single day you tell yourself that is a day you don\‘t actually
come back.”
He didn\‘t answer that. He looked, instead, like a man who had just been
handed an invoice for a debt he hadn\‘t realized was accruing interest,
and Elena, watching him absorb it, felt no satisfaction in having
finally said the true thing out loud —- only a tired, hollow ache, the
particular grief of loving someone you can see drowning and discovering
that you no longer have the strength left to be the one who pulls them
out.
“I\‘m going to bed,” she said, when he still hadn\‘t spoken after a full
minute, and she left him there with his spreadsheets and his
half-finished drink, and neither of them said the thing that was
actually true, which was that the house had forty-two rooms and somehow,
between the two of them, they could no longer find a single one where
they both wanted to be at the same time.
* * *
She went to see Carmen that Saturday, because some weeks the phone
wasn\‘t enough and she needed to sit in a kitchen that smelled like
someone actually cooked in it, at a table that seated four instead of
fourteen, in a house where every room had clearly, recently, been lived
in. Carmen\‘s apartment was small and a little cluttered and entirely,
gloriously occupied —- a stack of unread mail on the counter, a
child\‘s drawing taped to the refrigerator from Carmen\‘s part-time work
at an after-school program, the particular warm chaos of a life that
hadn\‘t been arranged for anyone\‘s approval but its owner\‘s.
“You look better,” Carmen said, pouring coffee into mugs that didn\‘t
match. “Still tired. But better than the phone voice.”
“I slept for once.”
“In the same bed as him?”
Elena wrapped both hands around her mug and didn\‘t answer right away,
watching steam curl up off the surface. “He was already gone when I woke
up. Office, probably. Or the gym. He\‘s started going to the gym at five
in the morning, which I\‘m fairly sure is a man trying to control
something, anything, since none of the actual problems are things you
can fix by adding more weight to a bar.”
Carmen snorted, not unkindly. “That does sound like a Wolfe family
coping mechanism. Did the old man also bench-press his feelings?”
“The old man invented the move.” The joke landed soft and a little sad,
the kind of humor that exists mostly to keep something heavier from
filling the same space. Elena looked around the small kitchen, at the
drawing on the refrigerator, at the stack of mail, at her sister\‘s
whole unglamorous, unguarded life laid out in plain view, and felt
something in her chest twist with a longing she hadn\‘t let herself name
out loud before. “Do you ever think about how strange it is,” she said
slowly, “that I have more rooms than I know what to do with, and you
have exactly enough, and somehow yours feels like a home and mine feels
like a hotel I\‘m not allowed to check out of?”
“I think about it every time you call me from that bathtub,” Carmen
said, gently, no triumph in it, just truth laid down plain on the table
between them. “Elena. You\‘re allowed to check out. You know that,
right? Whatever happens with Damian —- whatever he does or doesn\‘t fix
—- you\‘re allowed to decide the forty-two rooms aren\‘t worth what
they\‘re costing you.”
Elena didn\‘t answer that either, not directly, but she carried the
sentence home with her that evening, turning it over the way she turned
over compliance reports at the foundation, looking for the flaw in the
logic that would let her dismiss it. She didn\‘t find one. She only
found, sitting again in the back of the Bentley as the city slid past
the tinted glass, the uncomfortable, clarifying sense that her sister
had said out loud the exact shape of the thought Elena had been circling
for weeks without ever quite landing on it —- and that landing on it,
now that it had been spoken, was going to be very hard to unhear.