Chapter Sixteen
Marcus Steps In
MARCUS
He had not intended to be the kind of man who showed up at a woman’s
apartment on a weeknight uninvited. He had spent nine years being, above
all else, the kind of man who waited to be asked, who offered without
pressing, who built his presence in Elena’s life on the solid,
unthreatening foundation of being reliably available rather than
inconveniently necessary. That architecture had served him well, or at
least had served his own comfort well, and he understood, driving across
the city on a Tuesday evening with a bag of groceries he had told
himself were practical rather than symbolic, that he was now,
apparently, done with it.
She had called him that afternoon, from the foundation, her voice
carrying the particular compressed quality of someone managing something
large in a small container. The anatomy scan was Friday. She had
mentioned it in passing three weeks ago and he had noted it the way he
noted everything she told him —- carefully, without letting on that he
had filed it with the same precision he applied to legal precedent,
available for retrieval the moment it became relevant. “I’ll be fine,”
she had said, when the scan came up, which was exactly what Elena
Marchetti said about every situation that frightened her, and which he
had learned, nine years ago, to translate without difficulty: I am
afraid and I do not know how to ask for company without also appearing
to need it.
“Do you want someone to come with you?” he had asked, the question
direct and deliberately unadorned, no wiggle room for her to redirect it
into practicality.
A pause, the kind that lasted exactly long enough for a person to
abandon one answer and choose a more honest one. “Yes.”
So he had said he’d bring dinner Tuesday and they could talk through the
appointment logistics, which was a reason thin enough to see through but
which gave them both something practical to stand the conversation on
while they negotiated, without naming it, the shifting terrain of what
exactly they were to each other now that the word friend no longer
covered the full distance.
* * *
Her apartment was small in the way that apartments in this city were
small when occupied by people who had recently, deliberately, left large
ones —- not cramped but pared down, every surface earning its place,
nothing retained from the previous life that didn’t serve an actual
purpose. He had been here twice before, once with the baby monitor and
once with a drill and the curtain hardware, and both times he had left
quickly and cleanly, not because he wanted to but because wanting to
stay had been, in both cases, extremely obvious and he had not yet known
what to do with obvious. Tonight he stayed for dinner, sitting across
from her at a table that seated two with a kind of ease that surprised
him, not because ease between them was unusual but because the ease had
a different quality now that she knew what he’d told her —- less like
two colleagues who happened to like each other and more like two people
figuring out, over pasta he’d cooked in her small kitchen, what the next
version of a nine-year friendship actually looked like when the
nine-year secret at its center had been named out loud.
“You’ve gotten better at this,” she said, the pasta fork gesturing
vaguely in the direction of the pot. “The last time you cooked for the
foundation’s end-of-year dinner you gave approximately thirty people
food poisoning.”
“One person had food poisoning. The other twenty-nine had a genuine
sympathy response.”
She laughed, and the laugh was the kind that arrived without
calculation, without the half-second of self-monitoring he had watched
her apply to her own expressions for the last year in rooms where Damian
Wolfe or his associates might be watching, and Marcus felt something in
his own chest loosen at the sound of it, the particular relief of a man
who has been watching someone try to remember how to be themselves and
is finally, tonight, watching the memory return.
“Are you nervous about Friday?” he asked, when the laughter had settled.
“Terrified,” she said, the word falling out of her with the same
uncalculated honesty, like she’d stopped screening her own answers for
this particular person and was simply saying what was true. “I keep
telling myself it’s just a scan, it’s routine, there’s no particular
reason to expect anything other than a perfectly unremarkable anatomy
review. And then I lie awake imagining every alternative.”
“That’s what the second trimester is for, I’ve been told. Imagining
every alternative in exceptionally vivid detail, usually between the
hours of two and four a.m.”
“You’ve been reading pregnancy books.”
He had been reading pregnancy books. He had purchased three of them six
weeks ago and had been working through them with the same methodical
attention he brought to case law, on the grounds that being informed was
more useful than being instinctive, and that if Elena was going to have
someone at this appointment it should probably be someone who understood
what was being discussed. He had not told her this because it had
seemed, at the time, like information better disclosed after the fact
than before it, when it would simply confirm what she already suspected
about the precise and slightly excessive way he had decided to care for
her. “I wanted to be useful on Friday. Useful requires preparation.”
She looked at him across the small table with an expression he had seen
before on her face but never this openly, this close, without a
professional context to diffuse it into something more manageable.
“Marcus.”
“I know,” he said, before she could qualify whatever was coming. “You
told me you can’t answer the question yet and I’m not asking you to. I’m
just having dinner with you and coming to a doctor’s appointment on
Friday, and that’s all I’m doing. The rest of it can wait until
everything else in your life is slightly less suspended in mid-air.”
She held his gaze for a long moment, and what he saw in her face was not
the careful composed performance she’d given every room for the last
year but something rawer and more honestly grateful, and then she looked
back down at her pasta and said, “Thank you,” in a voice she was clearly
doing some work to keep steady, and he said, “You’re welcome,” and they
finished dinner without either of them needing to say anything more
consequential than that, which was, Marcus reflected, carrying his plate
to the small kitchen afterward, its own kind of answer.
* * *
DAMIAN
Priya mentioned the man at Elena’s building with the grocery bags in the
same even tone she used for everything, the tone he had specifically
trained her in over six years of working together because he had, at the
time, believed that the absence of editorial content in the delivery of
information was a professional virtue rather than a mechanism by which
an assistant protected her employer from his own worst reactions. He
received the information now with what he believed was considerable
composure and which Priya, from long experience of his composure,
clearly recognized as the controlled version of the opposite.
“Is Renata still on retainer,” he heard himself say, and then, before
Priya could answer: “No. Forget it. That’s not a question I actually
want answered, it’s a question I’m asking instead of the one I should be
asking myself.”
Priya, to her considerable credit, simply nodded as though the
retraction of a question was an entirely ordinary occurrence, and left
him to it.
He sat with the information —- Marcus Wren, grocery bags, a Tuesday
evening —- for a long time, alone in the study where a name had once
come out of him in the dark without his permission, and ran the same
argument he had been running with himself for weeks, except that tonight
the argument had a new data point and a new difficulty. The difficulty
was this: Marcus Wren had told him, to his face, that he had waited nine
years without acting, that he had only spoken after the marriage was
already ending, that he had come to the apartment with a baby monitor
and curtain hardware and was now, apparently, arriving with dinner, and
none of those things were evidence of the kind of man Damian had been
prepared to go to war against when he’d first heard the name in Renata’s
file. They were evidence of a man who was simply, patiently, showing up
—- which was, as Damian understood with the particular cruelty of an
insight that arrived too late and too clearly, the one thing Damian
himself had spent six months catastrophically failing to do.
He could not be angry at Marcus for providing what he himself had
withheld. The anger had nowhere clean to go, and so it turned, the way
unmisdirected anger always did, into something quieter and considerably
harder to manage: grief, plain and thorough, the specific grief of a man
who understood exactly what he had squandered and understood it clearly
enough to know that squandering it had been a choice, however
unconscious, however fear-driven, however perfectly explicable in the
language of pride and shame. He had chosen his own discomfort over his
wife’s company for six months. Marcus Wren had chosen, for nine years,
her company over his own comfort. The math was not complicated, and it
did not resolve in Damian’s favor.
* * *
He called Theo at ten, not because Theo could solve this but because the
alternative was sitting alone in a study in a forty-two-room house until
the silence became its own verdict. “He’s there,” he said, without
preamble, and Theo, who was used to conversations that began in the
middle, said simply, “Marcus Wren.”
“With groceries.”
A silence, brief, the kind Theo used to indicate he was choosing his
words with care rather than simply thinking. “Damian. Are you still
having her followed.”
“No. Priya mentioned it in passing. I’m not —- no. I’m not doing that
anymore.”
“All right. Then what do you want me to say?”
Damian looked at the window, at the city below it, at the same view he
had been not-seeing for eleven months from a dozen different vantage
points in this building and in this life. “Nothing useful, probably. I
think I just needed to say it out loud to someone who’s already heard
the worst of this and isn’t going to tell me I deserve it.”
“You don’t deserve it,” Theo said, simply. “But you also can’t compete
with a man who’s been showing up quietly for nine years by starting to
show up now. What you can do is be the man you’re apparently becoming,
consistently, without expecting her to notice on your timeline. That’s
not a strategy. That’s just what you owe her, independent of what she
decides.”
It was, Damian thought, the most honest and least satisfying piece of
advice he had received in the entire eleven months of this ordeal, which
was a reliable indicator that it was also the most correct. He thanked
Theo and hung up, and sat alone in his study until the city below him
went from lit to quiet, and practiced, with the dogged and imperfect
effort of a man learning a skill he had never been taught to value, the
art of simply letting things be what they were without trying to
negotiate better terms.
* * *
ELENA
After Marcus left, she washed the dishes herself rather than leaving
them for morning, because washing dishes was something she had always
done better when she needed to think, the warm water and the small
mechanical repetition of it creating exactly enough occupation for her
hands that her mind could work without interference. She thought about
the dinner, about the pregnancy books she had not asked him to read and
which he had read anyway with the thoroughness he applied to everything
he decided to care about. She thought about the way he’d said useful
requires preparation with such complete, unself-conscious earnestness
that she’d had to look down at her plate so he wouldn’t see how much it
had affected her.
She thought, for the first time in weeks with something approaching real
clarity, about what she actually wanted. Not what was safe, not what was
earned, not what she could justify to Margaret Cho or her sister or the
foundation board —- simply what she, Elena Marchetti, wanted from the
rest of her own life.
She wanted to feel the way she had felt tonight, she decided, setting
the last clean plate in the drying rack. She wanted to feel like herself
in a room with another person —- laughing without managing it, saying
terrified without needing it translated, being cared for in the specific
ways that actually cost the other person something rather than the
performative gestures that didn’t. She had felt that with Damian, once,
in a chapel in Lake Como, and she had felt it tonight at a table that
seated two. She was not yet certain what that meant about either man, or
what she was going to do with the particular ache that lived, these
days, in the space between those two versions of feeling known.
She dried her hands and went to bed, setting an alarm for earlier than
she needed because she had found, in the last few weeks, that she slept
better when the morning had a clear shape to it, when she could look at
a calendar and see the day already organized into useful pieces instead
of open space she’d have to fill herself. Friday was clear, which meant
Friday was the anatomy scan and Marcus in a waiting room with three
pregnancy books he’d read in advance, and the small printed photograph
she’d been carrying in her bag for three weeks would be replaced by
something more detailed and more real, and she would have to find out,
in that room, whether she was strong enough to feel the full weight of
it without someone she was allowed to reach for sitting next to her.
She fell asleep with the phone face-down on the nightstand and Damian’s
unanswered text still sitting in her inbox, the one he’d sent four days
ago asking if she was all right after the farmer’s market, a question so
simple and so long overdue that she hadn’t yet decided whether answering
it felt like the beginning of something or simply the delayed courtesy
of two people learning, imperfectly and far too late, how to be kind to
each other in the wreckage of a life they’d built together and were now
picking through, separately, for whatever was worth keeping.