CHAPTER FOUR
ROMAN
He sat on Nora’s sofa.
He sat on Nora’s sofa in her Brooklyn apartment that smelled like coffee and the specific clean smell of a well-kept space that had a child in it — something warm underneath everything, something domestic and honest — and he looked at the child she was settling on the floor with some blocks.
Dark eyes.
The same shade. The same specific quality — he knew that shade, had seen it in mirrors his entire life, had not expected to see it looking up at him from the floor of his ex-wife’s apartment.
The child looked at him with complete calm assessment.
Then he held up a block.
Roman took the block.
He turned it over in his hands.
“His name,” he said.
“Felix,” Nora said.
Roman looked at Felix.
“Hello, Felix,” he said.
Felix said: “Baba,” took the block back, and resumed his construction project.
Nora sat in the chair across from the sofa. She had her hands in her lap. She was looking at him with the specific expression he’d seen her wear when she was inside something complicated and deciding how to proceed — the contained look, the one that meant she was feeling more than she was showing.
He had a great deal of experience with that expression.
He’d spent three years learning to read it and one night failing to consider it.
“Tell me,” he said.
She looked at him.
“Which part?” she said.
“Start at the beginning,” he said. “I’ll tell you my beginning after.”
She looked at Felix.
She said: “I found out I was pregnant two days before the gala. I’d been trying to figure out how to tell you for two days. Things between us were—” She paused. “You know what things were.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I thought—” She stopped. “I thought if I told you about the baby, whatever was happening between us would — pause. That we’d have to stop and look at each other and make a real decision about what we were doing.” She exhaled. “I went to the gala to tell you.”
He held the sofa cushion.
“I was looking for you,” she said. “I saw the light in the anteroom. I saw you through the glass.”
He looked at her.
He’d known she’d seen. The graphic novel had made that clear. But hearing her say it—
“I watched you sign,” she said. “Your name, at midnight, in a room off the ballroom while the New Year was happening.” She met his eyes.
“And I understood something very clearly in that moment. That to you, our marriage was a problem to be resolved. Not a loss to be grieved. A problem.” She paused. “So I didn’t tell you about the baby.”
“You walked out,” he said.
“I walked out,” she said. “I walked out into the New Year and I went home and three months later I moved to Brooklyn and eight months later Felix arrived and that is—” She looked at her son. “That is where we are.”
Roman was quiet.
The apartment was quiet except for Felix’s blocks clicking against each other.
He thought about everything he wanted to say and understood that none of it was appropriate for the next ten seconds, and that what the next ten seconds required was not words but the ability to hold everything she’d said without making it about himself.
He said: “Did you have anyone with you? When he was born?”
She looked at him.
“My friend Bea,” she said. “She was there.”
“Not your mother.”
“My mother doesn’t know who the father is,” she said. “I told her I’d had a brief — I told her it hadn’t worked out.” She paused. “She knows Felix. She loves Felix.”
He breathed.
“You carried it alone,” he said.
“I made a choice,” she said. “I made it with full information and I don’t—” She stopped. “I don’t regret it. I regret the circumstances. I don’t regret Felix.”
Roman looked at the boy on the floor.
Eighteen months. Dark eyes. Solid, certain, entirely unaware of the earthquake happening above his head.
“I have things to tell you,” Roman said. “About why I signed those papers.”
“I know,” she said.
“Do you?”
“I suspected,” she said. “When the graphic novel found its way into the world and Kim started getting calls — I suspected someone had told you the truth. Because the only person who would have wanted me to sign the deal without meeting you is—” She stopped. “Camille.”
He looked at her.
“How did you know it was Camille?” he said.
“Because I found something in your files a month before the gala,” she said. “Something that worried me. And when I mentioned it to you—”
“I didn’t listen,” he said.
“You said you’d look into it,” she said. “And then three weeks later your sister called me and told me that I should think carefully about my future in your life.” A pause. “I thought it was a warning about our marriage. I think now it was something else.”
“It was a threat,” Roman said.
He said it plainly. Because it was.
Camille had called Nora and warned her to be quiet.
And three weeks after that she’d produced the evidence of an affair.
Nora had seen it. He could see that she’d seen it now, sitting in her apartment looking at him. She’d put the pieces together.
“Tell me what she did,” Nora said.
He told her.
Felix built and knocked down his tower twice while Roman talked.
Nora didn’t move.