CHAPTER THIRTEEN MAREN
Ifinally answered on the sixth call, mostly because Cal had stepped out to take his own call and the silence in the house had grown loud enough that even Rhodes’s voice felt, for the first four seconds, like relief.
“Maren.” He said my name like a man surfacing from underwater, breathless with it. “Thank God. I’ve been trying for days. Are you all right? Is the house comfortable? Renata said you’ve been cooking your own meals, I wanted to make sure you had everything you needed.”
“I saw the photographs,” I said, cutting through the flood of it before he could bury the real conversation under a dozen smaller, easier ones.
Silence on the line, brief but telling. “What photographs?”
“You and Delphine. The gala. And her leaving our house at midnight three nights ago. Has she been staying at the house, Rhodes?”
“She’s been there for the trust documents,” he said, and I could hear him weighing his words too carefully, a lawyer’s caution I’d rarely heard from him before, not with me. “Late, some nights, because the filing’s been a mess. It’s not what it sounds like.”
“Then tell me what it actually sounds like. Explain it to me the way you didn’t explain sending me away.”
“Maren, I have barely slept in two weeks. I have thrown every resource I have at finding the man who put a camera on you in a public garden. I have not had room in my head for anything except that.”
“You had room enough to stand beside her at a gala with your hand on her back.”
“Because she offered to help with an obligation I couldn’t cancel without raising questions I’m not prepared to answer publicly about where my wife has gone,” he said, his voice rising now, frustration bleeding through the careful control he’d started the call with.
“I wasn’t thinking about how it looked, Maren, because I was thinking about Fenwick.
I am always thinking about Fenwick. I have thought about almost nothing else since the day I sent you away. ”
“Then maybe that’s the problem,” I said, and my voice had gone quiet now, all the fight suddenly draining out of it and leaving something colder in its place.
“You’ve spent two weeks thinking about Fenwick.
Have you spent even one minute thinking about what it did to me to hear you say yes when I asked if you wanted me gone? ”
“Of course I have.”
“It doesn’t feel like it. It feels like you sent me away and then went back to your life, and the only time I hear from you is when a photograph forces you to explain yourself.”
“That’s not fair.”
“None of this has been fair, Rhodes. Not to me.” I closed my eyes, pressing my fingers against the bridge of my nose. “I need you to actually answer this. Has anything happened between you and Delphine? Not the gala. Not the trust documents. Anything at all.”
“No,” he said, immediate and certain, no hesitation in it at all. “Nothing has happened. I would never do that to you, Maren. Not once, not ever, regardless of anything else I’ve gotten wrong in the last month.”
“Then why does she keep appearing in every part of your life the moment I disappear from it?”
“Because she’s family, in the way this family has always used that word too loosely, and because I needed someone I trusted to help me manage things I couldn’t manage alone.
That’s the whole truth of it. I know how it looks from where you’re standing.
I don’t have a version of it that doesn’t sound suspicious from three states away, because I wasn’t thinking about how it would sound.
I was thinking about keeping you alive.”
“You keep saying that like it excuses everything else. Like the fact that you were scared means none of the rest of it matters. It matters, Rhodes. It matters that you sent me away without explaining why. It matters that another woman stepped into my life the second I left it. Even if nothing happened, even if I believe every word you’re telling me right now, it still matters that this is what my absence made room for. ”
He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again, his voice had lost some of its defensive edge. “You’re right. I’m not going to argue with that. I let this situation get away from me in more ways than the one I already knew about.”
“Do you understand why I’m asking? It’s not that I think you’re a liar.
It’s that I don’t know how to trust my own read on our marriage anymore, because you’ve already shown me you’re capable of deciding things about my life and not telling me the full truth about why.
Once I know that about you, Rhodes, every other explanation starts to feel a little less solid than it used to. ”
“I understand that. I hate that I’m the reason you feel that way, but I understand it.”
“Do you have any idea how humiliating it was, sitting in a stranger’s kitchen looking at a photograph of my own husband with his hand on another woman’s back, and not being able to call anyone who could tell me the truth, because the one person who could had already shown me he’d rather manage a situation than include me in it? ”
“I’m sorry. I know that’s not enough. I don’t know what else to offer you right now except that I’m sorry, and that I’m going to fix every part of this that I actually have the power to fix, starting with Delphine’s public presence in my life.”
“I have to go,” I said, and hung up before he could say anything else, before the conversation could pull me any further into a place where I might forgive too much too quickly, might undo the fragile independence I’d started building in his absence.
I sat at the table for a long time afterward, my hand still resting on the phone, replaying the call in pieces, trying to decide which version of Rhodes I’d actually just spoken to, the honest, exhausted man who admitted his mistakes, or the careful executive who’d learned, over years of negotiations, exactly how to sound sincere without necessarily changing anything underneath the sincerity.
I genuinely didn’t know which one I’d heard, and the not knowing frightened me more than either possibility on its own.
Cal came back in a few minutes later and found me sitting very still at the table, my phone face-down beside my untouched coffee.
He didn’t ask what had happened. He simply sat across from me and let the silence hold whatever shape I needed it to hold.
I was grateful for it, and the gratitude made it easier, later, to overlook how carefully it was being cultivated.
“He said nothing happened,” I told Cal eventually, needing to say it out loud to someone.
“Do you believe him?”
“I don’t know. I want to.”
“Wanting to believe someone isn’t the same as having a reason to,” Cal said gently, and I nodded, because it sounded wise, because it sounded like exactly the kind of clear-eyed perspective a good friend offers when you’re too close to a situation to see it plainly.
“What would you do?” I asked him. “If you were me.”
He considered the question for a long moment, longer than felt entirely natural, as though weighing how much to say.
“I’d want more than his word before I let it go.
I’d want to see, over time, whether his actions matched what he told me on the phone.
Words are easy, Mare. Especially for a man who negotiates for a living. ”
I didn’t ask myself, that evening, why a friend genuinely invested in my wellbeing might also benefit from my continued distrust of my own husband, might find something useful in a version of events that kept me uncertain, kept me close, kept the door between us open a little longer than it might otherwise have stayed.
I didn’t sleep well that night, and near midnight I gave up on it entirely, pulling on a sweater and going out to sit on the terrace where the air was cool and the stars, unobstructed by any city light for miles, spread out in a way that made the whole ordeal feel briefly, mercifully small.
I thought about our wedding day, an image that arrived unbidden and lingered longer than I expected, Rhodes standing at the end of the aisle looking at me like I was the answer to a question he’d been asking his whole life, a look I had never once doubted the sincerity of until the last two months had taught me that sincerity and completeness weren’t always the same thing.
I thought, too, about the community garden bench, about roses and blind spots and photographs taken from angles I hadn’t known existed, and I wondered whether every marriage contained blind spots of its own, places where one partner’s understanding of love simply couldn’t see what the other partner needed, less from malice than from a genuine failure of imagination about what the world looked like from someone else’s vantage point.
Cal found me there an hour later, having apparently noticed my absence from the house, and settled into the chair beside mine without asking permission, another small, accumulated intimacy I’d stopped questioning by that point in our reacquaintance.
“Couldn’t sleep either?” he asked.
“Too much to think about.”
“You could stop thinking about him for one night. Just to give yourself a break.”
“I don’t think that’s actually possible right now, Cal. Not in any way that would feel honest.”
He didn’t push further, simply sat with me in the dark for a while longer, and I let myself be grateful for the company even as some small, still-dormant part of me had already begun, without my full awareness, cataloging the difference between comfort offered freely and comfort offered as a strategy.