Chapter 8
XAVIER
Xavier didn't sleep.
He stayed in the kitchen for a long time after Isabelle left. He stood at the island with his hands on the marble and listened to the silence fill the house, room by room, floor by floor, until the whole structure was humming with the absence of her.
The vegetables were still on the cutting board. The knife was where she'd set it down. The towel she'd folded before she left was on the counter, a neat white rectangle with the edges lined up, because Isabelle folded things even when her life was falling apart.
He didn't move the towel. He didn't touch the vegetables.
He stood there and replayed the last ten minutes in a loop that wouldn't stop: her face when she'd realized what he was asking.
The way her voice broke on the word timing.
The tears going cold. And then the question, the one that had cracked everything open.
Look at me and tell me you believe this baby is yours.
He'd told her to leave. That he didn’t believe her.
Xavier went upstairs eventually. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her pillow, which still held the impression of her head from that morning.
He picked up his phone. Her name was right there, one tap, and he couldn't do it because he didn't know what to say and because some part of him, the part he was most ashamed of, was still running the numbers.
Because the numbers still didn't work. That was the thing he couldn't get past, the thing that kept circling back even as the rest of him understood that he'd just done something terrible.
Six weeks. Douglas Torres back in San Francisco since early March.
The Sunday visit to the apartment on Fillmore.
The wine on her breath when she came home.
The brightness in her face. The twenty minutes of talking about another man.
She'd told him there was nothing between them. He still wasn't sure he believed her. The locked room was open and what had climbed out of it wouldn't go back in. It sat in his chest, heavy and certain.
The bedroom was full of her: the Japanese linen curtains, the bedside lamp she'd found at an estate sale in Marin, the color of the walls that she'd had redone twice because the first wash was too pink.
Every surface was Isabelle, but Isabelle was gone, and the house without her in it was just a building.
An expensive, immaculate, empty building.
He didn't sleep. At some point he got up, showered, put on clothes and went downstairs. He opened his laptop at the kitchen table because it was Tuesday and Grant Capital didn't stop because Xavier's marriage was in pieces.
Xavier tried to work. He read the same email four times without absorbing a word.
He opened a term sheet and stared at it until the numbers lost meaning.
He called into the nine o'clock partners' meeting on mute and listened to Davis walk through the quarterly allocations and couldn't have repeated a single figure if his life depended on it.
His assistant called twice. He let it go to voicemail.
The kitchen was too quiet. The whole house was too quiet.
He kept hearing sounds that weren't there: footsteps on the stairs, the tap of her phone on the counter, the creak of the garden gate.
He kept looking up expecting to see her in the doorway with dirt on her jaw, her hair piled up and that expression she wore when she'd been working in the garden, half-exhausted and half-radiant.
She wasn't there. The doorway was empty. The garden gate didn't creak.
At noon he sent her one text. He'd typed and deleted a dozen versions. What he sent was five words.
He watched the screen. No reply. No typing indicator. Nothing.
At one o'clock he called her parents.
Kara answered. Her voice had the cool, measured quality it always carried.
"Xavier. We were wondering when you'd call."
"Is she there?"
"She was here last night. She left."
His hand tightened on the phone. "Where did she go?"
"Margaret's. Margaret sent me a text. She was quite upset when she left here. Crying. You know how Isabelle gets,” she added dismissively.
He didn't answer that. Kara continued.
"She told us what happened. Xavier, I want you to know that Richard and I don't think this is as serious as she's making it.
Marriages have rough patches. You're under a great deal of stress, both of you, with the fertility issues, the pregnancy.
It's natural for things to get heated. Isabelle has always been sensitive.
She's always taken things harder than they need to be taken. I told her as much last night."
Something turned in Xavier's stomach. He couldn't name it.
"She'll calm down," Kara said. "Give it a day or two.
Let her have her moment. She's always been dramatic about these things, even as a girl.
She'll come around. She always does. And Xavier?
When she does come home, and she will come home, just tell her what she needs to hear. You know how to handle her."
He hung up. He sat at the kitchen table with the phone in his hand and Kara Monroe's voice still in his ears. You know how to handle her. As though Isabelle were a negotiation. A difficult client. A situation to be managed with the right words in the right order.
He drove to Cole Valley at five. He told himself he was going to talk to her. He just wanted the truth, as hard as it would be to hear.
At Margaret’s house, the door opened before his knuckles touched the wood.
Douglas Torres walked out.
For a full second Xavier's brain refused the image. Douglas, tall and sharp-featured, stepping out of Margaret's house with his phone in his hand and his expression loosening from something warm into something ice-cold the instant he saw Xavier.
The jealousy hit like a physical thing. Fast, hot, irrational. Douglas had been inside. Douglas had been with Isabelle, spending the afternoon with Xavier's wife while Xavier sat alone in an empty kitchen unable to focus on a single email.
"What are you doing here?" Xavier couldn’t keep the snarl from his voice.
"None of your business."
"My wife is in there."
"Your wife is in there because of you."
They stared at each other. Xavier's hands were at his sides and he could feel them wanting to close into fists.
Douglas came down the steps. They faced off. Xavier was taller and broader than Douglas, but Douglas kept his eyes trained on him, dark and absolutely steady.
"I'm going to say something to you," Douglas said. “You're going to listen, and then I'm going to leave, and you're going to do whatever you want with it."
"I don't need to hear anything from you."
"You need to hear this." Douglas's voice was low, controlled and carrying a fury that was all the more devastating for how contained it was. "I'm gay. Isabelle was the first person I told."
Xavier's mouth opened. Nothing came out.
"There was never anything between us," Douglas said. "There was never going to be anything between us. Isabelle is devoted to you and has always been. She would never even look at another man. And you destroyed her by assuming she ever would.”
Douglas glared at him, then he walked past him, making sure to shoulder check him as he did.
He expected relief. Some part of his brain, the part that still calculated, still sought resolution, expected the fear to dissolve now that the threat had been removed. Douglas is gay. There was no affair. The baby is mine. The deal closes. Everyone goes home.
Relief didn't come. What came was the floor dropping out from under every justification he'd built, and underneath all of it was nothing.
No evidence. No logic. No reason at all.
Just Xavier, alone with the thing that had always lived inside him: the certainty that the people he loved would leave, and the willingness to destroy everything rather than wait for it to happen.
The front door opened. Margaret Monroe was standing in the doorway.
She was still in scrubs, her hair pulled back, and the look on her face was something Xavier had never seen directed at him before.
Margaret had always been neutral in his presence.
Pleasant. The sister-in-law who shook his hand at holidays and treated him with courtesy. He'd appreciated her for it.
She wasn't courteous now.
"She's not coming to the door," Margaret said.
"I just need five minutes."
"No."
"Please. I—I know I was wrong. I just need to talk to her."
"You need to talk to her." Margaret folded her arms. She leaned against the doorframe and looked at him with an expression that reminded him, suddenly and forcibly, of Isabelle.
The same dark blue eyes. The same jaw. The same capacity for stillness that could hold a room without raising its voice.
"That's interesting. Because last night she needed you to say four words.
I believe you, Isabelle. Four words. And you couldn't do it. "
"I know. And that’s why?—“
"Go home," Margaret said. "Give her time. Real time. She'll contact you when she's ready. If she's ready. That's her choice, not yours."
"Margaret..."
"You already left her, Xavier. You did it in the kitchen. You just did it standing still."
She stepped back. The door closed.
He stood there for a long time. Then he turned, walked back to his car, sat behind the wheel and didn't start the engine.
He watched the light in the upstairs window.
Margaret's guest room. His wife was up there, in a bed that wasn't theirs, because he'd stood in the kitchen and let the worst part of himself speak.
He had to force himself to drive home.
The house was dark. He walked through the front door and stood in the hallway. The sconces cast their warm brass glow against the walls. The hallway that Isabelle had built, designed, sourced, agonized over, every surface bearing the mark of her hands, her labor, her eye.
He'd walked through this hallway a thousand times and seen only the result.
He'd complimented the interiors, smiled when others did the same and never corrected anyone because it hadn't occurred to him that there was anything to correct.
She'd said a guy in Sonoma, and he'd believed her, because it hadn't crossed his mind that his wife would crawl around on a kitchen floor with a rubber mallet and a level she'd taught herself to read from a YouTube video.
He went into the kitchen. He picked up the towel she’d left that was still there. Held it. Pressed it against his face and breathed.
Margaret's voice in his head. You already left her. You did it in the kitchen. You just did it standing still.
He put the towel back. He folded it again, the edges lined up. He set it down in the exact place she'd left it.
He went upstairs and walked past the celadon room, the door still closed, the room she'd painted six months ago without telling him why.
He went to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the pillow she'd held against her chest when he'd gotten up in the middle of the night to google Douglas Torres in the kitchen.
She'd been holding his pillow. Reaching for him in her sleep.
That unconscious, trusting reflex of a woman who loved him.
And he'd repaid it by standing in their kitchen and accusing her of carrying another man's child.
Douglas being gay didn't fix it. The revelation hadn't resolved anything.
It had only shown him, with a clarity so complete it was almost unbearable, that the accusation had never been about Douglas.
It had been about Xavier. About the locked room and what lived inside it…
and the fact that he'd never once had the courage to open that door and look at what was there.
He'd loved Isabelle so much he'd never learned to trust her. He'd worshipped her so completely he'd never learned to respect her. He'd held on so tightly he'd crushed the thing he was holding.