Chapter 2
The lights were on in the townhouse when her cab pulled up on Rittenhouse Square.
All of them. Every window on all four floors was lit, the way the house looked when they were having a party.
Caroline sat in the back of the cab and looked up at it.
The tree in the square behind her was strung with white lights, and people were walking dogs past it in the cold, and a man was selling roasted nuts from a cart on the corner. It all looked like a Christmas card.
“Ma’am?” the driver said. “This is it, right?”
“This is it.”
She paid him and got out. She had left her father sitting on the organ bench with Luz beside him.
He had held both of her hands and told her that Connor got caught up in the moment, that the whole room was shouting, that men were fools.
He had said sweetheart four times. He had not looked her in the eye once.
She climbed the front steps and put her key in the lock, and the door opened before she could turn it.
Connor stood in the front hall with his overcoat still on.
He looked terrible. His hair was pushed back as if he’d been dragging his hands through it. His tie was gone. His face had the gray, stunned look of a man who has walked away from a car accident. For one second, out of nine years of habit, she wanted to ask him if he was all right.
She walked past him into the hall and set her bag down on the bench.
“Caroline,” he said. “Thank God. I’ve been calling you.”
“I know.”
“I tried to come up. They wouldn’t let me up the stairs.”
“I know. I told them not to.”
He shut the front door. The hall was warm and smelled of the cedar garland she had hung on the banister last Sunday. He had not noticed the garland. She had watched him not notice it on Monday, and Tuesday, and every day since.
“Listen to me,” he said. “It was the tradition. The light landed on us. The whole room was chanting. I didn’t know what to do, so I—”
“Don’t.”
“—I did what the room wanted. It was stupid. It was a stupid, stupid thing to do in front of—”
“Connor.” She took off her gloves one finger at a time. “Don’t tell me it was the tradition.”
“It is the tradition. You’ve run it for eight years. People kiss under that thing every—”
She took out her phone.
The video was already everywhere. It had been on the station’s website when Luz showed her, and in the cab it had been on three other sites, and now it was on a site she had never heard of, under a headline with two exclamation points.
It had been filmed from the second-floor balcony by someone with a good phone and a steady hand.
She pressed play and turned off the sound.
She held the phone up between them.
On the screen, the spotlight swung and stopped. There they were, small and bright under the dome. Connor laughing and shaking his head. Brittany’s hand flat on his coat. The kiss.
With her other hand, Caroline opened the stopwatch on her watch.
She started it when his mouth touched Brittany’s. She did not look at the watch. She looked at her husband’s face while he watched himself on the screen. His hand went into Brittany’s hair. His arm went around her waist. The color came up his neck and into his face, dark and ugly.
On the screen, he lifted his head.
Caroline stopped the stopwatch and turned her wrist so he could see it.
9.2 seconds.
“That’s not the tradition,” she said. “The tradition is a peck. Grandmothers do it on the cheek. You know how I know? Because I wrote the rules.”
He didn’t say anything. He looked at the frozen picture on her phone, and then at her watch, and then at the floor of the front hall.
“Tell me the truth,” she said. “You get one chance. I’m going to know if you lie. I’ve been married to you for nine years, and I watched your face under that light.”
He stood there for a long time.
Then he sat down on the bottom step of the stairs with his coat still on, like a boy waiting to be picked up from school, and put his elbows on his knees.
“I didn’t sleep with her,” he said.
Caroline waited.
“I never touched her before tonight. Not once. Not a hand on her arm. I swear that on anything you want.”
“Okay,” Caroline said. “What else.”
He looked up at her. She thought, he was hoping that would be enough. She watched him understand that it wasn’t.
“Budget season,” he said.
“Budget season.”
“It started as work. It was work. In October, we had the Newark deal and the board wanted the numbers early, and she stayed late. We ordered food. We did the numbers.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “And then the numbers were done, and she still stayed. And I still stayed. And we talked.”
“About what?”
“Everything.” His voice went rough. “The company. What I’m worried about. The people I can’t stand on the board. Stupid things. Things I thought were funny that day. She’d ask me about my day, Caroline. She’d ask, and then she’d listen to the whole answer.”
Something went through her chest, cold and sharp, like a nail.
“I ask you about your day,” she said.
“I know.”
“I ask you every night. When you’re home. You say ‘fine.’ You say ‘long.’ Then you go in your study and shut the door.”
“I know.”
“So you had things to say. You had a whole day of things to say.” She heard her voice start to shake and hated it. “You just didn’t have them for me.”
He didn’t answer. That was the answer.
“How long,” she said.
“Since the beginning of October. About two months.”
“Every night?”
“Most nights. Not weekends.” He winced as soon as he said it, as if he had heard how it sounded. “I came home.”
“At one in the morning.”
“Sometimes.”
“And texts? Calls?”
“Some. Yes.” He looked at her. “Mostly work. Not all.”
She thought about all the nights this fall. The light under his study door. The phone face-down on the kitchen counter. The way he laughed at something on the screen once, a real laugh, and when she asked what was funny, he said nothing, just work.
It was not an affair. He had not slept with another woman. And it was so much worse than she had known how to be afraid of.
“Why did you kiss her?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. I saw your face before you did it. She said something to you. What did she say?”
He was quiet.
“Connor.”
“She said, ‘Everybody’s waiting.’” He shut his eyes. “And I looked at her, and I wanted to. For about one second, I wanted to. And then I did, and then I couldn’t—” He stopped. “I’m not going to lie to you. I wanted to.”
The hall was so quiet that she could hear the grandfather clock ticking in the living room. She had bought that clock at an estate sale their first year in this house. He had carried it up the steps himself, swearing, while she laughed at him from the sidewalk.
“She makes me feel like—” he started.
“Don’t you dare finish that.”
“—like somebody who doesn’t know me.” He said it anyway, low and fast, like a man pulling out a splinter.
“That’s the truth, Caroline. She doesn’t know me.
She thinks I’m the guy on the business page.
She thinks I’m impressive. And you know me.
You know every stupid thing about me. And somewhere this year I started liking the version of me that she sees better than the one that comes home. ”
Caroline looked at him sitting on the bottom stair of their house.
She had thought, in the stockroom, that she wanted to hit him. She didn’t anymore. She felt something colder and more tired now — like standing on a dock, watching a boat she’d been on for nine years drift away, with all her things still on the deck.
“Thank you,” she said. “For the truth.”
She picked up her bag and started up the stairs past him.
He stood up. “Where are you going?”
“To pack.”
“Caroline, no. Don’t. It’s the middle of the night. It’s freezing.” He came up two steps after her. “I’ll go. I’ll go to a hotel. This is your house.”
She stopped on the landing and turned around.
“This is your house, Connor,” she said. “You bought it. You paid for the roof. You paid for the store. Everything I have is in some building you paid for.” Her voice finally broke on the last word, and she swallowed hard and made it come back. “I’m going to go stay somewhere you didn’t buy.”
* * *
She packed one bag.
She did it fast, standing in her closet, before she could think about what she was taking and why.
Jeans. Two work dresses. Sweaters. Flat shoes.
Her toothbrush. Her mother’s old silver earrings from the dish on the dresser, because she was not leaving them in this house with him. The charger for her phone.
She did not pack anything he had given her.
It turned out that was most of her jewelry and most of her coats, and she stood in the closet for a second looking at the camel cashmere he’d bought her two Christmases ago.
Then she took her old black wool coat off the hook in the back instead.
It had a hole in the lining. It would do.
When she came down, he was standing in the hall again. He had taken his overcoat off at last. He held it over his arm as if he didn’t know where it went.
“Let me drive you,” he said.
“No.”
“Then let me call you a car.”
“I called one.”
“Where are you going to go?”
She put on her gloves. “Stephanie’s.”
Something went across his face at that. Stephanie had never liked him much, and they both knew it. “Caroline. Please. Can we talk tomorrow? When you’ve slept. When we’re not—”
“You talked for two months,” she said. “Just not to me.”
She opened the door, and the cold came in, and she went out and down the steps to the car at the curb.
She did not look back at the house. She could see it anyway, reflected in the car window, every light still burning.
* * *
Stephanie Dunbar lived in Fishtown, on the third floor of an old brick building with no elevator and a radiator that sounded like a man hitting a pipe with a wrench.