Chapter 10 #3
“You didn’t ask me,” she said.
Connor went still.
“You stood up in front of the whole city,” she said, “and you tore up a piece of paper that decided my future without asking me. And then you decided my future without asking me. Out loud. On television.” Her voice shook.
“For as long as she wants it. You don’t know what I want, Connor.
You haven’t asked me what I want in a year.
You still haven’t. You just stood up there and announced it. ”
“I wanted everybody to know—”
“I know what you wanted. You wanted everybody to know that the plan wasn’t me.
That I didn’t agree to it. That I’m good at my job.
” She pressed her hands flat against the door behind her.
“And now what does everybody know? Everybody knows that I have my job because my husband tore up a piece of paper on Channel 6. It’s his gift.
It’s the chairman being generous. Did you hear them?
She has to take him back. That’s what they heard, Connor.
They didn’t hear that I’m good at it. They heard that you gave it back to me. ”
“That’s not what I—”
“And the window.”
He stopped.
Caroline heard her own voice go thin and high, and she pulled it down, hard.
“That night was ours,” she said. “The truck. The ladder. The candy bar on the floor. That was the only thing in our whole marriage that was never in a newspaper. It was never on a business page. It wasn’t a gala or a board meeting or a Snow Ball.
It was just us, at three o’clock in the morning.
I never told anybody about the candy bar. Not Stephanie. Not my father. Nobody.”
He had gone white to the lips.
“And then the other night,” she said, and now her eyes were stinging so badly she could barely see him.
“Saturday night. On that rug. I let you—I let myself have that. For one night. I let myself be happy for one night, and I didn’t tell a single soul about it, because it was mine.
” She swallowed. “And you gave it to them. You gave both of them away. Two nights after. On TV. There are people out on Walnut Street right now kissing in front of our window, Connor. It belongs to them now. I can’t ever have it back. ”
Connor’s face crumpled.
He put one hand over his mouth. He stood there by the broken reindeer, the chairman of Hadley’s, the man in the business pages, and he looked at his wife, and he understood. It landed on him, piece by piece, what he had done, and it was terrible to see, and she did not look away.
“I thought,” he said behind his hand. “I thought if they knew who you were—”
“You did it so they could see how sorry you are,” Caroline said. “It wasn’t for me. It was about you. It’s always about you being sorry in front of people.”
“You’re right,” he said.
It came out of him broken and very quiet.
“You’re right. I didn’t ask. I did it again.” He took his hand away from his mouth. “God, Caroline. I’m so sorry. I did it again.”
She did not tell him about Boston.
She thought about it. She stood with her back against the stockroom door and thought about saying it. I’m leaving. I said yes yesterday. You didn’t know, because you didn’t ask. It would have been the cruelest thing she could say. It would have been true.
She didn’t say it. She was too tired, and it was hers, and she had just learned what happened to the things that were hers when she gave them to him.
“Go home, Connor,” she said.
She opened the door and went out.
* * *
She walked to the rail of the mezzanine and held it with both hands and breathed.
The atrium below was almost empty. The crew was folding the chairs.
Somebody was sweeping up the torn pieces of the plan in front of the podium.
Stephanie was waiting at the bottom of the mezzanine stairs in her pink shirt, looking up at her with her hand over her mouth.
Stephanie had understood. Stephanie had understood the second he said candy bar, and her face said so.
Through the Walnut Street doors, the crowd was visible on the sidewalk in front of window one, lit up by the window’s glow and their own phone flashes. A girl in a red hat was posing in front of the plexiglass with her fingers in a heart.
Then something made Caroline look up.
On the second-floor balcony, across the atrium, a few people from the crowd were still leaving. Most of them were moving toward the elevators. One of them was not moving at all.
She stood at the balcony rail in a dark coat, with her blonde hair tucked up under a black knit hat. She had come as a member of the public. Anyone could come to Carols Under the Dome. It was free.
Brittany Vail was looking down at the torn pieces of paper on the floor, and at the crowd on the sidewalk kissing in front of the window. Then she lifted her eyes and looked straight across the atrium at Caroline.
And she smiled.
It was not a big smile. It was small and satisfied and patient. It was the smile of a woman who had spent all evening watching somebody else do her work for her, and do it better than she ever could have.