Chapter 5 #2
"By season. And I'm generous about the things that matter." I leave that hanging one beat too long, let her decide what I mean, let the cold do the work the words started. "Put the blanket down sometime, Nora. I'm curious what you've decided is worth keeping covered up in my house."
That gets her. Color comes up her throat that has nothing to do with the cold she pretends to mind, and for one second the sharp-tongued woman who stops me with a fingertip has no comeback ready. Then she finds one, because she always finds one.
"Smoke your cancer, husband." She stands, blanket trailing, and drops a kiss on the top of my head on the way past like I'm a dog she's decided to keep. "Dream about it. That's as close as you're getting tonight."
I sit out there alone after, the cigar burning down to nothing between my fingers, grinning like a fool in the dark over a kiss on the top of the head.
She has no idea what she's doing to a man who priced everything in the world until her.
We keep the war going because a war is a thing we both know how to fight, the wanting under it nothing either of us does.
I catch the wanting twice that first week, both times by accident.
Once at two in the morning, when I wake to a cold half of the bed and find her gone.
She's out in the dark of the living room, knees up on the window seat with the city forty floors down, her father's worn-out tack-room jacket bundled in her lap.
Not crying. Just holding the collar to her face and breathing it in.
She doesn't hear me in the hall. I go back to bed the way I came, and I never tell her I saw, because some things a person is owed in private. Grief is the whole list.
The second time, she's on the phone with the friend from the shelter, the dry one.
Her voice catches in the middle of an ordinary sentence about feed schedules, there and gone, the sound of a woman stepping around a hole in the floor she's not ready to look down.
Then she laughs at something the friend says, the laugh real, and that small ordinary recovery undoes me worse than the jacket did.
The grief is real, bottomless and real. It ends whatever doubt I'd held in reserve about how much of her hatred was performance. Somebody took her father. She thinks she's living with the somebody.
That should make me feel guilty. Instead it makes me feel hunted by proxy, because whoever built this built it well.
Built it to point straight at me. A man doesn't stage another man's murder to frame the most dangerous creditor on the coast unless he's either very brave or already dead and hasn't been told yet.
I intend to find out which. I just have to do it without losing the war, the wife, or the small, ferocious, grieving reason I now get up before dawn.
If she only knew. She's fighting this war in lace and stolen cotton, scoring points she thinks I don't feel. The truth is I lost it days ago, so badly that even the way I've slept every night of my adult life has turned into something she can use against me.
Because we share the bed. Neither of us will be the one to blink and make up a second, so we split the mattress down an invisible line, two countries that signed a treaty nobody trusts.
She takes the left. I take the right. There is a foot of cold sheet between us at all times, defended like a border, and we both lie very still in it pretending the other one is asleep.
I sleep with nothing on. Always have. It started as bravado. Somewhere it became a habit with no exit I'd ever noticed. No woman I kept ever got the border, the foot of sheet, the long dark hours of not reaching across it.
The third night I come out of the bathroom without thinking about it, naked, the way I've crossed a thousand bedrooms. She's sitting up against the headboard with a book.
She goes still. Her eyes drag down me, slow, honest, throat to chest to the cock that isn't remotely behaving itself now that she's looking at it, and she takes her time before she snaps them back to the page she's pretending to read upside down.
She doesn't say anything. Neither do I. I get into my own side of the bed beside my own furious wife, half hard and not hiding it, then lie there in the dark grinning like a fool.
I have just learned that Nora Calloway, who wouldn't take my money or my name without a fight, looks at my body the exact hungry way I've been trying not to look at hers.
But under the grin, lower and quieter, sits the thing I keep coming back to. She told me on her own porch the night I came for her. I think you did this, or you know who did. She didn't dress it up. She doesn't dress anything up.
And she's spent every day since proving she meant it.
She watches my hands when she thinks I'm reading.
She finds the door in every room I take her into, then puts her back to a wall.
She moved into the den of the man she believes ordered her father's throat opened, and she did it with her chin up.
Which means she has a reason, and the reason isn't love.
I'd have to be a fool to mistake it for love.
I'm a fool about a great many things where she's concerned. Not that one.
I didn't do it. The longer I look at how it was done, the staged Russian mess, the body left out like a billboard, the more certain I am somebody set it up to point at me. Whose hands.
I lie in the warm dark she overheats on purpose, a grin I can't kill sitting next to a cold dread I can't shake. I have to make her believe me before I find who did this, or find who did it before she stops being able to live with the man she thinks did.
I only know I'm not letting her out of this apartment, this marriage, or my sight until it does.