Chapter 4
NOELLE
The dress was the color of midnight, and Maura had laid it out on the bed before Noelle had come up to dress, which meant Elias had chosen it.
He'd never chosen a dress for her before.
She stood in her bathrobe in the doorway of the bedroom and looked at the thing lying across the duvet — long, deep-necked, heavier than it looked.
Her husband had reached a decision about what his wife should wear to her first high-profile event as Mrs. Strathmore, and the decision had been made without her.
There was a note on top of the dress. His handwriting was narrower than she'd expected. For tonight. E.
That was all.
She didn't try the dress on until Heather arrived to do her hair.
She let Heather finish pinning before she let the robe drop, because she didn't want the dress in the mirror before she had to be in it.
When she finally stood up and lifted the thing from the bed and pulled it over her head, she understood in the first second why he'd chosen it.
Nobody seeing them together tonight would fail to notice how he'd dressed her.
He'd chosen a color that would tell the room she'd been claimed, and chosen it so carefully that the room would also say it'd been done with taste.
It was, she realized, looking at her reflection in the long mirror, the dress he'd have bought a woman he was in love with.
She held her own eyes in the mirror for a moment and let herself feel it. And then she quickly shuttered the feeling away.
Elias was waiting by the elevator. He didn't speak when he saw her. His gaze moved over her once: slow, assessing, the hunter's pause. And then he inclined his head, which was as much acknowledgment as she'd learned to expect from him. The elevator doors opened and they stepped inside.
"You don't like it," he said, after the doors closed.
She watched the numbers fall. "I didn't say that."
"You didn't need to."
"It's beautiful."
"That isn't the same thing."
She glanced at him. He was watching the doors, not her. In profile, in the low light of the elevator, his face was the face she'd seen in the study for half a second: tired, set, a man carrying something heavy in his chest he had no intention of putting down.
"I'm not used to being dressed," she said.
"Noted."
He didn't apologize. She hadn't expected him to. The elevator slowed at the ground floor, the doors opened and she walked out ahead of him into the lobby because that was what he'd trained her to do without ever having trained her.
The ballroom was on Michigan Avenue, one of the older hotels, a place where the chandeliers had been hanging for a hundred years, the carpet had been replaced four times without anyone being able to tell.
Cars were still arriving when they pulled up.
There was a red-carpeted strip for the photographers, photographers were there, and a woman with a headset was counting guests off the sidewalk in staggered groups so that no two important names arrived together.
Elias gave the driver a short word. The driver came around, opened Noelle's door, and Elias offered her his hand as she stepped out. The first time he'd offered her a hand since the altar.
It was warm. Again.
"Don't look at the cameras," he said, low, as they crossed the carpet. "Look at me."
"Why?"
"Because that's what they're here to photograph."
She didn't answer. She looked at him. He looked down at her just long enough for whatever shutter was waiting to catch what it had come for, and then they were inside.
The sound of the ballroom closed around them, two hundred wealthy people who'd all agreed to pretend they'd just arrived, though most of them had been on the invitation list for six weeks.
His hand moved from hers to the small of her back with the ease of a man who'd done this a thousand times.
It stayed there for the whole receiving line.
She hadn't expected that.
He introduced her. It was a minor thing.
It was unremarkable. He said you know my wife, and he said Noelle, this is, and he said we're delighted you could come.
In every introduction his hand at the small of her back shifted — a millimeter, no more — to direct her gently toward the person she was meant to address.
It was the lightest touch in the world, and it kept finding her.
It kept being there when he needed her attention.
It kept not being there a moment longer than it had to be.
Noelle began, against her will, to catalog it.
She began to notice how he made space for her in conversations.
How he deferred, with a small tilt of his head, when she spoke.
How he waited until she'd finished before answering the next question directed at them both.
How he picked up a flute of champagne from a passing tray and handed it to her without asking if she wanted it, how the champagne was the one she preferred, which meant he'd noticed at some point.
It's a care, she thought, halfway through the second hour, watching him from the side as he said something to a woman who'd once served on a board with his mother. It's a kind of care. It just isn't the kind I thought I was getting.
The thought nearly undid her composure. She looked down at her glass instead.
They were standing alone, briefly, near one of the tall windows overlooking the river when the woman found them.
Yvonne — Noelle didn't catch the surname the first time — was tall and blonde, with a laugh that arrived before the joke.
She kissed Elias's cheek the way a woman kisses the cheek of a man whose cheek she's been kissing for a decade.
She said, in the warm, pitched voice of a woman accustomed to being listened to, Well. Look at you both.
"Yvonne."
"Mrs. Strathmore." She turned to Noelle with a smile that reached everywhere on her face except her eyes. "You must be exhausted. Events like these are such an adjustment, aren't they? Elias has always been so comfortable in them."
"I'm managing," Noelle said.
"Of course you are. And the dress — Elias, did you pick that?"
"I did."
"You've always had excellent taste."
I belong in his world, the tone said, underneath the words, the way a thread runs under a seam. Do you?
Noelle kept her face arranged. She smiled the polite, faintly warm smile her mother had drilled into her before her first debutante dinner at fifteen.
She said something about the color of the room, and something about the champagne.
Yvonne laughed the on-time laugh and drifted away toward a group of older men near the bar.
Within thirty seconds Noelle had forgotten the specific words and remembered, with an unpleasant accuracy, the shape of them.
Elias hadn't spoken during the exchange.
"Who was that?” Noelle said, when Yvonne was out of earshot.
"A friend."
"Of yours?” She tried to keep the jealousy from her tone, and was certain she failed.
"Yes."
"How long?”
He glanced at her. It was the briefest glance, and she felt the weight of it. "Long enough that she considers herself one."
"That isn't an answer."
"It's the one I'm giving you."
She looked at him fully then.
"You could have introduced me," she said.
"I did."
"Not the way you introduced me to the others."
A pause. He set his glass down on the ledge of the window behind them.
When he answered, his voice was lower. The attention in it was no longer the ballroom's attention, which had been steady and surface-level, but something closer to what she'd seen on him at the penthouse the night of the engagement party.
A man taking her in as though he'd decided she was worth taking in.
"I apologize."
It was so plain it caught her off balance. She hadn't known he could apologize. She'd assumed the word wasn't in his working vocabulary.
"Don't," she said, before she could think better of it. "It's fine."
"It isn't."
"Elias—"
"She shouldn't have spoken to you that way," he said. "And I should've said so."
The words were given plainly, without ornament. She realized he hadn't said anything because he'd been deciding, in real time, what the cost of intervening would've been. He'd decided, evidently, that the cost was low enough now to pay.
She didn't know what to do with it.
She settled on the only thing she could manage. "Thank you."
He inclined his head. His hand came up. For a moment she thought he was going to touch her face — a ridiculous thought, a thought that flooded through her like warm water and left her furious at herself — but what he did instead was lift a hand to the small of her back again.
He turned her gently toward the room. “I think they're about to start the speeches. Let's find our table.”
Noelle walked where he walked. She was aware, for the rest of the evening, of the exact temperature of his hand through the fabric of the dress. She was aware of the fact that she was aware. She was aware that she was going to be angry with herself about it later.
And she was aware, underneath all of it, of what she'd seen flicker in his face when he'd said she shouldn't have spoken to you that way.
A small, banked anger. On her behalf. As though somewhere inside the locked house of him there was a room she hadn't been given the key to, and something in that room had, for a brief second, stirred.
He dismissed her at ten-forty.
He did it politely. You can leave now. I have other matters to attend to.
The driver will take you home. She stood with him near the cloakroom while he said it.
She nodded, took the coat the attendant brought, and walked out the way she'd been taught to walk out of rooms like this.
The pleasant smile, the unhurried pace, the no-look-back.
In the car on the way home, she let the smile go.
It took longer than she'd expected. Her face had been holding it so carefully for so many hours that it had become a thing with its own momentum. She sat in the back seat of the car with the lake going past her on the right, and she watched her own reflection slowly slacken in the tinted window.
The penthouse was dark when she arrived.
She didn't turn on the main lights. She slipped her heels off by the door and left them where they fell — a small rebellion, a line the apartment would not object to but she knew he would notice in the morning.
She crossed the dim living room in her stocking feet and went to the window.
Noelle heard the door an hour later.
She didn't turn. She heard him set his keys down. She heard the soft sound of his jacket being folded over the arm of the chair in the study off the hall.
"I didn't expect you to be back yet."
"The evening ended earlier than I'd planned."
His voice was at her shoulder. He'd crossed the room more quietly than she'd heard.
Noelle looked at his reflection in the window beside hers, and in the reflection his face was back to what it had been for most of the evening: attentive, courteous, the door gently closed.
It was so much easier when he was closed.
When he was closed, she could manage it.
It was the openings that were breaking her.
"You handled yourself well tonight."
She closed her eyes. She opened them. She kept looking at his reflection.
"Elias."
"Yes?”
"When you apologized. For Yvonne. Did you mean it?"
The silence went on a beat longer than it had any right to. She watched his reflection. When he answered her, his voice was low, level, private.
"Yes."
That was all.
It was not enough. It was not nothing. She was aware — so aware it was almost a sound — of how close he was standing behind her. Close enough that if she turned, if she closed the distance, if she reached for something that had never once been offered to her freely —
The thought lasted a moment.
Then it faded. Because she already knew the answer. She'd seen it. She'd seen the door close on the unguarded face in his study. Whatever rooms there were inside her husband, they were rooms with doors. The doors had locks, and she had not been given the keys.
And she was beginning, against every training her mother had given her, to want them.
That was the thing she carried to bed with her that night. The wanting.
She'd said good night to him without turning from the glass. He'd said good night back, and when she'd walked past him toward the bedroom corridor she had not let herself look at his face.