Chapter 18
ELIAS
Elias was waiting on the sidewalk when she came out of her apartment.
She saw him before he saw her: the line of his shoulders, the dark overcoat, the way he stood without moving the way only he stood.
Her body did what her body did at the first sight of him, which was to pause in the doorway of the building with her hand still on the brass of the door and produce, at the back of her throat, the unwelcome involuntary breath of a woman who hadn't quite finished loving a man.
She let the breath out. She stepped onto the sidewalk.
He turned.
"Noelle."
"Elias."
The morning was cold. The air above Lincoln Park was the clean hard blue of a winter that had committed to itself, and the light on the stone of the buildings on Clark Street was the light she'd walked toward for weeks and would, she knew now, walk toward for weeks more.
Her therapist's office was on Clark and her therapist was on Tuesday mornings, and if Elias had been waiting on the sidewalk today he'd been told where she'd be.
She didn't ask who'd told him. She didn't need to ask. She wasn't going to give him the first question of the exchange.
"Can I walk with you?" he said.
"No."
"Noelle."
"No.”
He inclined his head the way he'd always done it, the minor formal acknowledgment of a refusal.
She registered, with a detachment that surprised her, that the gesture no longer made her chest hurt.
It had made her chest hurt in many rooms. It had stopped, somewhere in the weeks on Astor Street, making her chest hurt.
She noted the stopping without ceremony.
"I need to talk to you. Five minutes."
She looked at him. She'd rehearsed, in the bed in the Mathieus' guest room, in the chair in the Mathieus' library, what she'd say to him when he finally came for her in person.
She'd rehearsed a great many sentences. What she hadn't rehearsed, because she hadn't expected it, was the readiness of her own face to hear whatever he was here to say.
She'd thought she'd have to arm herself.
She wasn't armed. She was, she found, simply standing on Clark Street in her winter coat with her hands in her pockets, waiting.
"Five minutes," she said.
"Thank you."
He walked. She walked beside him. They went north on Clark in the cold. The wind off the lake was sharp, her coat wasn't quite warm enough. They walked without speaking for the first two blocks.
"I've been wrong about Vanders."
She didn't answer.
"It was a manipulation. Warren engineered it. The dossier was produced by a team that had been working on Vanders before my own team was brought in. They gave me a reading of your movements that wasn't — it wasn't — "
"Elias."
"Yes."
"I know you were wrong. I've known you were wrong since the night you came out of your study in the entryway and didn't ask me the question you came home from the Wentworth to ask.
I've known since the curb outside the Union League.
I've known since your mouth was on Yvonne's in front of two hundred people. You don't think I've known?"
"Noelle — "
"What I didn't know, Elias — and what I should've known and didn't — was that it was never going to matter to you whether you were right or wrong.
You were going to act on whatever you decided about me regardless of what was true.
That was the piece. The wrong reading wasn't what did this to us.
The willingness to act on it without asking me — that was what did this.
And it would've been the same thing if the reading had been right. "
He didn't answer.
"Five minutes, you said."
"Yes."
"You have four."
She turned and kept walking.
He walked with her. He walked with her the length of Dickens and up Clark again past the sandwich shop where her mother had, in another life, taken her for grilled cheese after dentist appointments.
Past the florist where the Mathieus bought their ranunculus, and the closed bakery that used to belong to a Polish family and now belonged to someone else.
They passed a bookshop she'd noticed on previous walks to Clark, a narrow storefront with green trim, the window full of secondhand hardcovers arranged on old library shelves, a handwritten sign in the door that said OPEN — COME IN — WE HAVE WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR.
She'd stopped in front of it once before, on a morning after therapy when the hour had been hers to place.
She'd gone in and spent forty minutes and come out with a first edition of a book about Burgundian gardens she hadn't been looking for and hadn't been able to put down.
The woman behind the counter had known the book, had known the author, had asked Noelle whether she'd read his earlier work on the Loire.
She hadn't. She'd gone back the following week and the woman had had it waiting for her.
She noticed the shop again now, walking past it with her husband beside her, and she noticed something she hadn't noticed before …
that the shop was, from the outside, exactly the kind of room she'd been, without knowing it, looking for.
A room full of books, light and the smell of old paper, with a woman behind the counter who remembered what you'd bought the last time.
A room that belonged to a person who'd decided what it was going to be and had built it.
A room she could imagine herself inside of.
The thought arrived quietly, the way the best thoughts arrived, without announcing that it was a thought she was going to keep.
She kept it anyway. She tucked it somewhere behind the conversation she was about to have and left it there for later.
“Yvonne is no longer in my life. I haven’t seen her since that night and I’ll never see her again. What happened was a mistake I regret. I'm sorry. For every way I — "
"Elias."
"Yes."
"Tell me without apologizing."
He was quiet for a step or two. "I made a decision about you without asking you," he said.
"I made a decision about your intentions and your loyalties and your motives, and I acted on the decision, and the decision was wrong.
I should've come to you the night I opened the dossier.
I should've come to you on the curb outside the Union League.
I should've come to you, at the latest, on the morning after the kiss in the living room, because whatever else I knew by then about Vanders I also knew what you had — I also knew what had happened between us.
And I went through all of it and I didn't come to you.
I chose a public act over a private conversation because the private conversation would've required me to risk being wrong in front of you, and I'd decided, before the gala, that I wasn't going to be wrong in front of you.
That was the miscalculation. I see it now. "
She walked. She walked another half a block before she answered.
"That's the operational version," she said.
"What?"
"The one where your error was procedural. The one where you didn't come to me when you should've. The one where the wrong thing was the timing of your decision-making."
"Noelle — "
"Elias. You chose to hurt me. That wasn't miscalculation. That was aim."
She stopped walking and turned to him on the sidewalk. She didn't raise her voice. She hadn't raised her voice in the conference room and she didn't raise it now.
"You came here to tell me you made a mistake about Gordon Vanders.
I believe you. I believe the mistake about Gordon Vanders.
What I don't believe — what I'll never believe — is that the Yvonne part was the mistake.
The Yvonne part was what you did when you were hurt.
You were hurt and you turned it into a weapon you used on me in public.
I'm not going to pretend the first part is the part you're apologizing for and leave the second part unsaid, because I don't think you've actually come to me about the second part yet. "
He looked at her. His eyes were the hazel she'd learned to read at close range, and at this distance on the sidewalk they were now something more tired and less contained.
"You're right," he said.
"I know."
"Noelle — "
"Don't, Elias."
She turned and walked on. They reached the corner of Armitage.
"I miss you," he said.
It was the worst sentence he could've said, and she knew, with a jolt that wasn't clean, that it was also the only sentence she hadn't armed herself against. The sentences she'd armed herself against were the logical ones and the explanations.
She hadn't armed herself against I miss you, because her husband had never, in the months of their marriage, said a sentence as simple as I miss you about anything, and the fact of his saying it now landed somewhere she hadn't reinforced.
She looked at him. She looked at the man she'd walked down an aisle toward, the man who'd kissed her, the man whose hand had been on Yvonne's jaw, and the man who was standing at the curb on Armitage and Clark in the cold with his overcoat unbuttoned at the throat.
She knew that she was going to love all of them for the rest of her life, and she was going to do it without letting any of them back into her apartment.
"It doesn’t matter.” Her voice wasn’t as firm as it should have been.
The wind moved along the street. Somewhere a car horn. He stepped toward her, and his hand came up. She knew that her husband was about to kiss her.
Noelle stepped back. She stepped back and her hand came up between them, flat, palm out.
"Don't."
He stopped.
"Noelle — "
"You don't get to touch me anymore."
It came out level. She hadn't rehearsed the sentence. The sentence had been in her the whole time and had arrived when it needed to. She'd said it in a voice that her mother hadn't taught her, a voice that was her own.
He didn't move.
"You kissed another woman in front of two hundred people. You don't get to put your mouth on her and then, weeks later, put it on mine. You don't get to do that. That isn't a door you get to walk back through. There are women who'd let you. I'm not going to be one of them."
His hand lowered. Slowly.
Noelle watched his face do the thing his face did when he received information he hadn't been prepared to receive, which was to not, visibly, do anything. His face held, but underneath it was the closest thing to devastation she'd ever been allowed to see on her husband.
"Noelle…”
"Five minutes were up a while ago, Elias."
"Please."
"No."
He looked at her. He opened his mouth and closed it. He stepped back from the curb, turned, and walked north on Clark in the opposite direction from the way she was going. Sh turned and crossed Armitage against the light and she didn't look back.
At the corner of Dickens she put her hand against the side of a brick building. She stood there and didn't cry. She breathed. The brick was cold against her palm, the cold went up her wrist and into her arm. She breathed.
She let go of the building and walked on. By the time she reached the corner of Astor and Division she was, if not fine, upright.
She let herself into the Mathieus' apartment. She sat in the chair in the afternoon light with her hands flat on her knees, and let the heartbreak move through her in waves, slower, the way grief moved through a body that had, at last, agreed to be a grieving body.
She let it. She let it for as long as she needed to. The afternoon went past. The light in the library changed color. The elms on Astor Street moved once in a gust and then stilled. At some point she got up, picked up the garden book where she'd left it, and she read.
She read for a long time. She didn't, any more than she could help, think about the curb on Clark.
She thought, instead, about the bookshop with the green trim.
She thought about the narrow storefront and the secondhand hardcovers and the woman behind the counter who'd known the Burgundian gardens book and had had the Loire volume waiting for her the following week.
She thought about what it would take to build a room like that: a room full of books a person had chosen, in a building a person had found, on a street a person walked down every morning because it was hers.
Noelle didn't know what it would take. She didn't know, yet, whether it was the kind of thought she was going to act on or the kind she was going to put away.
She knew it was the first thought she'd had in weeks that was about something she wanted to move toward rather than something she was moving away from.