Love Died in the Seventh Spring

The scarf was gray silk, the kind that costs more than my first car. It was folded into a neat triangle in Julian's coat pocket, and it smelled like gardenias, which is not a scent I wear, and which is not a scent that belongs anywhere near a man who has shared my bed for seven years. I stood in the entryway of our apartment with the coat still in my hands, the closet light humming overhead, and I understood with a calm that frightened me that I was not surprised. I was only sad in a way I had already rehearsed for months without knowing it. Downstairs, Julian was on a call. His voice drifted up through the open stairwell, low and easy, the voice of a man who has never once in his life worried about money. "Tomorrow at nine," he said. "Make sure the paperwork is ready." I folded the scarf back exactly as I had found it and hung the coat on its hook. Then I walked to the kitchen, poured a glass of water, and stood at the window looking out over the harbor of Saint Aubrey, where the lights of the yacht club trembled on the dark water. Seven years in this city. Seven years in his family's world, a world of galas and trust funds and women who wore gray silk scarves like they grew on trees. "Cassie?" Julian called up. "Are you home?" "I'm here," I said. He came up the stairs two at a time, tall and golden, his tie already loosened. He kissed my temple without looking at me and went straight to the refrigerator. "Long day. The board meeting ran late. Did you eat?" "Not yet." "Order something. I have an early call tomorrow." He pulled out a bottle of sparkling water and drank from it standing up, his back to me. "Oh, my mother wants us at the house on Sunday. She's planning something for the foundation gala. She'll want you to handle the seating chart again." Of course she would. I was good at seating charts. I was good at every invisible thing that held the Cross family together, and in seven years no one had ever called it work. "Julian," I said. "Mm." I looked at his shoulders, at the coat hanging on its hook by the door, at the life we had built out of other people's expectations. "Nothing," I said. "I'll handle it." He turned and smiled at me, that bright effortless smile that had undone me when I was twenty-four and new to this city and certain that being loved by a man like him meant I had finally arrived somewhere. "You're the best," he said. I smiled back. In my pocket, my phone was warm, and the memory of the scarf's smell was still in my nose, gardenias, wrong, foreign, a flower from someone else's garden. That night I lay awake beside him and listened to him breathe. At two in the morning I got up, went downstairs, and opened the drawer where we kept the household files. The joint account statements were where I always filed them. I had done the bookkeeping for this household since the second year, because Julian found numbers boring and I found them reassuring, and neither of us had ever thought that was strange. I did not sleep. I read.