Love Died in the Seventh Spring

Chapter 4: The Warning

On Friday, Lila Marchetti took me to lunch.

She chose a place near the office, a quiet restaurant with white cloths and one long wall of windows, and she spent the first ten minutes talking about the gala, then the second ten about how much she admired me, and then she set down her fork and looked at me with her soft practiced eyes and said, "I want to be honest with you about something."

I kept my face still. "Yes?"

"Julian is a complicated man," she said. "I've known that since I started. He does things, and people get hurt, and he doesn't always see it." She tilted her head. "I just wanted to say that if you ever want to talk, I'm here. I'm not your enemy, Cassandra. I know this world can be lonely for someone who came into it late."

There it was, wrapped in sympathy, the gentlest threat I had ever been handed. She was telling me she knew about me, and telling me she was the friend, and telling me, in the same breath, that she had Julian's version of our story and it made me small.

"Thank you," I said.

"Of course." She picked up her fork again. "You know, I think the key to any long relationship is honesty. I really believe that. If two people are honest with each other, there's nothing they can't survive."

"Honesty," I repeated.

"It's all we have, right?"

I looked at her across the table, this woman who was sleeping with my husband in an apartment he paid for with money I had balanced to the penny, and I felt something click into place, cold and exact. She was not going to admit anything. She was going to make me the one who looked irrational, and she was going to do it with a smile, and she was going to help Julian do the same. That was the design. That had been the design from the beginning.

"You're right," I said. "Honesty is everything."

I paid for lunch. She let me.

Walking back to the office, I passed a pay phone on the corner, the last one in that part of the city, and I stopped and looked at it and thought about how much easier this would have been if I could call someone. But the friends I had made in this city were Julian's friends, or his family's, or donors, and the one person I might have called, my sister, was three thousand miles away and had been telling me for five years that I was disappearing. I had stopped answering her calls in the third year. That was how completely I had given myself to this life.

I went home and paid our bills. Then I opened the account I had never told Julian about, the one in my own name at a bank in my own city that predated him by two years, where forty thousand dollars of my own money had been sitting since before I met him, quiet as a stone.