Chapter 17
1544 Words
ELENA
A few days later...
Liam came to bed at eleven.
I heard him moving through the place with the particular sequence of sounds I had learned in four years of marriage, the tap running, the closet opening, the specific weight of his footsteps on the hardwood. I lay in the dark and breathed evenly and looked at the ceiling and waited.
The bed shifted when he got in.
His hand found my waist.
"Elena."
"I'm tired," I said.
"You're always tired lately."
I kept my voice even. "I'm pregnant, Liam."
"I know." His hand moved. "That doesn't mean—"
"I said no."
The word landed in the dark between us and stayed there. His hand stilled. I felt the quality of his silence change like the warmth draining out of it, replaced by something that had always been underneath.
"You've been saying no for weeks," he said.
"Yes."
"Elena." His voice was controlled but thin at the edges. "I'm your husband. I have needs."
I sat up.
I turned on the lamp.
He was looking at me with an expression I had seen before. It was not often, not in the early years, but more frequently lately. The expression of a man who had run out of fuel.
"I know what you are," I said.
Something shifted in his face. "What does that mean?"
"It means I'm tired. It means I'm twelve weeks pregnant and my body doesn't feel like my own right now. It means I said no." I held his gaze. "It means no."
He sat up too. The warmth was entirely gone now.
"Something is wrong with you," he said. "You've been cold and distant. Some pregnant women likes s*x with their husband! But you, you're somewhere else even when you're standing right in front of me."
"I've been protecting the baby."
"From what?"
His voice rose slightly.
"From me? I'm the one who has been here. Reading the books, getting the vitamins, making sure you—"
"I know what you've been doing," I said.
Silence.
He looked at me. I looked back. The lamp between us, the broken silence, everything we had been not saying for weeks suddenly in the room with us.
"What does that mean?" he said again.
Quieter this time.
"It means I'm tired, Liam." I pulled the covers back and stood. "And I'd like to sleep."
He stood too.
"Elena."
His voice had the particular edge now that I had learned to recognize as the last stage before something broke.
"I have been patient and understanding. I have been everything you needed and you treat me like—"
"Like what?"
"Like a stranger."
He stepped toward me.
"Like someone you can't stand to be near. Like I disgust you. Since that incident at the lake, you have changed. What happened to us there was not my fault but you make me feel like I'm the one who hurt you!"
"Liam—"
"Do I disgust you?"
I looked at him across the bed.
This man I had married and had stayed with
The man whose hand I had held at his father's funeral.
Whose breakfast I had made for four years.
Whose lies I had been quietly dismantling for weeks...
He moved so fast I didn't track it.
His hand swept the vase from the nightstand. It was my mother's vase.
The blue ceramic one I had kept since the accident, the last thing of hers I still had in this apartment. It hit the wall beside the wardrobe and exploded into pieces that scattered across the hardwood floor.
The silence after was absolute.
Liam stood with his chest heaving and his hand still raised and looked at what he'd done.
I looked at the wall. At the blue pieces on the floor.
I said nothing and I kept my face neutral. I had learned long ago that the worst thing you could do with a man like Liam was let him see that he had reached you.
He had reached me but I didn't let him see it.
He dropped his hand and straightened his spine. He was reassembling itself in real time with the jaw setting, the eyes cooling, the controlled exhale of a man pulling himself back from something he couldn't afford.
"I'm going out," he said.
He got dressed without looking at me. Jacket, keys, phone and the second phone from the inside drawer that he thought I didn't know about. He walked out and the door closed behind him. I stood in the bedroom and listened to the silence that followed.
I crouched down and picked up the largest piece and held it in my palm for a moment.
Then I set it on the nightstand where the vase had been.
I went to the wardrobe and took out the bag from the back. It was not the expensive one. It's the old one, the one Liam never looked at. I packed efficiently and without ceremony. Three days of clothes. My toiletries. The lockbox.
I called the front desk of the Carlyle on my way down in the elevator.
**
The hotel bar was quiet at midnight.
I had checked in, called Sophia — draft the papers tonight, file tomorrow, I'll explain everything in the morning. I come downstairs because the room was too still and I needed something warm to drink.
I was waiting for my tea when I heard him.
A laugh, easy and uninhibited, the laugh of a man who found genuine things really funny. Then a voice I recognized answering it — lower, dryer, the tone Nicholas used when he was being what passed for relaxed.
I turned.
He was at a corner table with a man I didn't know. He was broad-shouldered, open-faced, the kind of easy confidence that came from never having needed to pretend. They had drinks and the remnants of a meal and the comfortable sprawl of two men who had been friends long enough to run out of things to prove to each other.
Nicholas saw me at the same moment.
He said something brief to his companion and stood.
"Elena."
"Nicholas." I managed a smile that was approximately sixty percent of a real one. "I didn't know you stayed here."
"I don't. Dinner."
He looked at me. It was quick but a complete assessment. Something in his expression shifted.
"Are you all right?"
"Fine. I just needed a change of scenery."
He held my gaze for a moment.
"Come sit with us."
"I don't want to interrupt—"
"Marlo." He said over his shoulder. "This is Elena."
The man at the table turned and stood with the easy manners of someone for whom standing when a woman approaches was simply what you did. He was perhaps the same age as Nicholas, warm-eyed, with the kind of face that looked like it defaulted to smiling.
"Elena Voss." He said it like he knew the name. "The Voss Gallery."
"Yes."
"Marlo Baldwin." He extended his hand. "I've been to three of your openings. The Reyes installation last fall was extraordinary."
I shook his hand. "You know the gallery?"
"I've been trying to get Nicholas to buy something for his place for years."
He shot a look at Nicholas.
"He keeps buying for the office. His apartment looks like a very expensive waiting room."
"It doesn't," Nicholas said.
"It does," Marlo said pleasantly. "Sit down, Elena. We were just finishing."
I sat.
The tea arrived. Marlo flagged the server for another round and launched without ceremony into an argument he'd apparently been having with Nicholas about something in the financial press.
Nicholas responded with the dry precision of a man who had been having this argument for years and found it comfortable. I sat between them and felt, for the first time since the vase hit the wall, something that was not quite calm but was close enough to function as one.
"You're quiet," Marlo said, at some point.
"Marlo," Nicholas said.
"It's fine," I said. "Long evening."
Marlo looked at me for a moment, then at Nicholas, then back at me. Something passed behind his eyes and then he picked up his drink and returned to his previous argument as if he hadn't said anything at all.
Nicholas looked at me across the table.
I looked back. Neither of us said anything.
I stayed for forty minutes. When I stood to go, Marlo shook my hand again and said the gallery needed to do another Reyes show and I said I'd think about it.
Nicholas walked me to the elevator.
We stood in the corridor outside the bar, just the two of us.
"Elena."
"I'm fine," I said. "I promise."
He looked at me for a long moment. The elevator arrived and I stepped into it and turned.
He was still looking at me.
The doors closed.
**
In my room, I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed my hand flat against my stomach.
"We're leaving," I said quietly. "Tomorrow it's official. But tonight, we already left."
My phone buzzed. Sophia.
Papers drafted. Ready to file at nine. Get some sleep.
I set the phone down and lay back.
I didn't cry.
I just breathed.
- Writer
