After That Moonlit Night, I Stopped Waiting for Him

I was reaching for the handrail when the garden lights went out. For one second, I thought the moon had vanished behind a cloud. Then the surrounding conversations dissolved into a single startled murmur, and the world narrowed to the pale blur of the stone path beneath my shoes. "Evan?" I held my cane in one hand and waited for his familiar answer. The cane wasn't a secret. I'd brought it to every site visit since my night vision began to fail, and I used it whenever the light dropped low enough to make edges disappear. Evan used to tease me that it made me look like a woman with somewhere important to be. He had also promised, more than once, that he would never let me walk alone in the dark. The silence stretched. I heard someone laugh near the fountain. Then a woman's voice said, "Evan, please." Madeline Vale. I knew her voice from the handful of times I'd heard it over speakerphone, and from the years Evan had spent telling me stories about the brilliant, impossible girl he'd loved before he met me. "I'm here," Evan said. Not to me. I tightened my fingers around the cane. "Evan, the lights are out." "I know. Stay where you are." The words sounded practical. They might even have been reassuring if I hadn't heard his shoes move away from me. The event was being held at the Halcyon Conservancy, an old estate on the edge of the fictional coastal town of Bellwether. I had helped design its new visitor route, including low-level path lights that wouldn't wash out the stars or create harsh glare. The route was supposed to remain lit during the fundraiser. We had tested the system twice. Now the garden was black, and I could hear guests fumbling for their phones. "Evan?" I called again. "I'll be right back," he said, farther away. A staff member bumped my shoulder. "Sorry. Are you okay?" "I'm fine. I need the handrail." "It's just ahead," she said, but I couldn't tell which direction she meant. My eyes adjusted as much as they were capable of adjusting. The path became a strip of gray, the hedge a darker wall beside it. The cane found the edge of the paving stones. I took one careful step. Then another. "Claire, don't move," Evan called from somewhere near the fountain. I stopped. "Where are you?" "Just a minute." Madeline's voice came again, strained this time. "I can't stay here. I need to get out." "I'm coming," Evan said. A second later, I heard their footsteps going toward the house. The cane tip struck a raised border. I shifted my weight, trying to locate the path, and my left heel slid into a shallow planting bed. My body pitched sideways. I caught the ground with my right hand, but my wrist folded beneath me. Pain shot up my arm. I gasped. Someone shouted for help. The garden filled with phone lights, a scatter of bright circles that made my vision worse. "Claire!" Evan's voice came from the doorway. He appeared beside me a few seconds later, breathless. His hand hovered over my shoulder. "I told you to stay still." I looked up at the pale shape of his face. "You left." "Madeline was panicking. I had to get her inside." "I was panicking too." He crouched. "You said you were fine." "I said I needed the handrail." The staff member who'd bumped me knelt on my other side. "We should get a medic." "I'm sorry," Evan said. "I thought you were safe." The apology landed between us, small and useless. A medic wrapped my wrist and helped me stand. Evan offered his arm. I took it because the path was still dark and because I was in pain, not because everything had returned to normal. At the clinic, the X-ray showed a clean fracture. The doctor fitted my wrist with a brace and told me not to put weight on it for several weeks. Evan sat beside me, holding my coat. "It was a freak accident." "It was a lighting failure." "That doesn't mean anyone could have predicted it." "I predicted it. I wrote the backup procedure." He looked at me. "You said the garden would be safe." "I said it would be safe if the temporary lights stayed on." He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "We'll talk about the event review tomorrow." There it was: the project, already standing between us like a third person. I waited until the doctor left the room. "Did you know Madeline was coming tonight?" "Of course. She's consulting on the Conservancy's new exhibition." "You didn't tell me." "I didn't think it mattered." I turned my braced wrist toward myself. The white wrap looked almost luminous in the clinic's fluorescent light. "You knew she'd be there. You knew I was walking the garden route. And when the lights went out, you left me." "I went to help her." "You had two hands." "I can't be in two places at once, Claire." "No," I said. "You can't." He leaned closer, his voice low. "I'm not going to fight with you in an emergency room." Neither was I. I was too tired to make him understand something he had already heard. When he drove me home, he kept one hand on the steering wheel and the other close to mine. At my building, he offered to walk me upstairs. I said no. I knew every step of that stairwell in daylight, and I had a cane in the car. He stood under the porch light as I let myself inside. "Call me if you need anything." I set my keys on the table with my left hand. "I did." He didn't answer.