CHAPTER FOUR — What Silence Keeps
809 Words
There was a gallery in Chelsea that Elara visited every Tuesday.
It had started as an approved activity — Viktor had sanctioned it in the early months of their marriage as part of the particular maintenance package of keeping a cultured wife presentable at cultural events. She had taken a board position at the gallery. She attended acquisitions committee meetings and occasionally loaned pieces from the small personal collection she'd been allowed to keep after the marriage. It gave her somewhere to go, something to do, a sliver of identity she could fold around herself like the thinnest coat against a very cold winter.
The gallery was called Lumen. The director was a woman named Cass who wore overalls over silk blouses and swore fluently in three languages and had never once looked at Elara like she was a trophy. In the context of Elara's life, this made Cass something close to a lifeline.
She was reviewing installation photographs on a Tuesday morning when her phone lit up with a message from a number she didn't recognize.
You looked like you were deciding whether to jump.
She stared at the screen.
For the record — I'd have been sorry if you had.
Her thumb hovered. Her pulse did something inconvenient.
She looked around the gallery office — Cass was in the front, two interns were cataloguing prints, no one was watching her — and typed back before she could stop herself.
How did you get this number?
The reply came immediately: I'm reasonably resourceful.
You shouldn't have it.
Probably not.
She set the phone face-down on the desk. Picked it up again in thirty seconds.
Mr. Moretti.
Dante.
We've spoken once. For less than ten minutes.
I'm aware. I've been thinking about it since.
The direct honesty of that landed somewhere in her chest like a warm stone. She was not accustomed to directness. Viktor communicated in layers of implication and consequence, in things unsaid that were louder than anything spoken. She had spent four years becoming fluent in that language and had lost, somewhere in the process, whatever fluency she'd once had in simple truth.
You understand what my husband would do, she typed, if he knew you had this number.
Yes.
Then why—
Because I wanted to make sure you were all right.
She put the phone down again. This time she stood up and walked to the window that looked out onto the gallery floor, where morning light fell through the skylights in long geometric strips, and she made herself breathe and be sensible.
He was a Moretti Don. He was Viktor's enemy. He had spoken to her for ten minutes on a balcony. She was a married woman who slept in a separate bedroom from her husband and had not been touched — not with affection, anyway — in longer than she could comfortably recall.
These were facts.
She was not a stupid woman. She understood what it meant that he had sought out her number. She understood the landscape of men like him — men who wanted things and moved toward them with the same unhurried inevitability with which weather systems moved. She had lived inside the hurricane of one such man for four years.
But Viktor had never once asked if she was all right.
She walked back to the desk and picked up the phone.
I'm fine, she typed.
That's not the same thing as all right.
She exhaled. No. It isn't.
A pause. She watched the typing indicator appear, disappear, appear again.
Have dinner with me.
Her heart lurched. No.
Lunch, then.
No.
Coffee.
Mr. Moretti—
Dante.
This needs to stop.
Another pause. Longer this time.
Elara. Just her name. Nothing after it for a full minute.
Then: I know what it is that you're carrying. I can see it from the way you hold yourself, from the way you look at exits in a room, from the fact that you stood on that balcony for forty minutes choosing the company of a city over a party full of people because at least the city doesn't require anything from you.
She pressed her hand flat against her sternum.
You don't know me, she typed. Her fingers weren't quite steady.
No. But I'd like to.
She put the phone in her drawer.
She sat at her desk for a long time, staring at the installation photographs without seeing them, while the warmth of that stone in her chest refused to cool.
At four in the afternoon, when she was gathering her things to leave, she opened the drawer.
The conversation was still there. She read it once, twice, three times.
Then she typed: There's a coffee place on West 22nd. Unremarkable. No cameras at the entrance.
She put the phone in her bag and left the gallery before she .
- Writer
