In Silence, I Loved Him First

Chapter Five: The Universe's Idea of a Joke

Vera discovered, somewhere in the sixth week of their marriage, that she was extraordinarily good at making Nathan Cole blush, and that this discovery was going to be a problem for absolutely no one but herself.

It started, as most disasters in that apartment did, with laundry.

"This isn't mine," Nathan said, holding up a shirt from the dryer, thoroughly confused, like a man doing math he didn't have the tools for. "I don't own anything this small."

"It's mine," Vera said, not looking up from her laptop. "You threw your whole hamper in with mine. Efficient of you. Chaotic, but efficient."

"So this—" he held up the shirt again, a plain black camisole, entirely unremarkable except for the fact that it was very clearly not meant to be worn under a blazer to a board meeting, "—is going back in your drawer."

"You could put it there yourself. It's not radioactive, Mr. Cole."

"I am not going through your drawers."

"Scared?"

"Cautious."

"There's a difference?"

He stood there for a long moment, shirt in hand, deciding — she could watch him deciding, that was the thing about Nathan, he'd never learned to hide the exact moment a thought crossed his mind, twelve years and an entire career built on pretending had apparently done nothing to fix that — and then he walked it down the hall himself, and came back roughly four minutes later looking like a man who had accidentally learned several things about her wardrobe he hadn't asked to know.

"You have a lot of green," he said, sitting back down across from her.

"I like green."

"I noticed. At the gala too."

"You noticed my dress."

"I notice things," he said, a little too quickly, and there it was — the faintest color climbing up from his collar, visible even in the low evening light of the kitchen. Vera's pulse did a small, private, entirely undignified leap at the sight of it.

"Do you," she said, setting her laptop aside, leaning forward slightly, watching him with the unhurried attention of a woman who had spent twelve years learning not to want things out loud and had apparently decided, this evening, to make an exception. "What else have you noticed, Mr. Cole?"

"I — " He cleared his throat. Looked at the counter. Looked at his own hands, as if they might have an answer written somewhere on them. "That's a very direct question."

"I'm a very direct woman. You signed a contract acknowledging as much."

"I don't think that clause was in there."

"It was implied."

"You're doing it on purpose," he said, and there was real accusation in it now, though it came out closer to a laugh than a complaint, his ears distinctly, satisfyingly pink. "This — this thing you do. Where you say something and then just — watch."

"I have no idea what you're referring to."

"Vera."

It was the first time he'd used her first name without the Ms. Camille in front of it, unprompted, and hearing it in his voice — low, half-exasperated, entirely unguarded — hit her harder than she'd braced for. She kept her face perfectly still. It was, by now, the only skill she trusted herself to perform without fail.

"Yes, Nathan?" she said, and watched him lose whatever argument he'd been about to make entirely.

He got up, eventually, mumbling something about an early call time, and retreated toward his room with the specific haste of a man escaping a conversation he'd been losing on multiple fronts, and Vera sat alone at the kitchen counter afterward with her laptop closed and her tea going cold, grinning at absolutely nothing like a teenager, which was, she reflected, a genuinely humiliating thing for a woman who ran three companies to be doing at eleven o'clock on a Thursday.

It became, over the following weeks, a kind of unspoken game between them — she teased, he blushed and deflected and occasionally, gloriously, teased back, badly, with all the comic timing of a man whose scripts had always been written by someone else. She told him, once, straight-faced, that his cooking had improved, when in fact he'd nearly burned down the kitchen attempting risotto, and watched him stand a little taller for the rest of the evening before she confessed the truth and he threw a dish towel at her, laughing, and she caught it out of the air without even having to look.

She rearranged his side of the closet once, purely to watch him spend a confused twenty minutes hunting for a jacket she'd moved four inches to the left. She left notes on the fridge in handwriting she'd had to practice being careless with, since her real handwriting — the handwriting of a woman who'd once been Chance Marvin, who'd once written I love you, but I'm too much of a coward to say it out loud in a diary she'd burned the night she disappeared — was too neat, too controlled, too much like evidence.

She told herself, more than once, that this was reckless. That happiness like this — small, domestic, undeserved — was exactly the kind of thing that made people careless, made them forget the terms of their own contracts, made them start believing in things that had an expiration date stitched into the very fabric of their existence.

She let herself be reckless anyway.

Late one night, unable to sleep, she found herself standing in the hallway outside his door, having gotten up for water and lingered there instead for reasons she didn't examine too closely, and she thought — not for the first time, but more clearly than she'd allowed herself to before — that whatever this was, however temporary, however built on a lie she would carry silently to the end of her life, it was still the single best thing that had ever happened to her.

The universe owes me nothing, she thought, resting her forehead briefly against the cool wall outside his door, close enough to hear him shift in his sleep on the other side of it, close enough to imagine, just for a moment, a version of this life where the door wasn't a boundary but an invitation. It took my mother. It took my face. It took twelve years and gave me back a stranger's name instead. But it gave me this — this ridiculous, borrowed, expiring thing — and I am going to take it, and I am never, ever going to tell it thank you out loud, because saying it out loud would mean admitting how much I need it to be real.

She would take it to her grave, she decided, standing there in the dark. Whatever this was. However it ended. She had buried harder things than a secret.

She went back to bed smiling anyway, which felt, in its own small way, like the most honest thing she'd done in twelve years.

Nathan, on the other side of that door, was not asleep either.

He lay in the dark replaying the kitchen conversation with an attention to detail that embarrassed him — the exact angle of her smile, the low register her voice dropped into right before she said something designed to undo him completely, the four inches his jacket had mysteriously traveled in the closet that he was almost certain, now that he thought about it, hadn't been an accident at all.

He didn't understand it. That was the maddening part. He'd married her for a business deal, walked into this apartment prepared to share a roof with a stranger and nothing more, and somewhere in six short weeks that stranger had become the person whose laugh he found himself listening for across a crowded room, whose approval he'd started, without quite noticing when it began, actually wanting.

It scared him a little, if he was honest with himself, which he tried to be, late at night, when there was no one around to perform for.

He thought of Sophie, briefly, guiltily, the way he always did when this same old feeling started creeping up on him — a worn groove that still ached out of habit more than conviction these days, going back further than he usually let himself trace, back to a girl crying in the back of his father's car over a rumor that had turned out to mean nothing at all, and a granola bar he'd never told anyone he still remembered handing her. This time, for the first time in longer than he could remember, the thought didn't land the way it used to. It felt distant. Borrowed from an old version of himself he wasn't entirely sure he recognized anymore.

He thought instead of green silk under gala lights, and a shirt in the wrong drawer, and the devastating patience of a woman who never once pushed for anything, and somehow always ended up exactly where he hadn't realized he wanted her to be.