Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
“I married her to own the Waymakers. That is the beginning and the end of the arrangement.”
And I don’t make a sound. That’s the strange thing I’ll keep coming back to afterward, that a person can be taken so completely apart and still not make a single sound, that I can turn on the buffed floor and walk back the way I came, past my father’s old office with his name still on the door, down the long quiet corridor while the building that grew me goes on being warm and proud of me as though nothing at all has happened inside it.
I married her to own the Waymakers.
The past six months come walking down the corridor with me, every memory arriving uninvited and turning itself over to show me its other side. The four blankets he had delivered before I’d even finished saying I was cold; I’d taken it for tenderness at the time, and now I wonder if it was only maintenance, the way you’d see to the upkeep of a thing you mean to keep in working order. The mornings he read me the sports pages in that lazy cutting voice until I laughed into my coffee; an arrangement, I understand now, a small daily performance for an audience of exactly one who was always, always going to believe it. The nights after Dad, when he held me in the dark and never once told me to stop. The beginning and the end of the arrangement.
Every one of these used to make me smile. I used to take them out and turn them over on the hard days the way other people worry a lucky coin between their fingers. And now every single one of them only wants to make me cry, because if the words I just heard through that gap in the door are true, then not one of them ever meant the thing I built my whole heart on believing it meant, and I have spent six months loving a man who was only ever, the entire time, balancing an account.
Has all of it been a lie?
My chest pulls so tight I can’t get a full breath in around it, and I keep my eyes down on the carpet and keep walking, because the walking is the only thing holding me upright, and I can feel it coming the way you feel weather coming, the exact moment I’m going to come apart right here in the middle of the corridor where anyone at all can stop and watch their princess fall to pieces—
“Cams?”
Troy, turning up at the worst possible moment the way he has his whole life, with that uncanny big-brother instinct for materializing at the exact instant I’d give anything in the world to go unseen. He’s dressed like the thing he is now, retired sports royalty in a charcoal coat that probably carries its own insurance policy, the golden boy a year out of the jersey and somehow even more photographed for it. Whatever he reads in my face wipes the easy warmth clean off his own in an instant.
But before I can get a single word out to him—
“Camilla.”
The other voice comes from somewhere behind me, and I don’t have to turn around to know it. I’d know it anywhere on earth. I knew it through a gap in a door not ten minutes ago, telling the truth about my marriage to a man it pays to keep quiet.
Trey.
So now I’m caught in the middle of the corridor with one man in front of me and one behind, wanting to laugh and wanting to cry and managing to do neither, and so I do the very worst possible thing, which is nothing at all, while both of them start toward me at once.
“Why are you crying?” Trey says.
I hadn’t known that I was.
Troy gets to me first, one hand already coming out toward my arm. “Cam, what—”
Trey is between us before Troy’s fingers can reach me, smooth and fast and absolute, a wall arriving out of nowhere. “Don’t touch my wife.”
Troy goes very still. When he speaks again all the easy warmth has drained out of his voice. “I’ve known her a great deal longer than you have, Flint.”
“And yet she married me.” Trey doesn’t raise his voice. He never has to raise his voice, and that is exactly the thing about him that frightens people. “Not you.”
Troy looks past my husband’s shoulder to me, and whatever he finds in my face sets his jaw like concrete. “What’s wrong, Cam? Did this jerk do something to you?”
Trey is watching me too now, and there’s a question in his eyes I don’t understand at all, something dark and cutting and somehow turned accusingly on me, of all people. “Did Barrymore do something?”
“I would never hurt her.” Troy bites each word off like he’s spitting out a threat.