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)
That settles it. If I’d wanted more proof than a folder Raymond Glasgow had thoughtfully copied in advance, here it is, gathered by my own man on my own order and delivered to my own inbox before nine in the morning. While I lay awake in a narrow bed among another man’s trophies telling myself the thing clawing in my chest was a grief I had no right to feel, she was out filling her calendar with him. She has spent more honest hours with Barrymore these two months than with the husband whose name she wears on her hand, and the arithmetic of it is so ugly that I close the file and sit a long moment with both hands pressed down hard against the cool wood of the desk until the worst of the wanting-to-break-something has gone back under.
It doesn’t go all the way under. It hasn’t gone all the way under in two months. I’ve simply learned how to carry it without setting it down where anyone can see.
I carry it home that evening the way I carry it everywhere now, and it remakes me into the man I’ve decided I have to be, which is a man I recognize all too well from a long time ago and had truly hoped never to have to be again. When she appears in the kitchen doorway in the half-dark, barefoot, and offers in that soft uncertain voice to make me breakfast in the morning, I don’t so much as look up from the documents in my hand.
“No, thank you.”
I make myself ignore what the two cold words do to her face. What a performer she is, I tell myself. Two whole months of this and she can still produce the flinch right on cue, the small wounded catch of breath, the eyes going wet and overfull as though I’m the one standing here breaking something precious. I used to fall for it. I used to fall for every last bit of it, the shyness she puts on every few nights when she comes and stands in the hall outside my door and asks me, barely above a whisper, whether I’d like to stay with her tonight, doing the exact helpless blushing thing that undid me completely on our wedding night, as though I haven’t seen the photographs now, as though I don’t know full well whose company she would truly rather be keeping.
I walk out on the question every single time. I don’t dignify it with so much as an answer. The closed door, the turned back, the silence where the wanted thing used to live, it’s the only language a liar truly understands. Give her nothing and she has nothing to twist into something. It’s the one defense I have left to me and I use it without a scrap of mercy, on her and on myself in equal part, because the truth I cannot afford to hold is that every single time I walk away from that whispered question in the dark, some part of me is screaming the whole length of the corridor to turn back around.
And then comes the morning, two months deep into this campaign of mine, when she stands in the cold of the bathroom staring down at a test that’s come back negative, her eyes filling all over again, her whole small body folding down into that breakable shape that has never once, not in all this time, stopped reaching straight into my chest and closing a fist.
I almost believe it. That’s the danger she has always been to me, from the first night. Even now, even knowing she sat across a café table from Barrymore mere hours before she stood here crying over a piece of plastic, even with Nolan’s photographs burned onto the backs of my eyes, some traitor buried deep in me looks at her tears and wants nothing on earth but to gather her up off that cold tile and tell her it doesn’t matter, that there will be other months, that I never wanted the wretched heir at all, that I only ever wanted her, only ever her.
So I say the cruelest thing I can lay my hand to instead, because the cruelty is the only wall left that holds any weight.
“If this keeps on, perhaps I’ll have to find another woman to give me an heir after all.”
I watch it go into her. I make myself ignore the flinch the way I’ve made myself ignore every flinch for two months, and I walk out before the wanting can get its hands on the wheel, and the door slams shut behind me hard enough to rattle the frame in the wall.
Damn her. Damn the hold she still has on me that two months and a folder full of evidence haven’t loosened by a single inch.