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)
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he says.
No, not a ghost, but…am I seeing it right? Is my husband about to dance with his ex?
When he’s never even looked my way?
Chapter Ten
The first rule I ever learned about a mistake is that you do not get to take it back. You get to decide what it costs and who pays, and that is the whole of the freedom available to a man once the thing is done; the rest is sentiment, and sentiment is for people who can afford it.
So I stand at the edge of the long room at the Plaza with a glass I have no intention of drinking and I do not let myself regret the invitation. I made it. It is on the board now, face up, the way every move I have ever made goes face up the instant my hand leaves it, and a man does not sit at the table I have spent my life sitting at and then wince at his own cards. I invited Ronna Roswell to this ball to make a particular point to a particular room, and the point is being made; I can feel it being made, the same way you feel weather change before the window confirms it, in the angle of every head that turns when she laughs and then turns a half-second later to find me, to see whether I am watching her or watching the door my wife will come through.
I am watching neither. I have trained myself out of watching the way other men train themselves out of smoking, deliberately, against the grain of the body, and tonight the training is the only thing holding the shape of me together.
Across the room Glasgow has set up his small court near the orchestra, Crowther at his shoulder doing the thing Crowther does instead of having a personality, and Greaves moving between the tables with nineteen years of board chairmanship in the set of his back. They are all watching me. They have been watching me for two months, ever since the photographs, waiting with the patience of old money for the cheap stranger to do the cheap thing in public so they can be civil about removing him afterward. I came tonight to give them nothing. I came to stand here cold and unbothered with a beautiful woman on the guest list and a wife somewhere in the building and let the whole appetite of the room go hungry.
And then the door at the far end opens, and I know.
I do not look. I want that on the record, here, in the only court that ever hears my testimony, which is the one inside my own skull at one in the morning. I do not turn my head a single degree. But I know the exact instant Camilla enters the room the way I would know a change in cabin pressure, some animal barometer in me that has nothing to do with my eyes and everything to do with two months of lying awake cataloguing the exact distance between her room and mine. The noise of the room reorganizes itself around her arrival. I feel it move through the crowd toward me like a tide coming up a beach, and I set my jaw and I keep my eyes on the orchestra and I do not look at my wife, because looking is a thing I am no longer allowed.
“There she is,” says a voice at my elbow, warm and amused and entirely delighted with itself. “Right on schedule. And you didn’t even flinch. Impressive, Trey. Truly.”
Ronna has arrived. She fits herself in beside me with the ease of a woman who has stood beside me at a hundred of these before, in the years when I kept women the way I keep cars, for as long as they were useful and not one evening past it. She is in a deep red that the room has been arranging itself around all night, and she is smiling at me with a private, gleaming sort of enjoyment, and I understand at once that she has not come over to be looked at. She has come over to watch.
“Ronna.”
“You know what I noticed, standing over there?” She turns her glass slowly by the stem, taking in the room as though it were a painting she’d been promised was very good. “I noticed you’ve looked at that door four times in the last twenty minutes. The same door. Now, the Trey I knew didn’t look at doors. The Trey I knew made the door come to him.” She tips her head. “So either you’ve developed a nervous condition, or you were waiting for something. Someone.”
“I watch every room I’m in,” I tell her. “It’s a habit older than you are. Don’t read anything into it.”