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 stand on the wrong side of a closed door on the cardiac floor and I do not go in, because I have learned what happens when I go in.
They told me the morning after. Not to be cruel; the night nurse simply assumed I knew, the way a wife’s husband would know, and so she told me plainly while she updated a chart that after I left the room that first night my wife’s heart had come apart so badly the alarms had pulled the whole floor running, that they had nearly lost her, that whatever had passed between us in those few quiet minutes had cost her more than the collapse at the ball. She didn’t say it was my fault. She didn’t have to. I am a man who reads a balance sheet for a living and I can read the one that matters now: my presence is a cost her heart cannot carry. The single thing I want in this world, to stand in a room and be near her, is the one thing guaranteed to kill her.
So I stand outside the door. I have stood outside it for the better part of four days.
Barrymore comes and goes through it like he was born with a key. He has, I have come to understand, something close to it; he is on every list I am not, the family lists, the old lists, the ones written long before I bought my way into her life with a ring and a hockey team. He nods to me in the corridor now, which is more than he did at first, a short hard civil nod that costs him something, because we have an understanding since the night in this same hallway, he and I, an understanding built on a name we both want to put in the ground. But the understanding does not extend to the door. When I asked him, once, plainly, to let me sit with her even for a minute, he looked at me for a long moment with those level protective eyes and said only, the doctor says no scenes, and you and I both know you’re a scene, and went in without me, and I had no answer, because he was right, and because a man who throws a punch in a cardiac ward to win an argument has lost more than the argument.
I send things. I am told they are received. Flowers, the white ones she keeps in her father’s old study because they were her mother’s, which I know because I make it my business to know things, and which I now understand I learned the way you learn the specifications of an asset, and hate myself accordingly. Books. The good tea she likes that isn’t sold in this country. They go in through the door that doesn’t open for me and I am told, by Bills, who has taken to delivering these reports with the flinching care of a man defusing ordnance, that Mrs. Flint says thank you. Mrs. Flint says thank you. Four days of Mrs. Flint says thank you, which is the most distant possible arrangement of two words that still counts as not being thrown out, and I take each one like a man taking the only water he’s going to get.
And in the long hours on the wrong side of the door, the machine does what the machine does. It runs.
I have tried to stop it. I have never once in my life tried to stop it before, the cold continuous accounting that has made me everything I am, and it turns out I don’t know how, it turns out you cannot unbuild the only thing you ever built, and so it runs and it runs and every number it produces is the same number and the number is you’re going to lose her.
Look at the arithmetic. I have. I’ve done nothing else for four days.
This is Camilla. This is a woman the city named a princess before she was old enough to vote, a woman strangers on the street call by her first name with their whole hearts, a woman so easy to love that an entire organization built a ring of standing ambulances around her rather than risk a world without her in it. Men notice her. Men have always noticed her; I noticed her, and I am a man who notices nothing he can’t use. There is not a ballroom or a boardroom or a hospital corridor she walks into that does not quietly reorganize itself toward her, and I know this because I have watched it happen and felt the ugly animal thing in me bare its teeth every time.
And against all of that, against a lifetime of being adored, stands the husband. Me. Let us be honest about the husband, in the only court that ever hears it. I married her for a hockey team. I told her so, near enough, in a room she turned out to be standing close enough to hear. I demanded an heir from her the way you’d demand a clause in a contract and then a separation in the same cold breath. I let her walk a red carpet alone into a wall of cameras. I danced with another woman in front of three hundred people and would not turn my head while her heart stopped across the room. I have set the bar for what a man can be to Camilla Flint so low that it’s resting on the floor of the sea, and here is the thing the machine keeps showing me, the thing I cannot make it stop showing me: