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)
And then I hear her clearly. Her voice is wet, thick with tears I cannot see and would give the team and both my hands to wipe away, and it breaks in the middle the way a thing breaks when it has been bent too long, and what she says, what my wife says into the quiet of that room, is this.
“I can’t bear it anymore. This has to stop. He makes me sick.”
Barrymore murmurs something. I don’t hear it. I will never hear it. Whatever it was, the thing he said back to her, the context that might have been a mercy, it stays in that room with the two people allowed inside it, and I stand in the corridor on the wrong side of one more door with the sum finally, fully, mercilessly worked.
There it is. Not a guess. Not the machine’s worst-case midnight arithmetic. Her own voice, her own words, the truth I have spent four days flinching from delivered at last in the only handwriting I would ever have believed.
She can’t bear me. She wants it to stop. I make her sick.
And the worst part, the part that tells me exactly how far gone I am, how completely the cold useful machine has failed at the one calculation that ever mattered, is that I cannot even argue with the verdict.
Because she’s right.
Chapter Fourteen
They let me out on a Tuesday with a list of instructions as long as my arm and a small beige machine that will, for the rest of my life apparently, tell me what my own heart is doing as though I couldn’t feel it perfectly well from the inside. No stress. No shocks. No excitement of any kind, the good or the bad, which when you think about it’s just a doctor’s polite way of prescribing a smaller life, and I am very good at smaller lives, I’ve had practice, so I tell them yes, I understand, I’ll be careful, and I mean it, I do, right up until the moment I stop meaning it entirely.
But that comes later. First comes Raymond.
He arrives at the house the second afternoon I’m home, while Troy is still here pretending he has nowhere better to be than my sitting room, and he comes bearing the exact correct flowers and the exact correct sympathy and a smile I have known my whole life without ever once, until today, looking at it properly. Raymond Glasgow. My father’s old colleague, my godfather in everything but the paperwork, a fixture at every Ericsson Christmas since before I could walk. He takes both my hands in both of his and tells me how frightened we all were, how glad he is, how my father would have moved the earth itself to keep me safe, and I let him, because this is a man I have been letting hold my hands at funerals and graduations for twenty-two years.
“And look at the two of you,” he says then, turning that warm old smile between Troy and me, settling into the good chair as though the house were already a little bit his. “Thick as ever. You know, there’s no shame in it, Camilla. The whole city’s seen how that man treats you. Nobody would blame you for where you turn for comfort.” A pause, gentle, terrible. “Nobody would blame either of you.”
Beside me Troy has gone very still.
I laugh, because I think he’s being clumsy, because I think it’s the bad joke of an old man who doesn’t understand that Troy is my brother in all the ways that count. “Raymond, Troy practically raised me—”
“Of course, of course.” He waves it away, still smiling, and the smile is the thing, I’ll think later, the smile never once changes. “I only mean you’ll both be free of the whole sorry business soon enough. Between us.” He leans in as though confiding a kindness. “He’s finished, my dear. Your husband. The board’s lost its patience and so have I. A man like that, a cheap nobody who buys his way into a family like yours and then parades a model around a charity ball while his sick wife collapses on the floor in front of three hundred people, that man does not get to keep what he stole. There’s a meeting. It’s all but done. And when it’s over you’ll have your life back, and the team will go where it ought to have gone in the first place, and you and Troy can stop being so very careful about being seen together.”
He pats my hand. He’s still smiling.
And I sit there in my mother’s chair with my godfather’s dry warm hand on mine and I feel something cold begin at the back of my neck and work its way down, slow, the way cold does, because there is a wrongness in this room and my body has found it a half-second before my mind has.