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)
So I’ll say it.
I don’t remember deciding. I’m just suddenly moving, past Troy, past his outstretched hands and his pleading, finding my shoes, finding my coat, finding the keys to a car I’m not supposed to drive, and Troy is behind me saying my name in the voice you use on a person standing on a ledge, and I love him too much to listen to him, and I go.
The Res rises up grey and enormous against the afternoon and I leave the car crooked at the curb where the valets will fuss over it and I go up, up, the private elevator, the long hush of the executive floor that still smells of my father, and my heart is hammering wrong the whole way, fast and skipping, four-in-six-out coming to pieces in my chest, and I press my hand to the place where it hurts and I keep moving, because I have rehearsed it in the elevator, the whole speech, Raymond did this, the photographs were a lie, Troy is my brother, you were played, and Trey, oh Trey, I never, not once, not ever—
His office door is open.
He’s standing behind the desk, and he looks up when I come through it, and for one suspended second something happens in his face, some flare of a thing I’m too breathless and too desperate to read, and I open my mouth to say all of it at once.
And he speaks first.
“Perfect timing.” His voice is the old voice, the cold one, the one from the very worst days, and he slides a thin sheaf of cream-colored paper across the desk toward me, already signed, his name black and final at the bottom. “I’ve just signed our divorce papers. Once you add your signature, you will never have to see me again.”
Chapter Fifteen
There’s a thing I told a board of directors once, years ago, when one of them asked how I’d built what I’d built so fast and so young. I told them I had never once in my life let go of something that belonged to me. It got a laugh. It wasn’t meant as one. It was the truest sentence I owned, the whole of my character in eleven words, and I have spent every year since proving it on anyone foolish enough to test it.
And here I stand behind my father-in-law’s desk, in the office that smells of a better man than me, letting go of the only thing I have ever owned that mattered.
The papers are between us on the desk, signed, my name black and final at the bottom where I put it an hour ago with a hand I would not permit to shake. I have just told my wife she will never have to see me again, and I have said it in the coldest voice I have, because cold is the only wrapping I could find that wouldn’t fall open and show her what’s inside it. She came through that door breathless and desperate and beautiful, about to say something, and I cut her off before she could, because I have learned what saying things does to her heart, and because I overheard, four days ago, exactly how she feels when she’s free to say what she likes. He makes me sick. I have built the rest of my life around those four words. The least I can do, the only decent thing left in me, is make it so she never has to look at the thing that sickens her again.
So I’ve set her free. It’s the most expensive thing I’ve ever given anyone and the first I’ve given without expecting to be paid back, and I brace myself now for the part where she takes up the pen, because watching her sign will be the price, and I’ve always been willing to pay.
“I’m sorry, Camilla.” It comes out grim, scraped, nothing like the thing it is. “For all of it. But most of all for nearly—” The word won’t come at first. I make it. “For nearly killing you. I’ll carry that. You don’t have to.”
She doesn’t take the pen.
She stands there on the other side of the desk and she looks at me, just looks, and her eyes fill, and then they spill, the tears coming without a sound, running down a face Loren is no longer here to fix, and she does not wipe them away and she does not look down at the papers and she does not reach for the pen. She only stands there in the wreck of everything I’ve done and cries, looking at me as though I’m the one who has been hurt, and I cannot bear it, I find. Of all the things I have stood and borne in this room and the rooms before it, this is the one I cannot.