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)
My fists clench at my sides.
“You don’t have to pity me,” I tell her, and it comes out hard, because hard is what I have when everything else has run out.
“I’m not.” Her voice shakes, but the words are clear. “But you don’t have to lie to me either.”
And something gives way in my chest, some final wall I’ve been holding up with both hands for two months, because she’s right, she’s exactly right, she has looked straight through the cold and named the only lie left standing in this room, which is the divorce, which is this whole performance of letting her go as though letting her go were what I wanted. I’m lying to her right now, with every signed page on this desk, and I’m tired. Just unspeakably tired of the lying that the truth simply comes up out of me on its own.
“The only time I lied to you,” I say, “was when I told you I was thinking of replacing you with someone else.” I watch her go still. “And the only time I lied about you was when I told Bills that I only married you because of the Waymakers.”
“I heard you say that.” Her voice breaks clean in the middle of it. “I heard you, Trey.”
I jerk where I stand.
“You never said—you never said anything.” It’s barely sound. The whole shape of the last two months is rearranging itself behind my eyes, fast and merciless, every cold thing she’s done suddenly wearing a different face, because if she heard me tell Bills I married her for the team, if she’s been carrying that since before the photographs, before the heir, before any of it, then he makes me sick was never what I built my life around four days ago. It was a woman who believed the man she loved had only ever wanted her for a hockey contract. It was grief. It was grief the whole time, and I called it revulsion and signed these papers on the strength of it.
“What can I say,” she whispers, “that won’t make me seem like I’m begging you to…” Her voice falters and dies.
“Beg what?”
She shakes her head, fast, the tears coming harder, refusing it.
And my heart slams once against my ribs, hard enough to hurt, because I can see what’s happening, I can see both of us standing here a single sentence apart from the only thing either of us wants and each too afraid of the other to cross it, and I have spent my whole life believing that the truth is a liability, a thing you give up only when it’s been pried out of you, a weakness. I’m about to bet everything I have left on it being the opposite. On it being the one thing that gets us out.
“If I beg you to forgive me—”
“I already did.”
The speed of it nearly stops me. I make myself go on.
“—and not to leave me, so I can spend the rest of my life making it up to you, will you—”
“Why do you want me to stay?”
And there it is, the question, the only one, and the cold man, the careful man, the man who has never once said a thing he couldn’t take back, looks at his weeping wife across a desk full of the proof of his own stupidity and does not hedge and does not calculate and does not protect himself even slightly.
“Because I love—”
I don’t get to finish it.
She is already around the desk, already against me, the signed papers scattering off the edge and sailing white and meaningless to the floor where they belong, and her arms are around my neck and her wet face is against my throat and she’s saying it into my skin, over and over, the thing I have been dying for two months without knowing it was the thing I was dying for.
“I love you, Trey. I love you so much.”
I get my hands on her face. They’re shaking. I, who do not shake, hold my wife’s face in two shaking hands and tip it up to mine, and I tell her the truest sentence I own now, the one that’s replaced the eleven words I built my life on, the one that’s only three.
“I love you, Camilla.”
She can’t answer me.
I’m already kissing her.
⁂
Three floors below, at that same hour, in the glass-walled boardroom where Richard Ericsson had once run his whole world, Raymond Glasgow was perhaps ninety seconds from taking it.
He had the votes. He had counted them twice and bought half of them outright, and the best part, the part he’d been savoring all morning, was the empty chair at the head of the table. Flint hadn’t even come. The cheap stranger hadn’t shown up to defend his own throne, and Raymond fully intended to read that absence into the record as the surrender of a man who knew he was finished.