Chapter2

Celia's POV

Arthur stood in the entryway with his coat still on and his keys in his hand, and for a long moment he looked at me the way he looked at a deal that had come in under his model. Then he set the keys on the console and did not sit down.

"I don't know what this is," he said. "You're tired. You might change your mind tomorrow morning and I'll pretend I didn't hear it tonight."

"I'm not going to say it differently in the morning."

His eyes went past me, down the dark hall, up the stairs where our daughter had gone. "Then what about Leonie," he said, and he asked it the way you play a card you have been holding all game — like her name was the one thing in this house that would make me take it all back.

"She goes with you," I said. "All of it. The house, the school, the name. Everything she needs, you can give her." My voice shook on the last part, and I heard it happen, and I did not stop — I held it together and finished the whole sentence anyway.

That drew a frown out of him, a thin crease between his brows. He set his keys down on the console and looked at me properly for the first time all night. He opened his mouth, and for one second I thought he might actually answer me, and then the phone in his jacket pocket went off, and whatever had been about to come out of him died in his throat.

He took it out, looked at the screen, and turned half away from me. Two sentences, low, and I heard the numbers without understanding them. When he turned back his face had changed, put together differently.

He pulled his coat on and walked past me toward the door, and then stopped with his hand on the frame and looked back over his shoulder. "Don't make tonight into something it wasn't," he said. "A sick woman needed a table and a ride home. That's all today was. Stop being unreasonable over something this small, and be Mrs. Winston."

The door closed. The garage door went up. The car pulled out of the drive without pausing at the gate, and then the house was quiet, and I was standing in the middle of it in my socks with a cup of tea gone cold on the table behind me.

I stared at his retreating figure — his anxious look, his flustered movements. This man had hidden all his tenderness away, saving it for someone other than his wife. A bitter, unspeakable sadness washed over me for all I’d given over the years.

I did not go upstairs right away. I sat in the living room with the lamps off and listened to the house settle, and I had finally stood up to go to bed when my phone lit the ceiling.

It was Zoe calling.

“I’m at St. Mary’s Hospital,” Zoe said. “I got hit by a delivery bike on Hudson Street. The cyclist took off with my wallet. The hospital says I need to pay the out-of-pocket portion before I can leave.” She paused, and the hum of hospital noise drifted from behind her. “It’s two hundred and forty dollars total, and I don’t have any working cards on me. Can you come?”

"Yeah," I said. "Give me twenty minutes."

I threw on my coat and drove over the bridge faster than I should have, both hands tight on the wheel. She had said the words like they were nothing, which is how Zoe says everything, and that was why I’d been worried about her injury the whole way there.

The concierge floor at St. Mary's was quiet the way money is quiet. Zoe was on the long bench just past the elevator bank with her jacket folded on her knee and her right elbow wrapped in white gauze, a bag of ice balanced on top of it, and she started swearing before I was even close enough to hear it.

"A month of work on that podcast, and I lose the notebook on Hudson Street," she said. "How's your night." She looked up at me and stopped. "Okay. Talk while we walk."

We walked toward the billing desk, and I was reaching into my bag when I raised my eyes and saw the corridor on the other side of the nursing station.

Arthur was coming toward us and Diana leaning into his arm, an IV port taped to the back of her right hand and his dark jacket draped over her shoulders. He had his head tilted down and he was talking to her in a low, patient voice, and I had never once heard it aimed at me in the years I had lived in his house. She laughed at something small he said, and he adjusted the jacket up around her neck without breaking the sentence.

The floor beneath my feet felt soft. I pressed my thumb hard into my palm until my nail left an indentation. Pushing down the surge of grief and anger rising inside me, I turned away from the wall, pulled Zoe over to the table, and stared at the laminated sign above the window. I pretended not to see. Maybe then it would hurt less.

Except they came past us, close, because there was only one way down that hall.

The overhead light fell on her chest, and a glint flashed across my eyes.

I saw clearly that the brooch pinned to Diana’s breast was the one Mother had custom-made for me. She’d pressed it with her little flower press she built herself out in the garage when I was nine. Flattened asters and larkspurs were set into silver. It lived in a velvet box, her name burned into the inside of the lid. I hadn’t dared look at it once since the funeral. I’d left it right where she kept it — in the second drawer of the vanity, underneath folded scarves.

"Why do you have this brooch?" I said. My voice came out shaking and clear, I could never be wrong about this. It’s the one that belonged to me.

“Is this yours?” She looked surprised. She lifted her eyes to Arthur and waited silently — and that silence told me more about how the brooch had come to be on her than any answer she could have given.

I saw clearly that Arthur’s eyes changed.