Chapter ~ Four

LIORA

I let the fifth call ring itself out too.

His name sat there on the screen, and I watched it disappear back into black without answering. I silenced it, and put it face-down on the script stand, and read.

I read the first passage Lisbon had asked for, and then the second, and somewhere in the third I stopped bracing for my voice to crack. Something in me had been pressed flat for five years. It came up all at once.

When I opened my eyes the engineer was standing very still behind the glass.

“Play it back,” I said.

He did. I stood with the headphones pulled half off and listened to a woman I barely recognized read a line about a tide that never came back. There was weight in it, a low, dark grain that had not been there at twenty-two. I used to read the news like I expected the world to be kind. This woman read like she already knew otherwise.

“Your voice has bulked up,” the engineer said, through the intercom. “Since the last time you were in here.”

I let myself believe him. Just for the length of the playback.

It was past midnight when I came out. The phone had twenty-three messages on it. I read only the last.

‘Stop sulking. It’s late. Come home.’

Sulking. Like I was fourteen and had missed curfew over something petty. Or maybe a hall full of people laughing at my face was a mood I should get over by morning, if he was firm enough about it.

I did not go home. I gave the driver the name of a hotel I looked up. The room had a view of a car park and, beyond it, a single lit window with a tree in it. Maybe a view would have helped me live in the illusion of a beautiful life. I sat on the edge of the bed in my coat, and somewhere between taking off one shoe and the other, the lump in my chest gave way without asking my permission first.

‘I’ll tell her after the anniversary.’

It was still the anniversary. It would be for another hour. He had been planning to tell me himself, and Seraphine had simply saved him the trouble by letting me walk in and hear it.

I thought about the years I had given that man, the way I always did when I let myself sit near them at all.

There was the winter gala, in our first December. He had never asked me to attend anything, so I decided to attend one, and I bought a gown the color of deep water and stood at the top of the staircase in the ballroom, under a ceiling of hanging lights, and for a moment the whole room seemed to turn. I saw Dorian look up. I saw the smile begin on his face, and I saw it stop when his eyes reached my cheek.

He didn’t say anything to me. He turned, quietly, to his assistant, and I watched his lips shape three words I could read from forty feet away.

‘Somewhere quieter. Please.’

That night a young woman in a black uniform guided me to a small lounge off the kitchens with a plate of canapés and a polite smile. I sat there until the music stopped.

I never went to another one. He never once asked why. I think it was the relief on his face that taught me I was right to stay home.

And yet he had been the one to ask me to be his wife. In a hospital room, with half my face in gauze and a hole where my career used to be, Dorian had sat down beside my bed, and taken my hand, and promised to take care of me for the rest of my life. It was the only sweet thing anyone had offered me that week. I said yes before I realized I was saying it.

But I thought of the drawer, too. five years of dated pages folded in a black ribbon. He had written to her on the night I came home from the hospital. He had written to her on our wedding day.

He had promised to take care of me. He had never promised to love me. It struck me, lying there in the dark, that my husband had never actually lied.

It was the truth that had done this.

I got up. I washed my face in the hotel bathroom until my eyes were clear enough to look at.

“Stop crying,” I told the mirror. “You would look pale and sick, and there’s already so much on your face to worry about.”

I was grateful, at least, that I had never stopped reading aloud. Even in years when it felt like broadcasting to an empty kitchen, it had kept some thread of me alive that the rest of my life had not managed to strangle.

I must have slept, because the next thing I knew there was gray light in the curtains, and beyond them the first snow of the year coming down slow and unhurried, as though it had nowhere to be. People say the first snow is for beginnings. My phone was full of unanswered texts telling me to come home.

I dressed. I left them all unread. I took the stairs down to the lobby, telling myself I would order tea and find a window seat and watch the snow and plan the twenty-nine days I had left.

I was still holding onto that calm when I reached the bottom step, and the first voice that met me was the overly familiar one I was trying so hard to despise.

“Oh, there you are.”

I stopped.

Dorian stood in the middle of the lobby, beside a ten-foot fir hung with white glass stars, with his coat over his arm and his phone in his hand, exactly as composed as he always was. A porter carrying someone’s luggage slowed to look, then thought better of it.

For a second, I wondered if the sight of him would make me angry. I just felt tired instead.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

He held up the phone and turned the screen toward me. A small blue dot, blinking on a map, sat in the exact spot where I was standing.

“I’ve had your location shared since the hospital,” he said. “In case you ever needed me.”

five years. He had known where I was the whole time. Did it ever matter?

“You didn’t answer a single call,” he said. He sounded almost puzzled. “You always answer.”

“I was busy.”

“Busy. At a hotel.” He let that settle, then softened, reaching for his easy voice. “You’re upset. I understand. Let’s get some breakfast, and we’ll talk.”

I should have said no. But I felt my stomach rumble so I gave in.

The hotel’s dining room was nearly empty, all white linen and low voices, a carol playing softly somewhere out of sight, and he chose a table in the corner with his back to the room, which put my scar against the wall. I noticed. I always noticed.

“Bring the usual for my wife,” he told the waiter.

The usual.

It arrived on a silver platter: a star-shaped pastry with a crust of crushed pistachio, warm, glistening, dusted with sugar like frost. He slid it across the tablecloth toward me like a man presenting a peace treaty.

“Your favorite, that’s why I always eat it,” he blushed.

It was not my favorite. It was not anyone’s favorite I knew but his. And it was the one thing on that menu that could put me in a hospital bed for the second time in my life.

five years, and he still didn’t know what I was allergic to.

“Dorian,” I said, and held my voice steady. “I want a divorce.”