CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

She arrived home on Thursday. When she reentered the penthouse, it seemed a little different, not exactly changed, but altered in the way spaces change when you've been somewhere awful and you come back. The dimensions were the same. The lighting was the same. However, she didn't glide through it smoothly, as one usually does, but rather cautiously, like a person who is navigating a room in the dark: not frightened of the room, only aware of the fact that such a room can have edges and that these edges must be carefully located. Adrian went to the hospital daily. He stayed with her, as people do with a grief that they do not have words for. He was simply there, not playing a part, not acting. He never attempted to talk her out of it or around it. He came with food that she did not eat and sat in the chair near the window and sometimes, when she had fallen asleep, she had woken up to see him still there. She did not thank him. She was unable to identify the words. She was not herself anymore. That was definitely clear. She even knew that there was a difference, just like a note changes its sound when the string gets slack, and she allowed herself to feel that difference without making an attempt to correct it. She had lost a child whom she had been so fearful of wanting but had wanted, nevertheless, and the grief for that was a world of its own with its own money and its own weather, and she would have to live there for some time before she could come back home.

But beneath the sorrow, she was even more detached, in fact colder than ever to the point of numbness. The shock and the sense of finally seeing the light on why the accident happened brought the chill. Marcus had told her more or less the same thing, he had been whispering, two days after she opened her eyes the car had been pushed off the road on purpose, the other car was already reported as stolen three hours before the crash. It was a targeted attack against her. And, they hit her at the one spot that hurt the most. She reflected on her mother's journal. The index card left on the windshield floated into her mind.

 The wedding present from Christiana, the photo of her by the storage unit in Greenpoint flashed before her. She sent a message to herself: I know who you are. I do not yet know why. But I am going to find out, and when I do, I am going to be very methodical about it. She decided to give herself a fortnight for mourning. Not because a grieving period can be set to a deadline, but because she had two major tasks ahead of her that necessitated her being operational, and she could not permit herself the luxury of staying in bed endlessly. The tasks in question were: unearthing the identity of her mother's murderer, and obtaining a degree from the Harlow Institute before Adrian's divorce was finalized. Both of these demanded get-up-and-go from her. Well, she did get up. In the days that followed, Adrian made a few attempts to get in touch with her.

She recognized his attempts, the thoughtful questions during dinner, the morning coffees he kept putting on her desk while she was working in the studio, the night she came down at two in the morning unable to sleep and found him already in the kitchen, sitting at the island with a glass of water and a look on his face that said he had not been sleeping either, and neither of them spoke but he made her tea without asking, and she sat across from him in the blue nighttime quiet of the kitchen and felt, for the length of the cup of tea, marginally less like she was made entirely of hollow things. She did not allow him beyond that point. She was scared. She thought, "If I share my feelings with him, if I show him the whole field of my emotions and he reacts with the cold, logical pragmatism of a man who wanted me to be his wife as a matter of contract, I don't think I'll be able to bear it." She had managed to endure Jeffery's lack of interest only because she had not been deeply in love, really love, the way one loves in the marrow of one's bones. She had merely desired to be loved by someone, and Jeffery had given that to her, and she had mistaken the giving for the thing itself. The feeling she had for Adrian was entirely different. It had a form and weight and a texture; by his very reaction, if he denied it was mutual, the loss of it would be a different type of loss than anything she had experienced before.

That was not something she was ready for. Not while she was immersed in the country of grief. So, she maintained a meticulous, courteous distance, went back to school, and dove into her collection of work with the kind of concentrated ferocity that a woman exhibits when she decides that the one thing she could build in her life that not even death could take away is fashion. Also, in the evenings, she was reading her mother's diary and following the clues that her mother had left, patiently and methodically, just as her mother had taught her to do when dealing with tough stuff. That anonymous envelope was delivered on the morning of the gender reveal. She had already been informed about the party by Cassandra, who had mentioned it with a deliberate performative casualness characteristic of one delivering the news they expect to wound. The baby gender reveal of Jeffery and Valerie was a type of event which required not only a venue but also a social media strategy and a colour-coded dessert table. Aria simply smiled, nodded, and returned to her work. The envelope was delivered before dawn by slipping it underneath the penthouse door. It contained a USB drive which held files,pictures, messages and a medical document that very clearly revealed the story of Valerie's pregnancy in absolutely irrefutable detail. The father's name. The dates. The messages between Valerie and Dario Caruso that had been exchanged while she was, at least apparently still devoted to Jeffery Watson. Somebody had made this move on her. She did not know who. She kept the question.

She didn't go to the gender reveal party. She didn't even want to. She had the documents sent to Jeffery's private mail address, the one that was not his work account, the one he always used on his private phone and the subject line was just: Thought you should know. She scheduled the mail to be delivered just when the smoke cannons were going off. Marcus told her about it, after he got the news from the security world's version of a gossiping aunt: the gathering had ended with a spectacular fall-out. Jeffery had turned very pale and had left the venue. Valerie had wept, but not from happiness. The cake table, decorated with blue powder colour in preparation for the arrival of a boy, had been left completely untouched. Sitting at her drawing table, Aria experienced the delight of it spot-on and clean, the delight of a restored balance and subsequently she discovered, under it, a sorrow that she hadn't at all hoped for. Not for Jeffery or Valerie. For her. For that her part which, in spite of believing so much in the promises of love, had been making ever so smaller so as to keep them. She again looked at the drawings. She had a show to do. Then a mother's death to unravel. And, hidden somewhere in the framework of the whole thing, a contemplation about a guy who had kissed her on a handiwork and withdrawn, and was still, as she was quite sure, pulling back only because he did not know how to come forward.  But she would deal with that later…..

One thing at a time.