CHAPTER FOUR: Clean Break

Liam's POV

She is gone by Thursday.

Not just her things. Her.

The apartment feels different without Emma in it and I cannot explain why in any way that would satisfy me if I try, so I do not try.

I stand in the bedroom doorway and look at the cleared nightstand, the empty hooks behind the bathroom door, the space on the closet shelf where her things have been, and I tell myself this is what clarity feels like.

I pour a drink.

Stand at the window.

The city sprawls below me, lit and indifferent, and I tell myself that the year is over and what remains is the life I am supposed to have been living.

I wait for that to feel like something.

Talia arrives Friday evening.

She walks into the apartment and looks around with the satisfied ease of someone who has been waiting a long time for a room to become available and is finally being shown to her table, and she pours herself a glass of my wine and says, "it's quiet," in a way that means good.

"It is," I reply.

"Good quiet," she says.

"Yes."

She looks at me over her glass. "You don't look like a man enjoying good quiet."

"I'm fine."

"You keep saying that."

"Because I am."

She crosses the room and puts her hand on my chest and tilts her head up at me with the expression she uses when she is choosing to be patient with me, which I generally have always found attractive but I am finding tonight slightly less so, though I cannot say why.

"It's done," she says. "She's gone. This is what we wanted."

"I know."

"Liam..."

"I know, Talia. I'm fine."

She holds my gaze for a moment and then smiles and goes to look at the city from the window beside me, close enough that our arms touch, and I stand there and look at the city and feel, underneath the fine and the clarity and everything else, a quiet persistent wrongness I cannot locate.

Not guilt about the divorce...

I have examined that from every angle.

Not guilt about Talia either...

What is between us is real and has been real for a long time.

Something else...

Something I have no clean word for.

Marcus mentions it Monday morning in the careful neutral way he mentions things that fall outside his official remit.

"Mrs. Carson's attorney confirmed everything processed cleanly," he says, setting a folder on the desk. "She's vacated the apartment fully." A pause. "No forwarding address on file. Left intentionally blank, her attorney noted."

I look up from the document I am reading.

"What do you mean, no forwarding address?"

"Exactly that, sir. The field was left blank. Intentionally."

I sit back in my chair.

Emma, who has shown up to every obligation and every event and every cold dinner without once making herself difficult to reach, has left no forwarding address.

She has just gone.

Somewhere.

"Fine," I reply. "That's fine."

"Of course," Marcus says, and leaves.

I look at the city through my office window.

No forwarding address.

It bothers me in a way I spend the rest of the afternoon... not examining, the way a sound bothers you not when it is happening but after it stops, when the silence it leaves behind is suddenly louder than the sound ever was.

I call Talia at six.

She answers warmly and I go pick her up and she talks over dinner about a property she has seen in the hills and a trip she wants to plan, and I listen and say the right things and reach for her hand across the restaurant table and smile.

Underneath all of it, something pulls.

"Can I ask you something?" I say.

She looks at me over her wine. "Of course."

"The things you told me about Emma, the Harrington account, the way she was talking to the board wives..." I keep my voice even. "How sure were you about all of that?"

She does not answer immediately.

It is a very small pause and she covers it quickly, smoothly, with a small concerned frown and a tilted head.

"What do you mean, how sure?" she asks.

"I mean did you actually hear her say those things? Were you present for those conversations?"

"Liam." She sets her glass down. "Why are you asking me this?"

"I'm just asking."

"Is this because she's gone and you're feeling..."

"I'm not feeling anything, Talia. I'm asking a straightforward question."

She looks at me with those dark eyes and I watch something move behind them, something that does its calculations fast and arrives at an answer and I note it immediately, all in about two seconds, before the warmth comes back.

"Of course I was sure," she replies. "I wouldn't have told you if I wasn't. You know that."

I nod.

I look at my wine.

"Right," I say. "Sorry. Forget I asked."

She reaches across the table and covers my hand with hers.

"She's gone," she says gently. "Let her go."

I smile at her.

But on the drive home, alone in the back of the car while the city moves past the windows, I think about that pause.

The small pause.

The fast one.

The one she covers so smoothly that most people would not have noticed it at all.

I notice most things.

I have simply, for a very long time, chosen not to.