Chapter 3

We spent a night at a motel near Camden. Early the next morning, we gassed up the car and left.

About two hours in, Julian woke. He rubbed his eyes and glanced out the window.

"You remember the first time we came here?" he asked.

I did. The autumn of our first year married, he had insisted on bringing me to see the fall colors. But it was a warm autumn that year, and the maple leaves were still green come October. We stood on Camden's hills looking down at the whole sweep of green below us, and laughed for a long time. He said, "We'll come back next year." There was never a next year.

"I remember," I said.

Julian was quiet for a while.

"You weren't this quiet back then," he said. "Back then you'd put your feet up on the dash in the passenger seat, crank the stereo loud enough for the whole street to hear."

"Then you changed."

Then. Then my father's company went bankrupt. Then he vanished for six weeks. Then I was losing our child while he was at dinner with Vivienne. After that I went quiet.

"You were in London at the time," I said, my voice level.

Julian's fingers curled on his knee.

"I checked your itinerary," I said. "You were in London a week. The rest of the time you were at your father's estate."

The car went quiet.

"You checked up on me," he said.

"I did. The third week you were gone."

He said nothing, turned his face to the window.

After a long while, he suddenly sat up straight.

"Eleanor, it's dull just sitting here. Let's play a game."

"What game?"

"Truth."

I watched the road ahead.

"What do you want to ask?"

He leaned over a little, his voice dropping. "When are you planning to sign?"

There was a pothole in the road, and the wheels rolled over it, jolting the whole car.

The answer to that question, I had changed many times. It was different now.

"When we get back from the north," I said. "I'll sign then."

Julian shot me a glance. His expression was strange. After our marriage fell apart, we had been fighting over the divorce on and off, for so long, until we were both utterly disappointed in each other, and still I had never gone through with it. Now that I was agreeing to it, he couldn't seem to accept it.

"Your turn to ask," he said.

I thought about it. There were plenty of things I wanted to ask, but no answer would make me feel any better.

So I changed the question.

"That cat of Vivienne's. What's it called?"

He paused.

"Oreo," he said. "A British Shorthair. Much better behaved than Sunny."

Sunny.

Sunny was the cat we got our first year together. An orange stray, picked up in a SoHo alley. I had never had a pet growing up. My mother was allergic to cat fur. But I was the kind of person who would crouch down to say hello to a cat on the street.

The first weekend after we got engaged, he came to my apartment carrying a pet carrier. Inside, a little orange cat Sunny was curled into a ball.

He said, "Didn't you say you wanted a cat?"

Sunny was hopelessly attached to him. Every night it had to sleep on his chest. Then he vanished for six weeks, and when he came back, everything had changed. We started sleeping in separate rooms. Sunny probably couldn't feel any warmth left in that house. One winter evening, it slipped outside.

It never came back.

I searched for a week. Put up more than a hundred lost-cat flyers, asked at shelter after shelter. I called him over twenty times. He answered the last one.

"It ran off, it ran off. Are you done? If you can't find it, don't bother coming back either, you and that cat both."

That night I sat alone in the empty living room, Sunny's cat bed still on the floor. I didn't cry. But something inside me snapped clean through.

"Eleanor."

Julian's voice pulled me back. He had already stopped the car at a roadside overlook, and he was turned toward me.

"Oreo is much better behaved than Sunny," he said, slow and deliberate. "Not dumb enough to run off on its own and not even be able to find its way home."

I drew a deep breath and turned to face him.

"The day Sunny got lost, I called you twenty-three times. You answered the last one. You said, 'If you can't find it, don't bother coming back either, you and that cat both.'"

His face went a shade paler.

The car was quiet for a long time. Julian's lips moved, his throat working.

"The day Sunny got lost, I couldn't get away, but I sent people with a pet search team to look. They looked for a whole week. Portland to Bangor, asked at every shelter. " His voice was low. "We just didn't find him."

He turned to look at me. His eyes had gone red.

"I never told you. Because telling you wouldn't have done any good."

I looked into his eyes. Three years, and this was the first time he had said any of it.

"Too late," I said.

I started the engine again.

"Drive. We need to reach Acadia before dark."