Chapter 17: Mrs. Hayes in the Lobby

“Clause four,” Rachel said, and drew a red line straight through it. “No.”

Julian looked at the page upside down across the kitchen island. Saturday, eleven a.m., and he’d typed up a whole document. An actual document. Residential Arrangement: R. Moore. One page, numbered clauses, a signature line. Rachel had laughed out loud when he slid it over, and then she’d gone and gotten a red pen out of the junk drawer, because two could play.

“You haven’t read clause four,” he said.

“‘Resident will not perform household duties outside of scheduled working hours.’” She tapped it. “So at nine p.m. I’m supposed to walk past a dirty pan like I’m a guest at the Plaza?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll die. I’ll physically die. You want that on your conscience?” She wrote in the margin: Resident may wipe whatever she wants. “Clause five. ‘No rent will be accepted.’ Struck. I’m paying you two hundred a week.”

“I don’t want two hundred a week.”

“I don’t want to be a charity case in a cashmere cardigan. We both have problems.”

He sat back on the stool and folded his arms. Navy sweater, sleeves pushed up, forearms out like he didn’t know what forearms did to a woman.

“One hundred,” he said.

“One seventy-five.”

“One hundred, and you let Delia take Sundays off without guilt-tripping her into staying.”

“That’s blackmail.”

“That’s negotiation.”

“It’s blackmail in a sweater.” She wrote $150 and circled it so hard the pen went through. “Final offer. Clause seven. ‘Resident will eat three meals a day.’ Who wrote this, my grandmother?”

“You had coffee for dinner Thursday.”

“I had coffee and a pear.”

“A pear is not a meal.”

“Then what is it, Julian? What is a pear? Tell me what a pear is.”

His mouth did the thing. The almost. She’d been chasing it all morning like a kid with a butterfly net, ever since 2 a.m. and the toast, and every time she got close he caught himself.

“Clause seven stays,” he said. “Non-negotiable.”

“Everything’s negotiable.”

“Not that.”

She got up to get honey from the pantry. Mostly because he kept looking at her mouth while she argued.

He followed her in. The pantry was narrow. She’d been grabbed in this same pantry fourteen hours ago and her wrist was still purple, and she should’ve felt trapped in here, and she didn’t, not at all. That surprised her. She turned around with the honey jar and he was right there, one shelf of Rao’s marinara away.

“You’ve got red ink,” he said, “on your…” He touched his own jaw, just under the ear, to show her where.

She wiped the wrong side. He shook his head. She wiped again and missed again, and his hand came halfway up and stopped in the air between them, and stayed there, like he’d just remembered whose pantry it was.

Neither of them said anything. Rachel could hear the refrigerator humming and her own blood in her ears. She could smell wool and cedar soap. If she moved half an inch forward, he’d let her. She was positive she wanted to. She was holding a jar of honey like an idiot.

Somebody cleared her throat behind him.

Mrs. Ruiz stood in the pantry doorway with the house phone pressed to her chest and her eyebrows somewhere up near her hairline.

“Mr. Cross. Mija.” A pause long enough to drive a truck through. “The front desk is calling. There’s a woman downstairs. She says she’s Mrs. Hayes.”

* * *

Chloe had picked the table in the window of the little café off the lobby, so the whole of Central Park West could see her.

She wore camel today, a long coat over a cream sweater, and the pearls. Of course the pearls. On the chair next to her, a little boy in a green dinosaur costume with the hood pushed back was swinging his sneakers and eating a black-and-white cookie the size of his head.

Halloween. Rachel had completely forgotten.

“Rachel!” Chloe stood up like they were sorority sisters. “Oh my God, thank you for coming down. Sit, sit. Noah, baby, say hi.”

“Hi,” said Noah, through cookie.

“Hi, Noah.” Rachel sat. “Nice tail.”

He twisted around to show her. It was stuffed and floppy and had felt spikes. “I’m a stegosaurus.”

“I can see that. Very scary.”

He gave her a small, polite roar and went back to his cookie.

Chloe slid a manila envelope across the table. Then she slid a second, fatter envelope on top of it.

“Ten thousand,” she said, sweet as a frosting rose. “Cash. And this is just a simple agreement. Uncontested divorce, you waive any claim to the house, the accounts, the cars, the whatever. You sign, Michael’s lawyer files Monday, and you go start your new life.” She glanced up at the ceiling, at all forty-two floors over their heads. “Looks like you already have.”

Rachel didn’t touch either envelope.

“Ten thousand dollars,” she said.

“It’s generous. Michael wanted to offer five.”

“He refinanced my mother’s house for nine hundred thousand.”

Something flickered behind Chloe’s lashes. Fast. Then the frosting came back. “I don’t know anything about that.”

“Sure you don’t.” Rachel sat back and looked at her, really looked. Twenty-seven, gorgeous, with a tiny pimple under her foundation on the left side of her chin. Her nails were the usual long red almonds, except the left index, which had snapped off and been filed down fast and badly. Nervous. “Here’s my counteroffer. You take those pearls off your neck and put them on this table, and then we can talk about what’s generous.”

Chloe’s hand went to her throat.

“These were a gift.”

“They were my mother’s. She wore them every Easter Sunday at St. John’s in Getty Square and she wore them in her casket viewing, and I took them off her myself before they closed it.” Rachel’s voice didn’t shake. She was proud of that. “Nobody gave them to you, Chloe. Somebody stole them and handed them to you, and you knew.”

Noah had stopped eating. He looked from his mother to Rachel and back with big careful eyes, a kid who knew the weather in a room. Then he broke his cookie in half, carefully, on the line between the black and the white, and held the white half out to Rachel.

“You can have the vanilla side,” he said. “I like the chocolate.”

Rachel’s throat closed up so fast it hurt.

“Thank you, sweetheart, that’s…”

Chloe snatched the cookie out of his hand. It snapped in two and crumbs went everywhere and Noah’s face crumpled, his little mouth going square.

“We don’t share with strangers,” Chloe said.

She stood up. Gathered the envelopes. Gathered her son, who was crying now, a soft confused crying with the dinosaur hood flopping over his eyes. And then she leaned down, close, her pearls swinging in front of Rachel’s face, and dropped her voice to something that was all teeth.

“Does your billionaire know you slept with your husband the night before he locked you out?”