Chapter 6

AURORA

I did not sit down.

That was all of it. Four years of doing what he asked before he had finished asking, and the first thing in me to break was my knees refusing to bend.

None of us moved.

Rhett stood in the middle of my living room with his hands on his hips. Noelle sat on my couch with her feet tucked up under her, wearing my pale blue robe, the one he bought me for our first anniversary. I stayed in the doorway with rain still in my hair from a county two hours away.

The lamp was on. The television was off. Somewhere behind me the front door was still open an inch, the way he had left it.

"Who took them," I said.

"Aurora."

"The photographs. Who took them."

He looked down at the coffee table. At the thick stack of me laid out across the wood like a hand of cards somebody had already won with.

"It doesn't matter," he said.

"It matters to me."

"It doesn't matter." Softer the second time. Kinder. The voice he used on clients who were about to lose money and did not know it yet. "What matters is that we talk about this like adults."

I turned and looked at my sister.

She was the one who knew. I understood that in the doorway before I understood anything else, because she had not looked up once since I came through it, and Noelle has never in her life been able to sit still in a room where something was happening to somebody else.

"Noelle."

Nothing.

"Noelle. Who took them."

I counted. Eleven seconds. Her hands moved on the belt of my robe and pulled it tighter across herself and that was the whole of her answer.

My sister, who cried at films. Who called me eleven times the week her landlord raised her rent. Who had been crying hard enough tonight that her mascara had come halfway down her face.

She would not say one word.

Remember this, I thought. Whatever else you forget, remember that she went quiet.

"Sit down," Rhett said. "Please."

"No."

He let out a breath through his nose and rubbed the back of his neck. Tired. Patient. A man dealing with something unreasonable and choosing to be good about it.

"Fine," he said. "Stand. I'd rather you were comfortable, but stand."

He came around the coffee table. He did not touch me. I want to be clear about that, because for a long time afterwards I thought he would have, and then I understood that he never needed to.

"I'm not going to insult you," he said. "I'm not going to stand here and tell you nothing happened, because something happened, and I'm not a coward."

He waited for me to thank him for it.

"It was a mistake. One mistake, which I have been sick about for months, and which I was going to end." He glanced back at my sister and then away, and his face did something I had never seen it do, which was look at Noelle like she was furniture. "And then you drove two hours out of the city with a man you had met once and spent the night in a hotel suite with him."

"That is not what happened."

"Isn't it?"

And there it was. That was the trick of him, the one I had lived inside for four years without ever once seeing the edges of it. He did not argue with me. He asked me a short question and let me do the arguing against myself.

"You've been sleeping with my sister for eight months," I said.

"And I will carry that for the rest of my life."

"Eight months, Rhett."

"And you," he said, so quietly and so reasonably that I almost missed it, "made a decision. In one day. That's the difference between us, baby. Mine was a mistake and I hated every minute of it. Yours was a choice and I think you enjoyed it."

The room went slightly sideways.

He was right about one of those things, and he had no way on earth of knowing which.

"I want a divorce," I said.

And my husband smiled at me. Not a cruel smile. A warm one, the one from the photographs on the hall shelf, the one he gave me in a registry office with a cheap carpet, because I build weddings for other people and had never wanted one of my own.

"No," he said. "You don't."

"Rhett."

"Sit down and listen to me for two minutes and then tell me what you want." He waited. He always waited, and I had always filled the silence, and that night I did not, and he went on anyway, which told me he had never actually needed me to. "There are eighty-one photographs on that table. Some of them were taken at a resort. Some of them were taken this morning. One of them was taken outside this house ten minutes before you walked in."

I did not look at the window.

That was the only thing I did right in that whole conversation.

"The Mitchell wedding is in three weeks," he said. "The Ferraro girl in January. You've got the Halloway account, the hotel, both venues on the north shore, and eleven suppliers who take your calls because your name is on the door and people trust it."

"Don't."

"I am not threatening you. I want you to hear that. I am telling you what will happen, because somebody has to, and it may as well be the person who loves you." He spread his hands. He looked almost sad. "If you file, those eighty-one photographs are on a desk in every one of those offices inside a week. Not by me. I wouldn't do that to you. But they exist, and they are not only in my hands, and once a thing like that is moving nobody can stop it."

"And what do you get out of it?"

"Nothing." He shook his head. "That's what you're not hearing. I don't want anything. I don't want a fight, I don't want lawyers, I don't want your business. I want us to get through the winter and I want this to stay inside this house."

He wanted me quiet.

That was the price. Not money, not the house, not an apology. He wanted me to go on being his wife in front of people, through Christmas, through the Mitchell wedding, through whatever else he had running that I could not see yet, and he was offering me my own company back as though it were a gift and not something he was holding by the throat.

And the thing underneath it, the thing I did not have a name for until much later, was this.

He never asked me if I had slept with Kieran Vale.

Not once. Not that night, not the next week, not ever. A man had taken his wife two hours out of the city and kept her until morning, and my husband stood in our living room with eighty-one photographs of it and did not ask.

I thought about that for a very long time afterwards.

"Baby." He reached out then and tucked my wet hair behind my ear, and I let him, because my hands had started shaking and I did not want him to see them. "You've had the worst day of your life. You're freezing. You're not thinking."

"No," I said. "I'm not."

"Then don't. Not tonight."

Behind him, Noelle finally lifted her head.

She looked at me across my own living room with her mascara ruined and my robe pulled up to her chin, and her mouth opened, and I watched her decide not to use it.

Rain started against the front window. Light at first, then all at once, the way it had come down on that lawn.

And while my husband stood there with his hand still warm against my cheek, telling me I was not thinking, I was thinking about the safe in the back of his closet upstairs. The grey one behind the shoe boxes. Four digits. He had used the same four since the week we moved in, and he had asked me to open it for him so many times that I could have done it in the dark.

I had never once looked inside it on my own.

"Okay," I said.

Something in his shoulders came down. He kissed my forehead, and he was so pleased with me, and I understood for the first time in four years exactly what that feeling had always been.

"Go and wash your face, baby," he said. "Then come back down and we'll be sensible about this."