CHAPTER 4: Camille, Coffee, and The Truth

"Tell me everything," Camille said, "from the beginning, and leave out nothing that might be emotionally inconvenient."

We were at a table by the window of our favorite coffee place on Bleecker Street, the one with the mismatched chairs and the barista who had learned our orders so well she started making them when we walked through the door. Camille had a flat white. I had something with too much vanilla in it because I was having a week where I needed too much vanilla.

I told her. The papers. The evening. The pasta. The apology.

When I finished, Camille was quiet for three seconds, which was unusual for her, and then she said: "He made pasta with you. The man who has a nutritionist named Francois and a rule about carbs after six. He sat down and ate pasta with you the night after you signed his divorce papers."

"I made the pasta. He just... sat."

"Selene." She leaned forward. "He was trying to stay."

"He filed."

"People do things they don't mean all the time when they're terrified and too proud to admit it. You of all people know that." She wrapped both hands around her cup. "I'm not saying you should go back. I'm not even suggesting it. I'm just saying — be honest about what you saw in that kitchen."

I looked out at Bleecker Street, at the ordinary Tuesday afternoon happening outside the glass. A woman walking a dog the size of a small horse. Two NYU students arguing about something that mattered enormously to them.

"I saw a man who realized too late," I said.

"Yes."

"That doesn't change anything."

"No," she agreed. "But it might change what comes next, if you're not paying attention."

* * *

I moved out of the penthouse on a Saturday with the help of Camille, her boyfriend Marcus who had a van, and a professional efficiency that I think surprised Dominic's building staff. I did not take the things I had bought to fill the apartment — the vases, the art books, the small sculptures I had placed on shelves hoping they would make the space feel lived-in. I took my clothes, my work equipment, my grandmother's china, and the pour-over coffee set.

Dominic was not there. I had told him I would move while he was at a conference in Dubai, and he had agreed with the kind of clean practicality that I had once admired in him. A conference in Dubai. Of course.

But when I came through the lobby for the last time, there was a box at the concierge desk with my name on it. The concierge, an older man named Raymond who had always been kind to me, handed it over with the particular discretion of someone who understood more than his job required him to say.

Inside was the sculpture.

Not the one from the gallery — that one belonged to a collector in Berlin. But a small version, a reproduction that Dominic must have commissioned at some point, of the coffee cup caught mid-fall. The one called Tuesday. The one we had been standing in front of the night we met.

There was no note.

I stood on the sidewalk outside the building with Camille and Marcus and a van full of the pieces of my life, holding a sculpture of a cup caught in the moment before everything hit the ground, and I did not know what it meant. I was not sure, then, that it meant anything.

I put it in the van.

I kept it.

I am still not entirely sure what that says about me.

* * *

The West Village apartment was small in all the ways the Hartley penthouse was not. The ceilings were low. The kitchen was a galley with just enough room for one person and too much ambition. The light came in sideways in the afternoons and turned the whole place the color of warm paper.

I stood in the middle of it on moving day, after Marcus and Camille had gone, and I breathed. Just breathed. The quiet was different here. It was the quiet of a space that was waiting, not a space that had given up.

I put the sculpture of the coffee cup on the windowsill where the afternoon light would hit it.

Then I opened my laptop.

I had a meeting on Monday. A contact from my freelance days had passed my name to a mid-size design firm in SoHo — Crane & Aldous Creative — who were looking for a senior designer with brand identity experience. The kind of work I had been doing in the margins of my marriage, in the studio with the northern light, for clients who had no budget and a lot of heart.

I had spent four years being Mrs. Hartley.

I pulled up my portfolio and I looked at it for a long time, and I thought: this is mine. All of this is mine. He never took this.

I started revising my resume.

On the other side of Manhattan, I did not know, Dominic Hartley had come home from Dubai a day early to an apartment that was so thoroughly, exactly the same as he had left it and yet so completely different that he stood in the foyer for four minutes before he could make himself walk further in.

He went to the windowsill in the study where Selene used to put things.

Empty.

He sat down on the couch — the one she had chosen, the deep green one he had told her was impractical and had stopped noticing he loved — and he sat in the enormous, engineered silence of a $4.2 billion life, and he thought about a Tuesday, and a coffee cup caught mid-fall, and a woman he had let go so efficiently he hadn't realized she was gone until the air changed.