Chapter 2 Noted

I had no answer for him. I couldn't find the first word of one.

The paramedics wheeled Edmund out between them, one at his head squeezing the bag, one at his feet steering, and the crowd opened in front of them. I was still on my knees. Someone had knocked the cake knife off the trolley, and it lay on the parquet beside my hand with frosting on the blade. I remember looking at it and thinking, Don't touch that.

Rhys put the vial in his jacket pocket and followed the stretcher out into the rain.

He didn't look back.

---

At four in the morning, the family room of the St. Ansel ICU smelled of burnt coffee and the floor cleaner they use on every hospital floor in New England, a lemon that has never met a lemon.

My dress had dried stiff. I'd washed my hands and forearms in the visitors' bathroom until the skin went pink, but I could still smell it on the hem. I sat in a vinyl chair under a framed print of a sailboat and read the same laminated sign about hand hygiene forty times.

I knew the story of the night by then, because I'd made the residents tell me. I'd trained in this building. Half of them had been in my anatomy group. They told me in corridor voices.

His digoxin level had come back four times the top of the range. They'd given him the antidote, the antibody fragments that mop the drug out of the blood, and his heart had stopped lurching. Then, an hour later, the CT. A clot had thrown off from his irregular heart during the arrest and lodged on the left side of his brain.

"He'll live," said a resident from my year, not looking at me. "Probably. But it's the speech area, Margot. And the right hand."

I didn't need it spelled out. I'd sat the exam. Broca's area. He would understand every word anyone said to him and be able to send almost none back. He'd be a man shouting from the bottom of a well.

He'd been about to say something about me after the cake.

At five I went and stood outside his room. The ICU at St. Ansel is a horseshoe of bays around a central desk, each bay with a sliding door and a curtain, and the night nurse, who had once let me practice arterial lines on her forearm, pretended not to see me come around the corner.

Through the gap in the curtain I could see the end of the bed. His feet under the blanket, absurdly small. The ventilator breathing for him in its patient, mechanical rhythm, sixteen a minute. A drip stand hung with three bags. The monitor showed a rate in the sixties and a rhythm that was irregular but alive, and I stood there and read every number twice.

Rhys was in the chair by the bed. He was still in his dinner jacket, the bow tie gone, his elbows on his knees. He was holding his grandfather's left hand, the one that would still work, in both of his.

I'd never seen him hold anyone's hand.

He looked up and saw me in the gap. He didn't get up. He reached across with one arm and drew the curtain closed, and the rings rattled along the rail, and I was looking at pale green fabric printed with tiny gray anchors.

The night nurse said, without lifting her eyes from her charting, "There's tea in the family room, hon."

I went back and sat under the sailboat.

The door opened and Delphine came in with a folded cardigan over her arm. She'd changed into slacks and a soft sweater. Her silver bob was perfect. Her eyes were red.

"You're shivering," she said. "Here. Put this on."

It was cashmere, oatmeal colored, and it smelled of her: something green and damp, cut stems and potting soil. I put it on over the ruined dress because I was shivering, and because nobody else had come into that room in four hours.

She sat beside me and folded my hand between hers. Her rings were off. Her palms were cool and smooth, a gardener's hands that were never allowed to look like one.

"I'm sure there's an explanation, Margot," she said. "There always is."

"I didn't put anything in his tea."

"Of course you didn't. Nobody thinks that." She squeezed my fingers. "Rhys is upset. He loves his grandfather more than anyone alive. Give him a little time."

I was so grateful I nearly cried into her shoulder. I've had five years to think about that, and I still don't like what it says about me.

---

The police officer came at six. He was young, in uniform, with a notebook and a cold, and he apologized twice for the hour.

"It's routine, ma'am. The hospital has to report an overdose they can't explain. I just need your account."

So I gave it to him. I didn't know any better. I'd grown up in Old Harbor, where you told a policeman the truth because he'd probably gone to school with your cousin.

"I made the tea," I said. "Lapsang Souchong. I warmed the pot in the butler's pantry, measured the leaves, poured the water. I carried the tray up to his study a little after nine and set it at his elbow. We played chess for five minutes. He wanted to finish the game before I poured."

"Go on."

"Then his daughter-in-law, Delphine Calloway, came to the door and said my husband was asking for me in the ballroom. So I went down. I never poured it."

"And was your husband asking for you?"

"No."

He wrote that down. He wrote everything down in square capitals.

"Did anyone else go into the study after you?"

"I don't know. I wasn't there."

"Anything else you think I should know?"

I thought of the vial. Vivienne's long fingers, her late eyebrows. But nobody had mentioned it, not the doctors and not the residents. The officer hadn't asked about a bottle. Rhys hadn't come out of Edmund's room all night, and as far as I knew he hadn't spoken to anyone in a uniform.

I thought, stupidly, that it was Rhys's to raise. That it was a family matter. That when he'd slept he'd see how it looked from the outside, how ridiculous: a doctor emptying a heart drug into a vial and then carrying the vial around in her party bag like a lipstick.

"No," I said. "That's all."

He thanked me, blew his nose, and left. I signed nothing. I didn't know, then, that a statement doesn't need your signature to sit in a file for five years and wait.

---

Rhys came out of Edmund's room at eight. He walked straight past the family room door. I went after him, still in Delphine's cardigan, and caught him at the elevators.

"How is he?"

"Alive." He pressed the button. "Go home, Margot."

"Rhys, I need to talk to you about last night."

"At the house." The doors opened. He stepped in and held them with his hand, but only so he could finish the sentence. "Noon."

The doors closed.

---

9 Lantern Row was a red-brick Federal house in the Heights with a fanlight over the door and a magnolia in the front garden that never seemed to get the memo about spring. Edmund had given it to us as a wedding present. In three years Rhys had not called it "ours."

I let myself in at five to twelve. I'd been there once already, at nine, while he was out: I'd showered until the water ran cold, left the gray dress on the bathroom floor, put on jeans and a sweater, folded Delphine's cardigan on the bed to return, and gone out to walk the harbor rather than wait in that house for him.

The hall table was a narrow mahogany thing that had come from Larkmoor. On it, squared to the edge, was a stack of paper an inch thick with yellow sticky flags down the side. Beside it was a clear plastic freezer bag, the kind you use for leftover soup. Inside the bag was the amber vial.

Rhys came out of the study. He'd showered too. He was in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled, and he looked exactly as he always looked, which was the worst part. Six foot two, black hair still damp, the platinum of his wedding band still on his left hand.

"I spoke to Benedict Carrow this morning," he said. "Those are divorce papers. They're generous. Read them if you want. Carrow's number is on the cover."

I didn't pick them up. I could read the cover from where I stood. COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS, and under it, typed by someone at Carrow's office on a Sunday morning, both our names, Rhys Calloway and Margot Calloway, set out like the parties to a shipping dispute. Somebody had been paid double time to make my marriage into a document before lunch.

The freezer bag had a white strip across the top for writing on. He'd left it blank.

"Delphine sent me out of the study, Rhys," I said. "She came to the door and told me you were asking for me. Ask her. Ask whoever went into that study after me. I wasn't there when—"

"Noted."

That was all. One word. He said it in board meetings to men presenting figures he'd already decided to ignore. He used it on caterers. He used it on his father. I'd heard it a hundred times in three years. I had never had it pointed at me.

"You haven't even asked me," I said. "You haven't asked me one question."

"I asked you one question last night. You never answered it."

"Because I didn't understand it. I still don't. Do you honestly think I'd poison your grandfather and then keep the bottle in my clutch?"

He didn't answer at once. A car went by outside, slow on the wet street, and he waited for it to pass. For a second I thought he might really be considering it. His eyes went to the freezer bag and stayed there.

"I think," he said, "that you came into this family with four hundred and twelve thousand dollars of your mother's hospital bills, and that my grandfather paid every cent of them. I think he arranged our marriage and I agreed to it because he asked me to, and I've spent three years being patient with a woman I didn't choose."

He said it in the same level voice he used for quarterly figures.

"I think he's been changing his will. I think you were the last person alone with him. I think an empty bottle of his heart medication came out of your bag in front of three hundred people."

Assets on one side. Liabilities on the other. Margot at the bottom, in red.

When I'm frightened, my voice goes down instead of up. It's been like that since I was small. My mother used to say she knew I was really in trouble when she had to lean in to hear me.

"I loved your grandfather," I said, and it came out barely above a whisper. "I kept his heart going with my hands for nine minutes. I was the one who knew what he took."

"Yes," said Rhys. "You were."

He let that sit there.

I'd made myself small for three years to fit into his life. I'd eaten breakfast alone at the kitchen table so I wouldn't be in his way. I'd learned which nights he came home and which he didn't, and never asked where he was on the nights he didn't.

I'd let his grandfather be my only friend in that family, because Edmund was the only one who ever sat across a board from me and looked me in the face. I'd thought, if I was quiet enough and good enough and patient enough, one day Rhys would turn around and see me standing there.

He'd turned around. This was what he saw.

"The house is in my name," he said. "You can take what's yours. I'd rather you did it while I'm not here."

He went back into the study, picked up his coat from the chair, and came out putting it on. Charcoal wool. I'd had it cleaned for him in January. He walked past me to the door and opened it, and the cold came in, and the smell of wet magnolia.

He stopped with his hand on the brass knob, as he had in the elevator. Only to finish.

"Sign by Tuesday," Rhys said. "Or I call the police."