Chapter Eleven

My hands were still shaking when I pulled into the driveway, and the front door opened before I even reached it.

Nathaniel stood there, still in yesterday's clothes, his hair a mess like he'd been running his hands through it for hours,he didn't wait for me to get inside.

"Where the hell have you been?" His voice cracked through the morning air. "Twenty calls, Elena. Twenty."

"I was busy."

"Busy." He said the word like it tasted wrong in his mouth. "Doing what? With who?"

I walked past him into the foyer, my bag pressed tight against my side, the folder inside it suddenly feeling like something he could see through the leather if he looked hard enough. "Does it matter?"

"Of course it matters." He shut the door behind us harder than he needed to. "You disappear all night, you don't answer your phone, and I'm supposed to just sit here and not wonder if you're with him again?"

"With Marcus, you mean."

"Are you?"

"No." I turned to face him. "I wasn't with Marcus."

"Then where?"

I thought about Esther's face, about the folder, about the promise I'd made not even an hour ago to keep it separate and safe. "That's not your business anymore."

"Not my business." He laughed, short and humorless. "You're still my wife, Elena. Last time I checked, that made it very much my business."

"Funny," I said. "You didn't seem to think so last night when you were moving my things into the guest house."

That landed. I watched it land, watched something flicker behind his eyes before the anger came back to cover it.

"That's different."

"Is it? Because from where I'm standing, you get to decide when I matter and when I don't,you get to lock me out of our bedroom one night and demand twenty calls' worth of answers the next morning like I owe you something."

"You do owe me something. An explanation."

"For what? For not living in that guest house waiting by the window in case you decided to remember I exist?"

His jaw tightened. "Was it the hospital? Were you with him at the hospital again?"

"No."

"Then who, Elena? Because someone kept you out all night, and I want to know who."

I set my bag down slowly on the hallway table, giving myself a second, just a second, to breathe before I said something I couldn't take back.

When I looked up at him, something in me had gone very still, very calm, the way water goes calm right before it turns to ice.

"When did you stop caring whether I was okay?"

He blinked. "What?"

"You've asked me a dozen questions since I walked through that door, and not one of them was are you alright. Not one,you want to know where I was, who I was with, what I was doing, like I'm a suspect in my own marriage but you haven't once asked if I'm okay."

"Elena…"

"When did that stop mattering to you?" My voice didn't shake, and that surprised me more than anything else that morning. "Because I used to think it was just how you loved.Quiet,distant but it's not that, is it? It's that somewhere along the way, you decided I wasn't worth the question."

He stood there, and for a moment I thought maybe, maybe, something would crack open in him, some piece of honesty he'd been sitting on for two years,his mouth opened like he wanted to say something real.

Then Elora's voice drifted down from the top of the stairs, light and unbothered, like she'd just woken from the best sleep of her life. "Is everything alright down there?"

Nathaniel's eyes flicked upward, just for a second, and that second told me everything I needed to know.

"You should go," he said quietly, all the fight suddenly gone out of his voice, replaced with something colder,something final.

"Go where?"

"The guest house." He wouldn't look at me now. "I think it's best if you stay away from the main house for a while."

"Nathaniel…"

"I mean it, Elena." He finally met my eyes, and there was nothing in them I recognized anymore.

"Stay away,I need space to think, and I can't do that with you walking in and out of here at all hours like nothing happened."

"Nothing happened."

"That's not what I'm talking about, and you know it."

I picked my bag back up off the table, my fingers tightening around the strap until my knuckles ached. "Fine," I said. "I'll stay away."

I walked past him toward the back door, toward the path that led to the guest house, and I didn't look back to see if he watched me go,I didn't need to.

I already knew Elora was still standing at the top of those stairs, still watching, still waiting for the moment she could come down and take the space I'd just been pushed out of.

The guest house door clicked shut behind me, and I set my bag down on the small table by the window, my hands finally steady enough to pull the folder out and look at it again.

The account number sat there, black ink on white paper, real in a way nothing else in that house had felt real in years.

I thought about what Grandma said,that it was mine to decide what to do with it.

I sat down on the edge of the unfamiliar bed, folder in my lap, and stared out the window at the main house, at the lit window on the second floor where Elora was probably already curling back into the bed that used to be mine.

Stay away from the main house, he'd said.

I almost laughed. As if I needed him to tell me that.

For the first time since I'd walked through that door with twenty missed calls burning a hole in my pocket, I didn't feel like crying,i felt something colder settle into my chest, something with edges.

He wanted space. Fine. I'd give him space.

But I wasn't going to spend it waiting for him to change his mind.