Chapter 11

Chapter 11

LINA

And I had not told him because I had sat across from him, in this room, and watched as he started the conversation and understood there was no opening for it.

Not because he was lying to me, but because he genuinely didn't know the opening was needed.

 

He came out of the bathroom, crossed to his side of the bed, and got in under the covers. He reached over and turned off the lamp on his nightstand. I was still sitting up on my side. I reached over and turned off mine. Then I lay down in the dark.

He was on his back. I could tell by his breathing. 

I lay on my side, facing away from him.

In the silence, I could hear the house settling. A car passing on the road outside. The faint sound of wind against the window, branches scratching softly against the window panes, my eyes following the movement as my face got caressed with the night cool breeze.

I moved my hand slowly, carefully, so that it lay flat against my stomach beneath the sheets. I did not press it.

Just rested it there, the way I had been doing since I found out, an instinctive gesture that had already become a habit that seemed it was going to be hard to break.

The baby was there. Smaller than anything that registered to a touch smaller than a bean at this point. But I kept putting my hand there anyway because it was the only honest thing I had done in this room in two years.

Damien's breathing changed. He fell asleep the way he did 

Without difficulty, just his body deciding it had done enough for the day and needed to rest.  Within minutes his breathing was long and even.

I lay awake.

I thought about the phone call in the hallway. I thought about the way his face had shifted when he looked at the screen, that half- second when he hesitated before leaving. I thought about the conversation that we were having.

He had said he wanted things to be better.

I believed him.

I also believed, with the same cold certainty, that wanting things to be better and being willing to do the actual work of making them better were two different things, and Damien had never had to distinguish between the two before because what he wanted, he had the resources to get it. And he had never met anything that would require significantly more work than the usual he put in it.

This, whatever this was, required exactly that. And he did not know how.

I pressed my hand a little more firmly against my stomach.

I thought about what I had said to my parents in the cemetery. I'm going. I am leaving him, stepping away from the love triangle he had going on with Adora and focusing on living a good life with my child, just the two of us against the world.

I needed money. That was the actual fact around which everything else had to organize itself. I needed money that was mine, that he could not see, that existed outside the black card that Damien had given me. He was not emotionally present in this marriage but he also wasn't a stingy man, he added money into the card every month, the monthly sum of 500,000. Not knowing if I had used up all the ones in there, but then again, aside from basic groceries, I didn't touch his money.

I had a degree I hadn't used. I had skills I had spent two years allowing to go dormant. I had a name that was still, technically, Rodriguez, and a face that was not widely enough known that it would follow me into every room.

I could work. I had always been able to work. The two years of being idle  in this house had made me forget that sometimes. I had graduated. I had written things people had told me were good. I had managed an entire household and a charity calendar and a social schedule that would have overwhelmed most people, without complaint and without credit, and those were not nothing.

I needed to find a job before I showed.

I did the math quietly in the dark. I was early. Weeks, not months. I had time, not an unlimited amount of it, but enough to move carefully if I moved soon.

I thought about the free clinic I'd looked up on my phone earlier, a search I'd done quickly and then cleared from my browser history with the caution of someone who had something to protect.

I needed to do these things without Damien noticing.

Which meant I needed to do them while continuing to exist in this house exactly as I always had, morning coffee and quiet evenings and attending whatever social obligations arose as Damien's wife, while still being unremarkable to avoid drawing attention to myself.

I was good at being unremarkable. I had been practicing for two years. Damien shifted beside me in sleep, a small unconscious adjustment. His arm moved and for a moment it was close to mine, close enough to touch mine.

I held very still. He settled and was quiet again.

I lay in the dark with my hand on my stomach and thought about my mother, who had been the most practical person I had ever known, a woman who cried at sad films and was someone who also balanced a budget to the last cent, and once told me the difference between women who survived hard times and women who didn't was simply the decision to keep moving when everything in you wanted to stop.

I could keep moving.

Not tonight. Tonight I was going to lie here and breathe and let the house be dark around me and not make anything worse by acting before I was ready. But in the morning I was going to begin, quietly and carefully and without telling anyone, the long work of getting out.

Damien's breathing was slow and steady beside me.

I watched the ceiling for a long time.