Chapter 6

Chapter 6

LINA

The drive home felt longer than it should have.

I kept my hands at ten and two the whole way, this was the way that my father had taught me to drive when I was 15 and was learning how to drive on the quiet stretch of road outside our old neighborhood.

I focused on the motion of staring at the roads, hands steady, eyes on the road, watching both the traffic systems and other cars, driving as carefully as I could, knowing I was carrying a special package in me, and tried not to think about Damien.

It didn't work.

Damien's voice kept playing on a loop in my head, the way a song  does when you have heard it one too many times.

"Wait for me." That was it, two words, simple enough, which could mean nothing, but I kept thinking about it as I merged into the hallway and made my way back to the city.

He wanted to talk.

My stomach tightened at this. I knew what talk probably meant. I had made up a list of possibilities carefully over the last hour, sitting in the cemetery with the wind in the oak tree and my father's name under my palm, and I had come up with a very short list and none of them was actually good for me.

The first, and most optimistic one, the one that I wished would happen, was that he was going to apologize. A real apology. Sit me down, look at me, tell me he had treated me badly and that he knew it and he wanted to do differently, that he was only going to focus on me and our family and that Adora would not be a member in our private life. I dismissed this possibility before I'd even finished forming it, because I knew Damien, I had spent two years studying him the way you study a language you can hear but can't speak, and a full, voluntary apology was something that he was not capable of doing, even if he was threatened. He had too much of his pride.

The second possibility was that he wanted a separation, that he was tired of the marriage and is tired of pretending that we are in love when clearly it's a farce. This sounded like the kind of  clean, businesslike dissolution that he would do. He would be calm. He would be careful and use some carefully chosen words to placate me. He would probably have already spoken to his lawyers. 

He would explain that they had fulfilled the terms of their obligation to his grandmother and that they are free now to live the life they wanted, and he was right, they had given it two years and it hadn't worked out.

There was no need to continue making the other miserable. Damien was a generous man, he would offer me a settlement, something generous because he would feel guilty.

The third possibility was the one that made me grip the steering wheel hard enough to whiten my knuckles.

He would look me in the eye, sit down and hold my hand and convince me about an open arrangement. He'd seen it done in his circle. Half the marriages in his grandmother's social world were built on this kind of quiet understanding, it was not spoken in general, but everyone knew secretly and kept their opinions to themselves.

He would tell me carefully that he thought he could be honest with me, and that Adora was more important to him than I was and he was going to stop pretending otherwise.

If that was it, I decided, I was leaving tonight. I didn't care about the money situation. I would figure it out.

I wouldn't share him. I wasn't built for that kind of quiet suffering, smiling and pretending to be graceful while I shared my legally married husband with another woman and I was done pretending I was.

I pulled into the driveway and sat in the car for a moment before I went inside, just trying to gather my thoughts and prepare myself for the difficult conversation that lay ahead. Then  I gathered my bag and my empty lily stems and went through the front door.

The house was dim. The curtains were closed to block the harsh sun rays from permeating the room and the inside lamps were not yet on.

 I set my bag on the hallway table and dropped the stems in the waste bin near the door and stood still for a moment, listening.

The television was on in the sitting room. I could hear it from the foyer, just randomly talking, even though there was nobody to watch it. I had forgotten to turn it off when leaving for the cemetery.

I followed the sound, telling myself I was going to get a glass of water from the kitchen, and stopped in the doorway.

The news section was on. This was one of the entertainment -adjacent channel that seemed to blur between current affairs and the entertainment industry. This was the kind that ran a stock market ticker alongside photos of who had been seen having dinner with whom. I had watched it exactly once before, by accident, and switched it off within minutes. This was like a gossip hot channel, using this kind of scandal that happened between famous people to get more engagement  on their channels.

On the screen now was footage that I recognized immediately. It was my husband Damien.

He was at what looked like the entrance of a hospital, a private one by the look  of the lobby that was displayed in the background. He was carrying Adora, his arms under her knees and behind her back, her face was pressed into his shoulders, shyly hiding from the public, while Damien was moving quickly, headed with a purpose and he didn't want anyone to slow him down. A small cluster of photographers had caught it somehow, because it was taken from a terrible angle and the quality was terrible, which only seemed to make it more mysterious.

The anchor was speaking excitedly, looking happy to be presenting such news, like they had just caught a major scoop.