Chapter 9

Chapter  9

LINA

He knocked.

That was the first thing that surprised me. Damien had never knocked on a door in his own house in the entire two years I had lived in it. He moved through every room with that feeling of ownership that he did not need to request for permission to do anything, and knocking was a privilege he didn't think I needed.

But he stood in the doorway of our bedroom and rapped his knuckles twice against the frame, which was almost more unsettling than if he had simply walked in.

"Can I come in?"

"It's your room," I said.

He came in. He left the door open behind him, which I thought was interesting, as though he wanted the option to leave easily or perhaps wanted me to feel like I had one. He looked at the bed for a moment, then at the chair near the window, and chose the chair. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, and I did not move. There was some distance between us which I thought was appropriate for the conversation we were going to have.

He had changed his shirt. The one he'd been wearing earlier was gone, replaced by a simple dark one, untucked, and he had washed his face because his hair was slightly damp at the temples. 

He looked like a man who had prepared himself for something he wasn't looking forward to but had decided was necessary, the same expression he wore before board meetings he'd told me were going to be tedious.

For a moment neither of us said anything.

Then he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped, and looked at me with that specific expression on his face he had when he was about to do something that seemed serious.

"I owe you an apology," he said. "For this morning."

"Okay," I said.

He paused, as though he had expected that to land differently, perhaps for me to say it wasn't necessary and using the silence I had given him, he recalibrated.

"I accused you without cause," he continued. "That was wrong of me. You had a legitimate reason to be there and I didn't give you the opportunity to explain before I—" he stopped, chose a different word, "—before I reacted."

I watched him. He was being careful. Every sentence was measured, and thought through like a man who was testing unfamiliar terrain by testing each step before committing his weight. 

He had probably worked out what he wanted to say in the car on the way home, a rough structure, a beginning and a middle and a clean end, and he was moving through it with the competence he applied to everything.

"Thank you," I said. "For apologizing."

"I shouldn't have implied that you were following me."

"No," I agreed. "You shouldn't have."

A small pause. He seemed mildly surprised that I wasn't deflecting. I had spent two years deflecting and perhaps he had come to rely on it.

"I know that wasn't fair," he said. "You've never given me any reason to think you would do something like that."

There were several things I could have said at this point. I could have told him that the reason I'd been at the cemetery was to talk to my dead parents about leaving him. I could have told him that I'd come home to find his face on the television, his arms around another woman, the news anchor speculating about great love stories while I stood alone in the lonely big mansion where I felt like a glided prisoner. 

I could have asked him what he had meant to say to me in the cemetery before Adora had touched his arm and the moment dissolved. 

"I appreciate you saying that," I said instead.

Damien looked at me for a moment. Something moved behind his eyes, something that was either frustration or relief. I couldn't tell which.

"I realize I've been—" He stopped. Started again. "I know this hasn't been easy. The arrangement. The way things have been."

The arrangement. That was what we were calling it.

"I'm not unaware of that," he said, as though he wanted credit for his awareness.

I kept my expression neutral and my hands very still in my lap. I was learning something in real time, sitting across from him in the grey evening light, which was that Damien Whitmore was capable of holding a difficult conversation and saying almost nothing in it simultaneously. He was apologizing without explaining anything, he was acknowledging his wrong doings, and also not promising things would change at all.

He thought this was going well.

I could see it. In the slight easing of his shoulders, in the way his breathing had become less controlled, in the fact that he was starting to sit back slightly in the chair rather than forward. 

He had come in here braced for something harder and the conversation was going smoothly because I was not pushing back, and he was reading my compliance as progress rather than exhaustion.

He thought that if he said the right careful things and I received them without argument, then the problem, whatever he imagined the problem to be, had been addressed and this could be put behind us and we could move on with our lives.

"I want things to be better between us," he said, and I believed him. That was the cruel part. I believed that he meant it, but I also knew that his words were not something he will stick by, over the next three weeks because he was going to stop making an effort and everything would go back to how it was. Me being ignored and him playing a shining knight for his friend and first love Adora. The one he wished he got married to, had circumstances being different.

"What does that look like to you?" I asked, a bit curious to know what he would say to this.