Chapter 6: The Lipstick

The drive home from St. Mary's was the quietest forty minutes of my life.

Damien knew. He had not said another word after the doctor left the room. He had simply helped me into my coat, collected my discharge papers, and walked me to his car with a hand hovering near my back without actually touching it. That hand told me everything. It was the gesture of a man recalculating everything he thought he understood.

I pulled my coat tight around my middle and stared out the passenger window. The city moved past in streaks of yellow and white light. Damien drove the way he did everything, with total control, both hands on the wheel, eyes forward. I could feel him glancing at me every few minutes. Short looks, clinical, like he was checking a monitor reading.

I did not look back. I watched the lights and breathed and told myself to hold it together until I reached the guest room. Just get to the guest room. Then I could fall apart in peace.

The penthouse was dark when we arrived. Damien turned on the hallway light and I walked straight to my room without speaking. I heard him move toward the kitchen, heard the sound of a cabinet opening and closing. I closed my door and sat on the edge of the bed and pressed my hands flat on my knees and stared at the floor.

Two heartbeats. Two tiny lives. And a man thirty feet away who had just found out about both of them and had not said a single word.

I did not sleep.

---

Catherine called on Saturday morning while Damien was in his office with the door closed. Her voice was warm the way a fireplace is warm, steady and reliable.

"Sunday dinner," she said. "Both of you. No excuses."

I said I would check with Damien. She said she was not asking Damien, she was asking me, and that was different. I told her we would be there.

Damien came out of his office an hour later and I relayed the invitation. He said fine. He did not ask whether I wanted to go. He poured coffee and stood by the window and looked out at the city and I watched him from the kitchen doorway and thought about how completely we had failed to build anything real in three years.

"Fine," I said back, to nobody in particular, and went to my room to get dressed.

---

Catherine's house smelled like garlic and fresh bread and something sweet baking in the oven. She opened the door and pulled me into a hug before I even had my coat off, holding on a beat longer than necessary, the way mothers do when they sense something without being able to name it.

"You look thin," she said, pulling back to look at my face. "Are you eating?"

"I eat," I said.

She studied me for another second with those careful brown eyes that were so different from Damien's gray ones, warm where his were cool, open where his were guarded. Then she smiled and took my coat.

Dinner was roast chicken and potatoes and a salad Catherine apologized for even though it was perfect. She talked easily, filling the space the way she always did, asking about the hospital, asking about my work, asking the questions Damien never thought to ask. I answered and ate small portions and kept my hands in my lap between bites.

Then Catherine set down her fork and looked at us both with a bright, hopeful expression.

"So," she said. "How are you feeling about the future? Any plans?"

Damien reached for his wine. "The institute is expanding. We're looking at a second research division in the spring."

Catherine waited. He did not say more.

"I meant personally," she said, gently. "Children, perhaps. I keep thinking about grandchildren."

The word landed in the center of the table like something dropped from a great height. I felt my stomach turn, not from nausea this time, from the sheer painful irony of sitting here with two of his children already growing inside me while he prepared his answer.

Damien set his glass down. "Children would be inconvenient right now. The expansion requires my full attention for at least the next two years. It's not the right time."

Inconvenient.

The word went through me like something cold. I picked up my water glass so my hands would have something to do. I counted the ice cubes. There were three.

"Excuse me," I said. "I need some air."

I found the garden through the side door off the kitchen. It was cold outside, the kind of November cold that settles into your shoulders, but I was grateful for it. I stood on the stone path between Catherine's rose beds and breathed slowly and told myself not to cry.

I had heard him call the babies inconvenient once before, in abstract terms. Hearing it at a dinner table, directed at his own mother's hopeful face, while I sat three feet away carrying those babies, was a different thing entirely.

I pressed my hand to my stomach, just for a moment, hidden there in the dark garden where nobody could see.

"He wasn't always like this."

I turned. Catherine stood in the doorway, a cardigan pulled around her shoulders, watching me with an expression I couldn't quite read.

She came and stood beside me on the path. She did not look at me directly, just out at the dark garden, speaking quietly.

"When his father died, something closed in him. He had been warm once. You wouldn't believe it now, but he was." She paused. "He has never forgiven himself. He keeps everyone at a distance because distance feels like safety to him." She finally looked at me. "I am sorry that you have been on the receiving end of that."

I did not know what to say. She squeezed my hand once and went back inside.

I stood there for another minute, cold and alone, holding what she had said.

---

I found the lipstick on the drive home.

It was in the passenger visor, tucked into the small gap where sunglasses sometimes sit. I only found it because the latch was loose and the visor fell open when Damien took a sharp turn. A small tube rolled out and landed in my lap.

Rose gold. A luxury brand. A shade I had never owned in my life.

I turned it over in my palm. My chest went very still.

"This isn't mine," I said.

Damien glanced over. Looked at what I was holding. Looked back at the road.

"Put it back," he said.

"Put it back," I repeated. Just to hear how that sounded. "That's what you want to say to me right now. Put it back."

"Elena."

"How long has she been in your car, Damien?"

His jaw tightened. He said nothing.

"How long." My voice stayed flat. I was surprised by that. Somewhere beneath the flatness I was shaking, but my voice didn't know it yet.

"It isn't what you're making it into."

"I'm not making it into anything. I'm holding the evidence and asking you a question."

He said nothing.

I looked at the lipstick in my palm. Rose gold. Expensive. Serena always wore rose gold. I had noticed it for years, had always thought it suited her in the particular way that things suit people who know exactly who they are and what they want.

"Pull over," I said.

"We're almost home."

"Pull over."

He did not slow down. His eyes stayed forward. His hands were steady on the wheel.

I reached down and opened the car door.

"Elena." His voice cracked on my name. "Elena, close the door."

The red light ahead of us caught. The car stopped.

I stepped out.

The night air hit me hard, cold and immediate. I stood on the pavement with my coat and my purse and nothing else, watching through the passenger window as Damien stared straight ahead. His hands were still on the wheel. His knuckles were white.

The light turned green.

He drove away.

I watched the taillights until they disappeared around the corner. Then I stood alone on the sidewalk in the November cold, carrying his twins, holding a stranger's lipstick, and I waited to feel something more than the quiet, exhausted certainty that I had known this was coming.

The street was empty. A wind moved through.

I put the lipstick in my coat pocket and started walking.