Chapter Four

"Drive-ins are vulgar," Ethan said. "It's a parking lot with a projector. I don't understand the appeal."

We were at the breakfast table. I'd slid the drive-in details across to him the same way I did everything these days calmly, without ceremony, already braced for the resistance. He'd looked at the printout like I'd handed him a bill he didn't recognize.

"The appeal," I said, "is that it's on the list. The list you agreed to."

"I agreed to the spirit of the list…"

"There's no spirit, Ethan. There's a list. It has items. This is one of them." I picked up my coffee. "Friday, Seven-thirty, I'll drive."

He didn't say no. With Ethan, not saying no was the closest thing to yes I usually got.

I wrote Friday in my planner that night with a small, stupid flicker of anticipation that I immediately talked myself out of. I knew better, I'd been knowing better for years and doing it anyway. It's a particular kind of hope; the stubborn kind, the kind that survives on almost nothing. I hated it. I also couldn't seem to kill it.

Friday came.

He canceled at four in the afternoon. A text: [Can't do tonight. Work came up. ]

There it was again.

I went anyway.

I changed out of my work clothes, put on jeans and my leather jacket, drove myself to the Riverside Drive-In on Route 9, and bought one ticket. The girl at the booth didn't even blink. Solo attendees probably weren't unusual here.

The film was a romantic comedy, the exact kind Ethan had called lowbrow when I'd described it. Two people who were obviously in love spending ninety minutes pretending they weren't, set in a shiny version of New York that looked like a postcard. Predictable from the opening credits.

I laughed through most of it.

I laughed at the escalator scene and the terrible best friend and the completely unhinged airport finale, and at some point I realized I was having a genuinely good time alone, in a parking lot, watching a movie my husband had refused to see and that realization did something strange to me. Something small and significant that I didn't have words for yet.

The car next to me had a family in it. Mom, dad, a little girl who'd fallen asleep against her mother's arm by the second act. The mom laughed at the same moments I did. At one point she caught me looking and we shared that brief, wordless connection that strangers sometimes manage, this is good, isn't it? and I thought: yes. Yes it is.

I found out a week later. Carla from Ethan's office mentioned it at a birthday party, the way people mention things they assume you already know.

"I saw Ethan at the cinema last Friday," she said. "He looked like he was having the best time. What was the film, oh, that romantic comedy everyone's been talking about. Did you end up seeing it too?"

I held my wine glass very carefully. "No," I said. "I missed that one."

"He was with…" She stopped. The realization moved across her face slowly, then all at once. "I'm sorry. I thought…"

"It's fine," I said. And I smiled at her because it wasn't her fault and I didn't want her to feel bad about it.

But it wasn't fine.

He'd told me drive-ins were vulgar. He'd said what people would think and then he'd taken Vivienne Carr to a cinema twelve blocks from our house to watch the same film. The exact same film.

Not vulgar when it was her, apparently.

I went to the drive-in again the following Saturday.

Different film this time, older. One of those timeless ones that people watch when they need to feel something without it being complicated. I brought tea in a thermos and a blanket for my lap and I parked toward the back where you could see the whole lot.

Halfway through, my phone buzzed.

Not Ethan, Vivienne.

You still haven't replied. I think we need to meet. There are things about Ethan you don't know. Things I think you deserve to know before you sign anything.

I read it three times.

Things I deserved to know. What did that mean? Was it a threat dressed up as concern? A strategy? Or, and this was the thought that unsettled me most, was it genuine?

Because here's the thing about Vivienne Carr that I'd been slowly piecing together over the past two weeks: she wasn't stupid. She was calculating and she was deliberate and everything she did had a reason. Which meant this message had a reason too.

The question was what it was.

On screen, the lead actress stood in a lit doorway looking at the man she'd spent the whole film pretending not to love. Her face was completely open. Unguarded. Raw in the way that real feelings are raw when they finally stop being hidden.

I knew that face. I'd worn it for five years.

I put my phone in my bag. I watched the rest of the film. When it ended and the lot started to empty, I sat for a few extra minutes in the quiet.

Things you don't know.

What didn't I know?

I started the car. I drove home and when I walked through the front door, Ethan was in the entryway with his coat on and his keys in his hand,coming or going, I couldn't tell and he looked at me with an expression I'd never seen on his face before.

Something that looked almost like panic.

"Where were you?" he asked.

"Out," I said. "Why?"

He opened his mouth. I closed it. His jaw tightened. "Vivienne called me," he said. "Did she contact you?"

And there it was. That was the panic. Not a concern for me. Fear of what she might've said.

What are you hiding, Ethan?

"Goodnight," I said, and walked past him up the stairs.

Behind me, I heard him say my name once, quietly, like a question he didn't know how to finish.

I didn't turn around.