A Kiss on the Forehead

Chapter 5:

I let myself into a house I no longer recognized.

The brownstone was dark. We had bought it the year we married, a narrow, creaky thing in Brooklyn Heights with crooked stairs and a garden the size of a bath mat. Julian had wanted something grander. I had wanted something that needed me. For three years I had believed we had met somewhere in the middle.

I stood in the hall with my keys in my hand and looked at it all as if for the first time. The coat hooks. The framed photograph of our wedding day, both of us laughing at something outside the frame. The little dish by the door where he dropped his cufflinks every night.

Every object had changed. Not in shape, only in meaning, like a word you repeat until it turns into noise.

I took a shower so hot it hurt. I scrubbed the dust of the Orpheum from my skin and sat on the edge of the tub in a towel, staring at my reflection in the fogged mirror. Swollen eyes. A mouth pressed shut.

"All right," I whispered to her. "We have a job to do."

She did not look convinced.

I put on the gray cotton pajamas Julian liked, the ones he said made me look soft. I filled the kettle. I sat at the kitchen table in the circle of lamplight and opened my laptop and pretended to work on a quote for the Orpheum's balcony. The numbers swam. I read the same line four times.

At 1:14 a.m., a key turned in the lock.

I had imagined this moment for hours. In my imagination I was cold as marble, a queen in an empty hall. In reality, my pulse went off like a smoke alarm and my palms went damp. I reached for my tea so that I would have something to hold.

"Lena?" Julian called softly. "Why are you still up?"

"Couldn't sleep." My voice emerged smooth and small, a wife's voice. "I was working."

He appeared in the kitchen doorway, tie hanging loose, coat over his arm. Even now, even after everything, I felt the old pull in my chest. He was beautiful. That had always been the problem. Sandy hair, warm brown eyes, the sort of face that made strangers forgive him before he spoke.

"Poor thing," he said, and crossed the room, and bent down.

That was when the scent reached me.

Jasmine and warm vanilla and something sharper underneath. A perfume I had bought, as a gift, last Christmas. A bottle with a small gold cap. Chloe's favorite.

I sat very still while Julian pressed his lips to my forehead.

"Investors," he sighed, straightening. "Honestly, I don't know why they insist on dinners that run until midnight. I'm exhausted."

"I know." I smiled up at him. My face felt like a mask someone had painted on. "The roses were beautiful, by the way. Thank you."

His eyes warmed. He actually looked pleased. "You liked them?"

"I always do."

"Good." He squeezed my shoulder. "Anything for my girl."

My girl.

I stared at his hand on my shoulder, the same hand that had rested on Chloe's. I imagined, with perfect clarity, snapping every finger, one at a time.

Instead I said, "It's our anniversary today, technically."

A flicker. Barely a flicker. A man doing quick arithmetic behind his own eyes.

"Of course," he said. "I haven't forgotten. I have a surprise."

"I booked the Brooklyn restaurant."

"Perfect. Perfect, darling. Seven?"

"Seven."

He kissed me again, quick and absent, and padded off upstairs. I listened to him go. The creak of the fourth step. The bedroom door. Water running.

Only when I heard the shower hiss to life did I let my face fall.

I pressed both hands over my mouth. My shoulders shook. I made no sound. I had learned that on the stairwell, that grief could be silent, that you could come apart in a perfectly quiet kitchen with a kettle ticking as it cooled.

He had stood three feet from me and smelled of her, and I had thanked him for the flowers.

My phone lit up on the table.

Chloe.

"Hope you didn't work too late, babe. Love you. Sleep tight." A little yellow heart.

I looked at that heart for a long time.

Then I picked up the phone and, with a steady thumb, wrote back: "Love you too. Dinner this week?" And added a heart of my own.

I had never lied so smoothly in my life. Somewhere at the back of my mind a small, wild voice marveled at it. "Look at you," it said. "Look how quickly you learn."

A second message arrived, from the number I had typed into a stranger's phone a few hours earlier.

"Rules by noon. Cross Tower. Eat something."

I stared at the last two words. They were absurdly, unexpectedly kind, and for one unguarded second my eyes stung more than they had all night.

Upstairs, the shower shut off.

I closed the laptop, rinsed my cup, and climbed the crooked stairs to lie down beside a man I no longer knew.

I did not close my eyes once.