Page 35 of Where Vows Collapse
Noelle turned.
She walked out of the hall.
She didn't look back.
She didn't, because looking back was the one thing she couldn't afford. She could walk out of a room with her face arranged and her hands steady. She couldn't walk out of it and also look at him one more time and keep any of it intact.
She was aware, as she crossed the long marbled length of the foyer toward the coat check, of her knees. Her knees were doingthe walking; the rest of her was somewhere a few feet behind them, catching up.
Noelle collected her coat from the attendant without waiting. She walked out of the Art Institute into the cold of Michigan Avenue. There was a line of black cars along the curb. She gave the Strathmore name to the first driver who stepped forward, he nodded and opened the door, and she got in.
The door closed.
The driver pulled away. She kept her face arranged until the car was around the corner. Somewhere near Monroe, she took a breath that wasn't quite a breath.
It wasn't a sob. She wasn't going to sob in the back of a hired car. It was a sound smaller than that and harder to name, the sound a body made when it had been holding a thing for too long and had just been given permission to put it down. Her hand came up to her mouth. She held it there. She looked out the window at the street lamps blurring as her eyes did what her eyes were doing. She let herself, for the length of a block, feel exactly as much of the thing in her chest as she could feel without losing the rest.
Then she put her hand back in her lap. She arranged her face again.
"Not home," she said.
The driver glanced at her in the rearview. "Ma'am?"
"The Drake, please."
"Of course."
She closed her eyes for a moment. She opened them. She wasn't going back to the penthouse tonight.
She wasn't going back to the penthouse at all. She wasn't going to live the rest of her life under the same roof as a man she loved, who had looked her in the eye on a curb and lied to her, and who had then arranged a room and a woman and a kiss to make sure that any stray hope she might've carried out of thatliving room a few nights ago was put down cleanly in front of two hundred people.
She'd adjusted her whole life. She'd adjusted since she was a girl.
She wasn't going to adjust to this.
Noelle watched the museum fall away behind her in the window. She watched the lake come up on her right. The car turned north on Michigan, she sat with her hands folded in her lap, she let the grief do what grief did on the inside of a woman who'd been trained to keep the outside of herself intact. The outside held. The inside didn't. They were both, she understood, going to have to be true for a while.
At the Drake she paid the driver with the folded bills. The night clerk, who was well trained, did not comment on a woman arriving alone at a historic hotel in a dark green gown and no luggage. He took the Laurent name and handed her a key.
In her hotel room, Noelle stood at the window with her coat still on. She looked out at the dark lake beyond the avenue. She let her knees go at last, and the sobs erupt from her throat.
CHAPTER 13
ELIAS
Yvonne wantedto talk about it.
That was the first thing Elias registered after the room had reabsorbed the moment. Yvonne was still at his elbow. "Elias — "
"No."
"I don't — "
"Yvonne."
He said her name the way he said names of counterparties when a conversation was no longer going to continue. Yvonne, to her credit, was not a stupid woman. She registered the tone. She registered, also, the cost of continuing to stand beside him while the rest of the room watched. She stepped back from his elbow with the fluid grace she’d been born with, and moved away toward the bar.
He did not watch her go.
