Page 8 of Where Vows Collapse
And still, every evening, she dressed as though she expected him.
She hadn't meant to start doing it. It had simply happened. The first week, it was because she'd dressed for dinner her whole life and didn't know how else to close a day. The second week, it was because she'd caught her own reflection in a hallway mirror and been startled by how much she'd softened around the edges: as though the penthouse were absorbing her, too. The third week, she admitted to herself the thing she'd been trying not toadmit… she was dressing in case he came home early enough to see her.
He didn't. Not once.
Five weeks in, on a Thursday, she waited too long.
She hadn't meant to wait. She'd come down to dinner at eight, the way she had all week. She'd eaten a few bites, set her fork aside and sat with her wine while Maura cleared the table around her. By nine-fifteen, she hadn't moved. By nine-forty, Maura had caught her eye from the kitchen doorway with the worried look of a woman who understood what waiting looked like and had the good sense not to name it. Noelle had smiled — the practiced smile, the one her mother had taught her — and told Maura she could go.
Maura had gone. The penthouse had gone quiet.
Noelle had stayed at the table.
It was ten-fifty when she heard the door.
She didn't turn. She heard his footsteps and the soft sound of his keys being set down on the marble of the entry table. The rustle of his jacket being folded over the arm of a chair in the study off the hall. She knew every one of those sounds now. She could have drawn a map of him moving through the apartment with her eyes closed.
"You're still awake."
His voice was neutral. Curious, almost. As though it were simply a fact he was noting for later.
"I was waiting."
The words came out before she could file them down. She heard herself say them and wished, in the same breath, that she hadn't.
He paused in the doorway of the dining room. She still hadn't turned. She was aware of him, the shape of him at the edge of her vision, the dark of his suit against the amber lamplight of the hall. She could feel his attention on her.
"There's no need to do that."
"I wasn't aware it required justifying."
"It doesn't." A beat. "It's simply unnecessary."
Unnecessary.
She turned in her chair then. She turned slowly, because the alternative was turning fast, and she wouldn't give him that. He'd come further into the room while she wasn't watching. He was at the sideboard now, loosening his tie with one hand, pouring a drink into a short glass with the other.
"I thought we might have dinner," she said.
"I've already eaten."
He'd always already eaten. The entirety of her life in this apartment was built around his having already eaten. She'd been sitting in this chair waiting to offer a husband a meal he had, somewhere across the city, already finished.
"I see."
He crossed to the window with his glass, and she could see him now fully. The lean line of him, the way he held the drink without drinking from it, the set of his shoulders that was, she'd started to notice, the set of a man who carried tension in his back and didn't know it. He spoke without looking at her.
"You shouldn't adjust your schedule around mine."
"I wasn't adjusting." She kept her voice level. It cost her. "I was making an effort."
He looked at her then. A slow look. And when he spoke, his voice was gentle in a way that was somehow worse than harsh would have been.
"For what?"
For what?
There was no unkindness in it. She could have managed unkindness. What he was giving her was indifference so complete that it hadn't even occurred to him to dress it up.
