Page 20 of Where Vows Collapse
He could enforce the distance harder. More hours at the office. Travel. The work was there. The cost of the enforcement was his own body: he had been sleeping badly, and he knew why. But his body had always been expendable to him in service of discipline, and this would be no different.
He could investigate her more aggressively. The file on Gordon Vanders had been reopened on his desk this week. He had requested additional pieces of information that he would have by the end of the week. It was possible that what he was going to find would settle the second explanation in favor of the first, which would be — he admitted this without pleasure — a relief.
Or he could ask her.
He didn’t consider that option for long. He had considered it already and had rejected it. The reasons for rejecting it had not changed, and he was not going to revisit them.
Elias picked up his glass and turned from the window.
CHAPTER 8
NOELLE
It happened so quietly that,for a few seconds afterward, Noelle wasn't sure it had happened at all.
She'd been reading in the chair by the window. She'd been reading in the chair by the window many evenings lately. It had become where her evenings ended, and she'd settled into the new arrangement as she'd settled into every arrangement before it, because she had been raised to settle into whatever a room required of her.
The book was a biography of Berthe Morisot. She'd found it on the thirty-second floor of the next tower, in the small residential library Maura had pointed her toward. She'd just set the book down on the arm of the chair when she heard the door.
Too early. He was never home this early.
She didn't turn. She had stopped turning at the sound of the door some time ago, because turning had been what the old Noelle had done. The old Noelle had been a woman who waited, and the new Noelle did not wait.
Noelle heard him cross the hall and come in behind her. She turned.
He was standing just inside the doorway, and for a second she didn't recognize what she was looking at. The face was hisface. The set of the shoulders was his. But something in the way he was standing was not the Elias of the last few months. It was closer to the man she'd walked in on at the study window that first time. The unguarded man. The one who had not known he was being seen.
Except this time he knew.
"You're still up," he said.
"I usually am."
A pause. She had learned the empty silences with him and this was not one. This silence held.
"Was your day productive?” she asked, because it was the question she'd been using for weeks, the polite hollow question that asked nothing and received nothing. She said it now more out of reflex than intent.
"Yes."
She waited for him to leave. He didn’t.
“Good,” she said.
She meant it. It came out too honest. She heard it come out too honest and hated, briefly, how unguarded the word was. She looked down at the book on the arm of the chair to give herself a second.
When she looked up again he was still watching her.
It was a different watching. She knew his watchings now — the watching he did in public, the measured surveillance he used at the dining table when she'd said something he hadn't expected. This was none of those. This was the watching of a man who had stopped, for a second, doing the thing he was always doing, and was simply looking at her.
Noelle stood up.
She didn't think about it. She stood up before she had decided to stand. She was doing exactly the thing she had promised herself she would not do, the thing she had been, in careful increments every day, training herself not to do. But shewas doing it anyway, and she took a step toward him before she could stop herself.
Another.
Elias did not move.
He watched her cross the room toward him, and the air between them changed. She could feel it. She had felt it the night of the engagement party, at the altar when his hand had closed on hers. And she was feeling it now. She had stopped being able to pretend that she was not.
