Page 29 of Where Vows Collapse
He poured a drink he did not especially want, carried it to the chair across the room from her, and he sat.
She still did not look up.
He watched her write for a minute and set the glass on the side table.
"Noelle."
She looked up.
Her face was composed. The composure was not the composure he had catalogued in every room of their marriage. It was a harder thing. “Yes?”
"I'd like to speak with you."
"About?”
"The other night."
She set her pen down. She did not close the folio in front of her. She angled her chair, slightly, so that she was facing him. She folded her hands on the blotter in the posture of a woman who'd been raised to listen attentively to things she did not intend to agree with.
"All right."
Elias did not know, in the second before he spoke, what he was going to say.
He had come to the chair with a plan. The plan had been to repair the surface. The plan had been to restore, with a small careful sentence or two, the courteous cooperation he needed from her in public, because he could not have a wife who walked past him in entryways. He opened his mouth to deliver it and what came out instead was something else.
"I lied to you."
She didn’t move.
"On the curb. When you asked."
"I know."
"I wasn't — "
"I know, Elias. You don't need to say it."
"I do need to say it."
She waited.
He looked at her across the small distance of the living room. The lamps were low. Her hair caught the light. Her face had the worn stillness of a woman hearing a thing she’d given up expecting to hear, who was making no effort to pretend otherwise.
"I haven't been avoiding you," he said. "That part was true. I haven't been avoiding you. I've been — " He stopped. He was not in the habit of stopping in the middle of sentences. He started the sentence over. "I've been managing something. I can't tell you what. But it has not, at any point, been you I've been managing."
Noelle considered him.
"That's not quite the same thing."
"No."
"It might even be a more elegant kind of lie."
"Possibly."
She didn’t smile. Her mouth moved very slightly, the acknowledgment of a point scored without warmth. She looked at her hands on the blotter.
"The kiss," he said.
