Page 41 of Where Vows Collapse
Her mother set her spoon down. For a second her mother looked, across the table, like the woman in the silver-framed photograph on the dresser of Noelle's old room. The twenty-two-year-old on the steps of Holy Name Cathedral with the peonies in her hands and the smile of a woman who hadn’t yet learned how much of her life would be spent arranging her face for other people.
Her mother reached across the table and put her hand, briefly, over Noelle's. She hadn’t done that in years. Noelle took a breath and did not cry, because she had cried on a hotel floor and she was done, today, with crying.
“You can tell me what happened when you’re ready,” she said gently.
Her father came home later.
She heard the front door and the sound of his shoes on the marble of the foyer. She was in the window seat of her old bedroom with a cup of tea that had gone cold. She heard him stop in the foyer. She heard her mother's voice, low, from the kitchen: a single sentence she couldn't make out. She heard the silence that followed.
He appeared in the doorway of her bedroom a minute later. He was in his club clothes — the blazer, the open collar. He stood in the doorway the way he'd stood in the doorway of his study the morning he'd told her the marriage was necessary, exceptthat the man in the doorway that morning had been a man looking past her. The man in the doorway now was trying, she could see, to look at her. He was trying and not quite managing it. His eyes kept finding the carpet, the window frame, the edge of the dresser beside her head.
He took a step into the room. She didn't invite him further.
"Your mother told me — "
"I know what she told you."The marriage contract contained financial terms that stabilized the Laurent position, if that’s what you’re worried about. A divorce won’t void them. I put the request in the filing. Henry believes it’ll be honored.
"Noelle — "
"Don't. I need you to hear something," she said. "I'm going to say it once, and I'm not going to say it again. You're not going to answer it, because there isn't an answer for it. There's only the hearing."
He didn't speak.
"You knew," she said. "When you made the arrangement with Elias, you knew the books were worse than what the due diligence was going to show. You knew about the older debts. You knew Gordon had been managing them for years, and you knew that when the marriage went through, those creditors were going to see Strathmore money and come looking for it. And you put me in that marriage anyway, knowing that the only way to protect Elias from what you'd hidden was for me to help Gordon keep it from reaching his desk. You did it without telling me what I was walking into until Gordon sat across from me and explained it. By then the contracts were signed and it was too late for me to walk away without destroying everything."
Her father's face had gone grey.
"I carried it," she said. "I carried it for the whole of the marriage. I carried it through every dinner I sat at alone in that apartment and every gala I attended on his arm. And when myhusband decided that I was working against him — when he decided that, Papa, he kissed another woman in front of two hundred people to punish me for it, the thing he was punishing me for was protecting him from you."
She watched her father absorb the words. She watched him try to produce a response and fail. She watched as a man she'd loved her whole life understand, for the first time, what his decisions had cost his daughter.
"I lost my marriage," she said. "I lost it because I couldn't tell my husband the truth, and I couldn't tell him the truth because the truth was yours. You'd put me in charge of keeping it, and the keeping of it made me look, to the man I was falling in love with, like exactly the woman he was afraid I was. You did that. You. You did it the morning you sat in your study and told me the marriage was necessary and didn't look at me while you said it."
The room was very still.
"I'm not going to forgive you today," she said. "I may forgive you eventually. I don't know yet. What I know is that I can't sit in a room with you right now and have you be sorry at me, because your sorry isn't going to rebuild any of the things I'm going to have to rebuild. The energy it would take me to receive it is energy I need for rebuilding."
Her father stood in the doorway for another moment. His mouth worked once. Whatever he'd been going to say and she could see, behind the grey of his face, that there had been something. Whatever it had been, it didn't come. Her father turned and left.
The requestfor a meeting came at four.
Henry's office called the Laurent house. Elias's counsel had been in contact. Elias was requesting a meeting at Noelle's earliest convenience. Noelle, who was sitting in the window seat of her old bedroom with a cup of tea she had been letting go cold, listened to Henry's summary and considered for a half minute.
"Tomorrow," she said. "Not his office. Not the residence."
"A neutral room. I have a conference room on Madison."
"All right."
"Noelle?”
"Yes."
"You don't have to meet with him."
"I know."
"You don't have to say anything if you do."
