Page 46 of Where Vows Collapse
He hadn't been willing to believe it. He'd preferred the dossier.
Elias thought about the sentence that had broken her voice.You chose to hurt me instead.He had. He'd chosen to hurt her instead, and he'd chosen it in a public hall with two hundred people watching, and he'd chosen it because the truth was a thing he'd been unwilling to hold.
He'd wanted, he saw now, to be the kind of man who wasn't wounded by a woman. He was that kind of man still. He was just, now, also the kind of man who'd wounded one. The most important one. His wife.
CHAPTER 17
NOELLE
The Mathieus'apartment was on the seventh floor of a limestone building on Astor Street that her mother had been visiting for twenty years and Noelle had been visiting for slightly less. She'd been there for Christmas dinners, for the lunches the Mathieus gave before they left for France, for the occasional early-evening cocktail her mother dragged her to whenever her mother had a thing she wanted her daughter to be seen at. She'd always been a guest. She'd always, at the end of an evening, gone home.
Noelle wasn't a guest now.
She stood in the entryway of the apartment with the valise her mother's driver had carried up, the leather handbag that contained her keys, wallet and phone. She looked at the rooms around her: the parquet, the heavy grey drapes, the pale blue sofa Adèle Mathieu had imported from Paris and never, in the years Noelle had known her, once allowed anyone to sit on … and she saw that she was going to live here.
The housekeeper had left a note on the console in French.Bienvenue, Madame. La cuisine est ravitaillée. Appelez-moi si vous avez besoin de quoi que ce soit. Mardi.Noelle walked through the rooms, the long main room with the grey drapes andthe blue sofa, the dining room with the round table that seated six, the library the Mathieus used as a study, the kitchen with the copper pans hanging over the island, the two bedrooms at the back, the one she was going to sleep in and the one she wasn't.
She stopped in the larger bedroom. The bed had been made. A vase of anemones sat on the nightstand. The closet doors stood open and empty, awaiting whatever she was going to put in them.
Her whole life, to this moment, had been put in her closets by other people. She closed the closet doors and went to unpack.
Noelle went to the bank in the morning. It was the branch on LaSalle that her grandmother had used. She had her own accounts there, accounts her grandmother had opened for her when she was eighteen and had added to, quietly, over the years. The accounts hadn't been touched by the marriage. Henry had seen to that, in the arrangements he'd drawn up before the wedding, which had kept the separate property separate and the joint property joint and the question of which was which clearly documented.
The woman at the bank remembered her from girlhood. She called herMiss Laurent, notMrs. Strathmore, and she didn't correct herself. Noelle said nothing about the correction. She signed the forms that needed signing, authorized the transfers, and had the address on the statements changed to the Astor Street apartment. The woman at the bank typed the new address into the system, handed Noelle a new set of cards.
She walked down LaSalle afterward in the cold. She'd had, she found, the unfamiliar experience of being a woman walking down LaSalle in the middle of the morning with nowhere she was expected to be. She'd lived, for as long as she could remember, inside a schedule another person had set: her mother's schedule when she was a girl, her father's once she'd come of age, her husband's since the wedding. She stood at thecorner of LaSalle and Madison and waited for a light that didn't need waiting for. She registered, with mild surprise, that the next hour was hers to place.
Noelle placed it in a bookshop. She bought a book about Morisot she'd already read, because she'd left the one she'd been reading at the penthouse and had no intention of sending for it. A book on the restoration of European gardens she'd been wanting to read for months, and a novel she had no prior interest in because the cover was blue and she liked the weight of it in her hand. She paid for the books with the new card, carried the bag out of the shop, walked back to the apartment on Astor Street.
She sat down on the sofa, opened the Morisot book. But she didn't read. Instead, she held the book open on her lap and looked at the page for a long time without reading it. She thought about her husband's hand on Yvonne's jaw, her husband's mouth on Yvonne's mouth, and she let the ache in her chest do what it was going to do.
Noelle went to the kitchen and made tea. She carried it to the dining room, sat at the round table and drank it in the bright cold light of the late morning. She wrote, on a sheet of Mathieu stationery she'd taken from the library, a list of things she was going to need to do over the course of the week. The list includedphone to be transferred to my account,new boots,note to Adèle,health insurance, andgroceries I actually like.
It was, when she looked at it, the list of a woman beginning a life.
She set the pen down and sat with the list, letting the ache settle. She picked the pen back up and addedtherapistto the list, underlined it once, and set the pen down.
The phone rang at a little past three. She was in the library with the garden book, and the ringing of her phone on the table beside her was the first thing since she'd walked intothe apartment the day before that had belonged to the outside world. She looked at the screen.
His name.
She hadn't deleted his name. She hadn't done anything with his contact in her phone.
It went to voicemail. A moment later the screen produced the notification that a voicemail had been left.
Noelle didn't listen to it.
She opened the garden book to the page she'd been on, and read about espalier fruit for a while. She turned a page, then another. The words on the page were words, she read them in the order they appeared, and at the end of the chapter she closed the book and just sat.
She didn't listen to the voicemail. She didn't want to listen to it. She was aware, as she sat with the book closed, that the not-listening was a decision she was making and would have to make again. The voicemail wasn't going anywhere, it would be there in an hour, in a day, in a week. She was aware also that the strength of her decision rested on how many times in a row she could make it without exception.
She made it this time. She'd make it the next time.
She set the book aside and got up.
The phone rang again a little after seven. Noelle was making dinner — she'd bought groceries at the market on the corner of Astor and Division, not the Whole Foods her mother used. She'd bought the foods she'd liked as a girl and had stopped buying once she'd begun buying groceries. The kitchen was warm with the smell of garlic, lemon and the pleasant domestic sound of a pan on a gas flame. Her phone sat on the counter. It rang.
His name again.
