Page 48 of Where Vows Collapse
"Noelle."
"Elias."
The morning was cold. The air above Lincoln Park was the clean hard blue of a winter that had committed to itself, and the light on the stone of the buildings on Clark Street was the light she'd walked toward for weeks and would, she knew now, walk toward for weeks more. Her therapist's office was on Clark and her therapist was on Tuesday mornings, and if Elias had been waiting on the sidewalk today he'd been told where she'd be.
She didn't ask who'd told him. She didn't need to ask. She wasn't going to give him the first question of the exchange.
"Can I walk with you?" he said.
"No."
"Noelle."
"No.”
He inclined his head the way he'd always done it, the minor formal acknowledgment of a refusal. She registered, with a detachment that surprised her, that the gesture no longer made her chest hurt. It had made her chest hurt in many rooms. It had stopped, somewhere in the weeks on Astor Street, making her chest hurt. She noted the stopping without ceremony.
"I need to talk to you. Five minutes."
She looked at him. She'd rehearsed, in the bed in the Mathieus' guest room, in the chair in the Mathieus' library, what she'd say to him when he finally came for her in person. She'd rehearsed a great many sentences. What she hadn't rehearsed, because she hadn't expected it, was the readiness of her own face to hear whatever he was here to say. She'd thought she'd have to arm herself. She wasn't armed. She was, she found, simply standing on Clark Street in her winter coat with her hands in her pockets, waiting.
"Five minutes," she said.
"Thank you."
He walked. She walked beside him. They went north on Clark in the cold. The wind off the lake was sharp, her coat wasn't quite warm enough. They walked without speaking for the first two blocks.
"I've been wrong about Vanders."
She didn't answer.
"It was a manipulation. Warren engineered it. The dossier was produced by a team that had been working on Vandersbefore my own team was brought in. They gave me a reading of your movements that wasn't — it wasn't — "
"Elias."
"Yes."
"I know you were wrong. I've known you were wrong since the night you came out of your study in the entryway and didn't ask me the question you came home from the Wentworth to ask. I've known since the curb outside the Union League. I've known since your mouth was on Yvonne's in front of two hundred people. You don't think I've known?"
"Noelle — "
"What I didn't know, Elias — and what I should've known and didn't — was that it was never going to matter to you whether you were right or wrong. You were going to act on whatever you decided about me regardless of what was true. That was the piece. The wrong reading wasn't what did this to us. The willingness to act on it without asking me — that was what did this. And it would've been the same thing if the reading had been right."
He didn't answer.
"Five minutes, you said."
"Yes."
"You have four."
She turned and kept walking.
He walked with her. He walked with her the length of Dickens and up Clark again past the sandwich shop where her mother had, in another life, taken her for grilled cheese after dentist appointments. Past the florist where the Mathieus bought their ranunculus, and the closed bakery that used to belong to a Polish family and now belonged to someone else. They passed a bookshop she'd noticed on previous walks to Clark, a narrow storefront with green trim, the window full of secondhand hardcovers arranged on old library shelves, ahandwritten sign in the door that saidOPEN — COME IN — WE HAVE WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR.She'd stopped in front of it once before, on a morning after therapy when the hour had been hers to place. She'd gone in and spent forty minutes and come out with a first edition of a book about Burgundian gardens she hadn't been looking for and hadn't been able to put down. The woman behind the counter had known the book, had known the author, had asked Noelle whether she'd read his earlier work on the Loire. She hadn't. She'd gone back the following week and the woman had had it waiting for her.
She noticed the shop again now, walking past it with her husband beside her, and she noticed something she hadn't noticed before … that the shop was, from the outside, exactly the kind of room she'd been, without knowing it, looking for. A room full of books, light and the smell of old paper, with a woman behind the counter who remembered what you'd bought the last time. A room that belonged to a person who'd decided what it was going to be and had built it. A room she could imagine herself inside of. The thought arrived quietly, the way the best thoughts arrived, without announcing that it was a thought she was going to keep. She kept it anyway. She tucked it somewhere behind the conversation she was about to have and left it there for later.
“Yvonne is no longer in my life. I haven’t seen her since that night and I’ll never see her again. What happened was a mistake I regret. I'm sorry. For every way I — "
