Page 50 of Where Vows Collapse
"You kissed another woman in front of two hundred people. You don't get to put your mouth on her and then, weeks later, put it on mine. You don't get to do that. That isn't a door you get to walk back through. There are women who'd let you. I'm not going to be one of them."
His hand lowered. Slowly.
Noelle watched his face do the thing his face did when he received information he hadn't been prepared to receive, which was to not, visibly, do anything. His face held, but underneath it was the closest thing to devastation she'd ever been allowed to see on her husband.
"Noelle…”
"Five minutes were up a while ago, Elias."
"Please."
"No."
He looked at her. He opened his mouth and closed it. He stepped back from the curb, turned, and walked north on Clark in the opposite direction from the way she was going. Sh turned and crossed Armitage against the light and she didn't look back.
At the corner of Dickens she put her hand against the side of a brick building. She stood there and didn't cry. She breathed. The brick was cold against her palm, the cold went up her wrist and into her arm. She breathed.
She let go of the building and walked on. By the time she reached the corner of Astor and Division she was, if not fine, upright.
She let herself into the Mathieus' apartment. She sat in the chair in the afternoon light with her hands flat on her knees, and let the heartbreak move through her in waves, slower, the way grief moved through a body that had, at last, agreed to be a grieving body.
She let it. She let it for as long as she needed to. The afternoon went past. The light in the library changed color. The elms on Astor Street moved once in a gust and then stilled. At some point she got up, picked up the garden book where she'd left it, and she read.
She read for a long time. She didn't, any more than she could help, think about the curb on Clark.
She thought, instead, about the bookshop with the green trim. She thought about the narrow storefront and the secondhand hardcovers and the woman behind the counter who'd known the Burgundian gardens book and had had the Loire volume waiting for her the following week. She thought about what it would take to build a room like that: a room full of books a person had chosen, in a building a person had found, on a street a person walked down every morning because it was hers.
Noelle didn't know what it would take. She didn't know, yet, whether it was the kind of thought she was going to act on or the kind she was going to put away. She knew it was the first thought she'd had in weeks that was about something she wanted to move toward rather than something she was moving away from.
CHAPTER 19
ELIAS
Elias walked north on Clark.
He didn't know where he was walking to. His car was parked on Wells; the direction he was walking in wasn't the direction of his car. Walking was the thing his body was doing in the absence of any clear instruction from the rest of him, and continuing to walk was going to be more useful than stopping, because stopping would require him to determine where to stop.
Several blocks passed without registering.
At Webster he turned east and walked to the lake. The wind off the water was harder than the wind on the interior streets had been. It came at him across the width of the drive and took the warmth out of his face. He stood at the railing of the footbridge over the drive and looked down at the cars passing beneath him and didn't think anything in particular.
The railing held him for some number of minutes. Then he turned and walked back.
At his office, he asked his assistant to hold his calls. She looked up when he came in and didn't comment on the coat he was still wearing, or on the color his face probably was, or on the hour — past eleven, out since nine — and she did what shealways did, which was to register the instruction and produce no evidence she'd seen a thing she hadn't been asked to see.
The door closed behind him. The coat stayed on. The desk received him the way the desk had received him every day of his adult life, and he sat with his hands on the blotter and didn't mistake their steadiness for anything. He'd already learned, in the weeks since the living-room kiss, that the steadiness of his hands was no longer information he could use.
You don't get to touch me anymore.
The sentence sat in him. His wife had given it to him directly, without inflection, with her palm up between them: the gesture of a woman drawing a line she didn't intend to renegotiate. The line had held. It was holding now. Two hours after the line had been drawn, it was still between him and his wife, and in the course of the afternoon he was going to have to decide what to do about it.
The decision, when it came, came from the part of him that had always activated first. The part that had been activating since he was very young, since the year of Michael Warren, since before Michael Warren, since the years in which he'd learned that the thing to do when the world delivered a result you hadn't predicted was to move.
He picked up the phone.
"James."
"Elias."
