Page 66 of Where Vows Collapse
He walked home. The walk was long — Astor Street to the penthouse was a distance he'd normally have driven. The city went past him in its late-night version: cabs on Division, the restaurants closing on Wells, a couple arguing quietly outside a bar on State.
At the penthouse, the foyer was dark. Maura had gone hours ago. He set his keys in the crystal dish and stood for a moment listening to the apartment do what the apartment did at night, which was produce the quality of silence he'd been living insidefor months and which, tonight, had acquired an additional register. The register of a man who'd been given something and had had it taken back in the same hour.
He went to the study and sat at the desk in the dark, putting his face in his hands. Elias stayed like that for a while. Grief pooled in his gut. Plain grief.
He went to bed very late. He didn't sleep.
The next day he didn’t go to work and told his assistant he was going to work from home. But he didn't work and didn't pretend to work, because the pretending had, somewhere in the last twelve hours, stopped being a thing he was able to sustain. He could only think about the woman he loved.
He thought about calling her. He didn't call. He was going to give her time, and space. The giving was going to cost him whatever it was going to cost him, and he was going to pay it.
He thought about the bookshop, the way she'd looked at him when she'd shown him the room: the vulnerability of a woman showing a man the one thing she'd built without his shadow in it. The memory of that look was, this afternoon, the sharpest thing in the room. He thought about her hands on his chest and her voice in the dark and the sound she'd made that he was never going to stop hearing.
The thinking was doing nothing except keeping him in the chair at the desk in the study of an apartment he'd spent a marriage failing to make a home.
The buzzer sounded at seven.
He didn't move immediately. The buzzer was the building's house line — the concierge calling up — and the buzzer could've been a delivery, a neighbor, a wrong apartment. He let it ring. Itrang again. He got up from the desk and crossed to the intercom panel in the hall.
"Yes."
"Mr. Strathmore, Ms. Laurent is here to see you."
He didn't speak for a moment. The concierge waited.
"Send her up."
He went to the entryway and stood there. He was wearing the clothes he'd been wearing all day — a shirt he hadn't changed, pants he hadn't changed out of.
The elevator opened. She was wearing the coat she'd taken off the hook the night before. Her hair was down. She looked beautiful.
She stepped out of the elevator and into the foyer.
"I went to see my mother," she said. “She said something I've been thinking about. She said the worst thing I could do isn't going back. She said the worst thing I could do is spend the rest of my life being safe."
He didn't speak. He didn't trust what his voice was going to do if he spoke.
"I've been being safe, Elias. I've been being safe since the gala. I built the bookshop because I needed something that was mine. The bookshop is mine, and I'm not giving it up, and I'm not giving up the apartment on Astor Street, and I'm not giving up the version of myself that walked away when you hurt me. I'm keeping all of it. That woman is the woman I'm going to be for the rest of my life."
"I know."
"But that woman — she was also a woman who was afraid. She was afraid because she'd discovered that she loved a man who'd just humiliated her. The discovery was the worst thing that had ever happened to her, and the fear that came with the discovery was the thing she'd been living inside ever since."
She took a breath.
"I've been living inside the fear, Elias. I've been calling it strength. I've been calling it boundaries. I've been calling it the bookshop, the apartment, the therapist on Clark Street. All of it has been real, all of it has mattered, and underneath all of it I've been afraid. I've been afraid that if I let you back in and you hurt me again, it'll destroy me."
"Noelle — "
"Let me finish." She looked at him. "My mother said the woman who built the bookshop isn't a woman who'll be destroyed by a man. She said the woman who built the bookshop raised herself, and the woman who raised herself isn't the woman my mother trained. And she's right. She's right, Elias. I'm not the woman my mother trained. I'm not the woman who held everything and showed nothing."
She stepped toward him.
"And that woman — the woman I am now — can survive. She can survive you hurting her again, if you hurt her again, because she survived it the first time and the surviving is what built her. The fear of being destroyed was the thing that was actually destroying me. Not you. The fear."
She was close to him now. Close enough that he could see the tiredness around her eyes — she hadn't slept either — and the color that had come into her cheeks. Her hands were at her sides and not in her pockets, which was the way she held her hands when she wasn't holding anything back.
"I love you, Elias,” she said. "I love you, I'm terrified and I'm here anyway."
