Page 26 of Belong to Me
The elevator is the worst.
The building has one private lift. We share it. And the encounters are accidental and unavoidable and each one is a small catastrophe. He steps in, I step back. I press my floor, he presses his. We stand in a glass box rising through a building in Monaco and we don’t speak and the distance between us is three feet and three feet in an elevator is nothing and everything.
His hand brushes mine reaching for the button. My shoulder touches his when the lift jolts between floors. He holds the door for me and his arm is above my head and I walk beneath it and his cologne catches me, cedar and smoke and the darker thing, and I’m carrying his child and I can’t breathe in a lift that smells like him and I grip my keys and I walk to my door and I don’t look back.
He never looks back either. But I hear him stand in the hallway after the lift doors close. I hear him not move. And then, after a pause that lasts exactly as long as it takes for a man to decidenot to knock, I hear his footsteps return to the lift, and the doors open, and he goes up.
Every time. He almost knocks. Every time, he doesn’t.
And every morning, the ginger tea is there.
ANTON
She’s five months along and she’s glowing and I’m dying.
I make the tea before dawn. I carry it downstairs. I set it outside her door. I go back up. I make my own coffee and I drink it at the window and I count the minutes until I hear her door open below me, the sound carries through the building’s bones, a faint click and a pause and then the soft scrape of the thermos being lifted, and the pause is the part that guts me. The pause where she stands in her doorway holding what I’ve left her and decides whether to carry it inside or pour it out.
She has never poured it out.
I hold on to that. In the dark hours between the tea and the morning, when I pace the penthouse and my footsteps echo and the harbour burns below me and I think about a girl who smiled at me in the aftermath of the worst thing I’ve ever done, I hold on to the fact that she has never poured out the tea.
The elevator encounters are exquisite torture. Three feet. Glass walls. Her perfume and her growing belly and her hands gripping her keys and her eyes that find everything in the lift except me. She is building a life two floors below mine and I can hear it through the ceiling, music sometimes, or the sound ofher phone, or the particular rhythm of someone moving through rooms who is learning to be alone again, and I don’t interfere.
I’ve learned, at a cost I’ll carry for the rest of my life, that I don’t get to decide what she wants.
DAISY
Tuesday evening. The lobby.
I’m coming back from a walk. The air is good for the nausea and the movement is good for my back and the walks are getting longer because my body is changing and the changing requires movement and space and the freedom of streets that don’t belong to anyone.
I walk through the lobby doors and there is a man at the concierge desk. Early thirties. Brown hair, open face, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He’s carrying a box of books and talking to the concierge about a delivery, and when the lobby door closes behind me he turns and the box wobbles and three books slide off the top and I catch one before it hits the marble floor.
“Nice catch.” He grins. The grin is easy and warm and uncomplicated and doesn’t carry a single layer of subtext. “I’m Jeff. Just moved in. Ninth floor.”
My floor.
“Daisy,” I tell him. “Tenth floor, actually. They number oddly here.”
He laughs. I laugh. It comes out before I can stop it, a real laugh, the first one in months, and the sound of it surprises me so muchthat I laugh harder and Jeff laughs with me and the lobby fills with the sound of two people who have found something funny in a marble building that takes itself very seriously.
I don’t see Anton.
But he’s there. I learn later that he was coming through the back entrance from the car park. That he stopped. That he stood in the corridor between the car park and the lobby and he saw me laughing, really laughing, with a man he’d never seen. That the man touched my elbow to balance the box and the touch was familiar and easy and carried none of the weight that every touch between Anton and me has carried since the first day in the conference room.
I don’t know any of this yet.
I only know that I laughed, and it felt like breathing after a long time underwater, and the man on my floor has an easy grin and carries too many books and his name is Jeff Peterson and he doesn’t know who I am or what I’ve survived and the not-knowing is the most restful thing I’ve felt in months.
Chapter ****11
Chapter 11
DAISY
Jeff Peterson owns too many books, cannot cook, and has the uncomplicated warmth of a man who has never destroyed anyone.
I learn this over the course of weeks. He’s an architect. He moved to Monaco for a project, something to do with sustainable marina design, and his unit on my floor is half-unpacked boxes and half-drafting table and he apologises for the mess every time I come over, which is often now, because Jeff Peterson is easy and I have forgotten what easy feels like.
