Chương 3
“Documenting.”
Jenna looked at him.
This time, he did not look back at her.
And for the first time since Melissa asked when I was moving, Scott stopped behaving like a man managing an inconvenient wife and started looking like a man who had just discovered his plan might have witnesses.
Scott took one step toward me, then stopped as if he had remembered there were rules now that he did not know.
“Put the phone away.”
I slipped it into my purse.
“No.”
Jenna folded the tape measure into itself with a metallic snap.
“I think I should go.”
Scott glanced at her.
“You don’t have to.”
“Yes, I do.”
She set the tape on the mantel and reached for her bag.
For a moment she looked less like the woman replacing me and more like someone who had walked onto a stage after being told the audience already knew the script.
At the door, she paused.
“Scott said you knew.”
I looked at him.
His mouth tightened.
“Knew what?”
“That you were moving.”
Scott said her name sharply.
Jenna flinched.
I watched the silence between them rearrange something.
She had known she was sleeping with a married man.
I was not interested in absolving her of that.
But the apartment was different.
The forged lease was different.
The box of my belongings was different.
“What exactly did he tell you?” I asked.
“Claire.”
Scott’s voice carried the old warning again, except it had lost its authority.
Jenna stared at the floor.
“He said you’d signed everything last week.”
I felt the pulse in my throat.
“Everything?”
She looked at Scott, waiting for rescue.
He gave her none.
“The lease.”
Scott stepped between us.
“That’s enough.”
Jenna’s face changed.
Not dramatically.
Just a slight pulling away around the eyes, as if one final detail had failed to line up.
“You said she signed it.”
“We’re not doing this here.”
“This is my house,” I said.
He turned on me.
“And mine.”
“Yes.”
The word came out almost pleasantly.
“That’s why I’m still standing in it.”
Jenna left without saying goodbye.
Scott followed her to the porch, and I heard the low murmur of his voice through the closed door.
I did not try to listen.
Instead, I carried the box from the stairs into the dining room and photographed every item inside.
There were twenty-three things.
Not random things either.
The coats I wore most often.
My spare sneakers.
The framed family photographs that sat on my dresser.
Three sweaters.
A makeup bag.
The ceramic bowl.
Enough to make an apartment look temporarily inhabited.
Not enough to make it look like someone had actually moved.
Scott came back inside.
“You called someone.”
It was not a question.
I picked up one of the photographs.
It showed my parents on their thirty-fifth anniversary, my father squinting into sunlight and my mother laughing at something outside the frame.
“Who did you call?” he asked.
I put the photograph back.
“Why?”
“Because you’re suddenly taking pictures of everything.”
“You started packing my belongings.”
“I was trying to help.”
“Who?”
“What?”
“Who were you helping?”
He stared at me.
Then he walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and stood there too long.
Cold air spilled around his legs.
Finally he took out a bottle of water.
“You’re making this adversarial.”
I almost admired the sentence.
Scott could place a fire in your lap and complain about your smoke.
“Did you sign my name on the lease?”
He twisted the bottle cap.
“We discussed separating.”
“No.”
“We did.”
“We discussed being unhappy.”
“That’s splitting hairs.”
“Did you sign my name?”
He drank.
The refrigerator was still open behind him.
I crossed the kitchen and closed it.
“You’re wasting electricity.”
He stared at me as if I had slapped him.
I could not help it.
I laughed.
It lasted only a second, and somehow that made him angrier.
“This is funny to you?”
“No.”
I wiped under one eye.
“It’s just that you’re worried about me making things adversarial while my coats are in a box and my mail is being forwarded to a home I’ve never entered.”
His face emptied.
“The mail?”
There it was.
Not surprise that the request existed.
Surprise that I knew.
I rested both hands on the counter.
“Saturday.”
Scott looked toward the window.
For years, whenever we argued, he needed movement.
He would wash a dish, straighten a chair, check his phone, anything that allowed him to look occupied rather than cornered.
Now he peeled the label from his water bottle in thin wet strips.
“It was supposed to make things easier.”
“For whom?”
“For both of us.”
“By having my mail sent somewhere else?”
“You were going to have a place.”
“I have a place.”
His eyes came back to mine.
“This isn’t sustainable.”
The word struck me harder than anything else he had said.
Not because it was cruel, but because it sounded rehearsed.
Sustainable.
The kind of word Scott used in presentations when he wanted an unpleasant decision to sound inevitable.
“How long have you been planning this?”
He dropped the ruined label on the counter.
“We need to calm down.”
“I am calm.”
“That’s the problem.”
I almost asked what he meant.
Then I understood that he had expected the woman I used to be.
Crying would have reassured him.
Screaming would have made me unreasonable.
Begging would have returned him to the position he knew.
My calmness gave him nothing to push against.
He walked past me.
“I’m sleeping in the guest room.”
“Good.”
At the stairs, he stopped.
“You know, Jenna didn’t create the problems in our marriage.”
“I know.”
That answer made him turn.
“You do?”
“Yes.”
He seemed almost hopeful.
I let the hope sit there.
“You did.”
He went upstairs without another word.
The guest-room door closed hard enough to shake the picture frames in the hallway.
May you like
I slept badly.
At 2:13 in the morning, I woke to the sound of footsteps downstairs.
