Part 5
“Where is your husband now?” Priya asked.
“I don’t know.”
Nora checked her phone. “He’s calling me too.”
“Don’t answer,” Clara said.
“I wasn’t planning to.”
That irritated Clara for no good reason. Nora had done nothing wrong. Still, a mean little spark jumped in her chest.
“You’ve answered him before,” Clara said.
Nora looked at her.
The room went quiet except for Mia sipping apple juice through a straw.
Clara regretted it immediately.
Nora set her phone down. “Yes,” she said. “I have.”
“Nora—”
“No, it’s fine. I did. I answered him because he called me crying after your anniversary dinner and said you’d locked yourself in the bathroom and he was worried you were having a breakdown. I answered him because I didn’t know what was true. I answered him because he’s very good at sounding like the reasonable one.”
Clara looked at her lap.
Nora’s voice softened. “I am not proud of that.”
“I didn’t tell you enough.”
“You told me enough. I didn’t listen correctly.”
Mia looked between them. “Are you fighting?”
Clara and Nora both turned too quickly.
“No,” Clara said.
“A little,” Nora said at the same time.
Mia frowned.
Nora leaned toward her. “Sometimes grown-ups fight because they’re trying to get to the truth and they’re clumsy about it.”
Mia considered that. “Daddy says fighting means someone has to win.”
Clara closed her eyes.
Nora’s face changed.
Priya, who had been silent, made a note.
They left the hospital through a side exit because Henry had texted that he was coming there. Priya arranged for an escort to Nora’s car. Clara felt ridiculous and terrified walking under the bland morning light with a security officer beside them and her daughter’s small hand in hers. The city was beginning its day. Delivery trucks hissed at curbs. Office workers carried coffee. A dog in a little red sweater refused to cross the street while its owner pleaded with it.
The normal world had no decency. It kept moving.
At Nora’s house, everything smelled like toast, laundry detergent, and the lemon oil she used on old furniture. Nora’s husband, Ben, had taken their two boys to school early after telling them Aunt Clara and Mia were coming because of “a family emergency,” which was true enough to be useless. He left a note on the kitchen counter in his square careful handwriting: Clean sheets on guest bed. Soup in fridge. I’m sorry. Tell me what to do.
Clara stood reading it until the words blurred.
Mia went straight to the couch and curled under a blanket. She looked smaller in daylight. The bandage near her temple made her face seem lopsided. Nora turned on a nature documentary with the sound low, something about sea otters cracking shells on their bellies. Mia watched without smiling.
Clara borrowed sweatpants and a sweater from Nora. The sweater had a hole near the cuff. She kept worrying the hole with her thumb.
At 9:12, Henry arrived at the house.
He did not knock like an ashamed man. He knocked like a homeowner who had forgotten his keys.
Nora looked through the peephole and swore under her breath.
Clara was in the kitchen with Priya’s packet spread before her: safety planning checklist, emergency protective order information, legal aid contacts, counseling resources, instructions for documenting injuries, a sheet about children who witness domestic violence. The papers looked both helpful and obscene beside Nora’s chipped blue mugs.
Mia sat up on the couch. “Is it Daddy?”
No one answered fast enough.
Henry knocked again.
“Clara,” he called through the door. “Open the door.”
Ben was not home. Nora had a baseball bat somewhere, Clara remembered absurdly, because one of the boys had quit Little League and refused to throw anything away. The thought of Nora with a bat facing Henry in her sock feet was so frightening and ridiculous that Clara nearly laughed.
Instead she walked to the living room.
Mia’s eyes were huge. “Do I have to go with him?”
“No,” Clara said.
The certainty came from somewhere deeper than knowledge.
Henry’s voice sharpened. “I know you’re in there.”
Nora whispered, “I’m calling the police.”
Clara nodded.
Henry moved along the porch. A shadow crossed the front window.
“Do not make me stand out here like some criminal,” he said.
Mia flinched.
That decided Clara.
She went to the door but left the chain on. Nora grabbed her arm.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not letting him shout through the door at her.”
Nora did not release her immediately. Their eyes met. Then Nora stepped back, phone pressed to her ear.
Clara opened the door as far as the chain allowed.
Henry stood on the porch in the same tuxedo pants and white dress shirt from the night before, though he had removed the jacket and bow tie. He looked tired, unshaven, almost tender in the washed-out morning. For a second Clara saw the version of him that had first disarmed her: handsome in a bruised, serious way, carrying flowers to her studio because he had noticed she liked orange tulips, listening as if every word she said changed something in him.
Then his gaze dropped to the chain.
His mouth hardened.
“Take that off.”
“No.”
He looked past her. “Where is Mia?”
“Resting.”
“I want to see my daughter.”
“She doesn’t want to see you.”
“You don’t get to decide that.”
Clara held the edge of the door. The chain trembled slightly, giving away her shaking hand.
“The police are on their way,” she said.
Henry stared at her.
Then he smiled, but only with his mouth. “You called the police on me again.”
“Again?”
“At the hospital. At the gala. Now here. You’re building a little story, aren’t you?”
Nora appeared behind Clara, phone still to her ear. “Leave.”
May you like
Henry ignored her. “Clara, listen to me. I spoke with David this morning. He says this can still be handled quietly if you stop escalating.”
David was Henry’s managing partner. A round, polished man who kissed women’s hands at parties and once told Clara that Henry’s intensity was “part of the genius package.”
