Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
the bar is on the floor, and she’s surrounded, every day, by men who would not have to step over a pebble to clear it.
It’s only a matter of time. That’s the sum. That’s all of it. A woman that easy to love, married to a man that easy to leave, and the only variable left in the equation is when. Some kinder man, some warmer man, some man who would never have needed a near-death in a ballroom to work out that he was in love with her. He’s out there. He’s probably already met her. He’s probably sending better flowers. And he will not even have to try very hard, because I have done all the hard work for him, I have spent two months making the case against myself so thoroughly that all the next man has to do is be gentle to her once, just once, and mean it, and it will be the most extraordinary thing that has happened to her in a year.
And underneath that, lower, where the machine can’t reach because the machine doesn’t go there, is the other terror, the one I won’t write down even here. That the when might not be a man at all. That it might be her heart. That I might lose her not to someone better but to the thing I set off in her chest, that one morning the door I’m not allowed through will open and it will be Barrymore’s face and not a nurse’s, and there will be no next man and no separation and no winning her back, only the clean nothing-smell of this floor and a world that does not have her in it, and the certain knowledge for the rest of my life that I am the one who did it.
I would give them the team. That’s how I know. That’s the diagnostic, the one clean reading I trust in all of this. Glasgow is moving. Bills brings me that report too, between the others, the votes Glasgow is counting, the directors he’s turned, the special meeting he’s circling like the gambler he is, betting the one asset he was never supposed to be able to touch. Two months ago that news would have been the only news in my world. I married a grieving girl to keep my hands on that team. I would have burned a great deal to keep it.
And now I find I don’t care. I have turned it over and over looking for the place where I still care and it isn’t there. Let Glasgow have it. Let him sell it for parts to cover his debts, let the whole edifice my marriage was supposed to buy go down in flames, I would sign it over to him this afternoon, every share, with a smile, if signing it would buy me one thing. One honest conversation. One quarter of an hour in a room where my wife let me tell her the truth and her heart did not try to kill her for hearing it. That’s the going rate now, in the only currency that turned out to matter, and I cannot pay it, because the price of the conversation is her life, and so I do the one thing left to a man who has finally found something he can’t afford.
I wait. I stand outside the door and I wait, and I tell myself that when she’s stronger, when the doctor lifts the order, when her heart has learned to carry a little weight again, there will be a door I’m allowed through, and I will walk through it and I will say the thing I should have said before I ever lifted a hand against her, and she’ll be well enough to hear it.
It’s the only plan I’ve got. It’s a bad plan. It depends on time, and time is the one thing the machine keeps telling me I don’t have.
On the fourth evening they move her off the critical floor. Bills tells me with something almost like hope in his voice, because off the critical floor means better, means stronger, means soon, and I let myself have the hope for exactly as long as it takes me to walk the two flights up to the new room, because off the critical floor also means a room with a door that doesn’t seal, a door left ajar the width of a hand, and as I come down the quiet corridor toward it I hear her voice for the first time in four days.
I stop.
She’s awake. She’s talking, low, and the sound of her goes through me like nothing on this earth has ever gone through me, because it’s the first proof in four days that she’s still in the world, and I stand frozen in the corridor like a thief and I drink it. Barrymore’s there. I can hear the low rumble of him answering, too quiet to make out, just the shape of a man saying something gentle, and I cannot hear a word of it, not one, and I have one half-second of the old jealousy, the reflex of it, before it dies, because I know now what he is to her and the knowing has cost me too much to forget.