“Finally, we are home.” Ethan heaved a long sigh and pushed the front door open with his shoulder, dripping water onto the hallway tiles.
Lily laughed as she squeezed past him, pulling wet hair away from her face.
“The rain didn’t even give us a warning.”
“We had fun though, yeah?” He turned to look at her, and he was grinning genuinely.
“Yeah.” She beamed back at him and looped her arms around his neck, not caring that his shirt was soaked through.
“We did.”
They showered separately and met back in the bedroom, still warm from the water.
Lily sat on the edge of the bed in her robe, towelling her hair, when Ethan came out with a towel around his waist and stopped in the middle of the room and just looked at her.
“What?” She raised an eyebrow.
“Nothing.” He shook his head, but he was still looking.
“I just…,I’ve been meaning to say something.”
“That sounds serious.”
“It’s not.” He sat beside her.
“I just wanted to say thank you.
For the Foundation work.
The gala, the events, all of it.
You never make it feel like a favour and it is one.
A big one.”
She reached up and touched his lips before he could finish.
“Babe.
Are we not supposed to be one?”
She was 24, working for the events company contracted to run a Sinclair Corp fundraiser.
Her grandmother had trained her well, she knew how to make a room look effortless.
.
Then a cufflink had rolled under a table near the bar and she was the only one who saw it go.
She had crouched to get it and a man had appeared beside her, also crouching, reaching for it at the same time.
Their hands almost touched.
Then he looked at her, like she was the most interesting thing in the room.
She laughed because she didn’t know what else to do.
He laughed too.
That had been all it took.
“Thank…” he started.
She kissed him quiet.
He looked at her for one second with something slow and certain in his eyes, and then he kissed her back, properly, deeply, his hand coming up to the side of her face.
She leaned into him and the robe slipped off one shoulder.
His wife lay beneath him, breath uneven as his lips moved along her neck, slowly.
Her fingers curled into his hair.
The tension had been building since the restaurant, small touches, his hand at her lower back on the wet street, the way he looked at her in the cab like he was only half-listening to whatever he was supposed to be thinking about.
“Uurghh”.
When he shifted between her thighs she exhaled softly and tilted her head back, and his forehead came down to rest against hers.
Then his phone rang.
He didn’t move.
“Ignore it.”
“I didn’t say anything.” She pulled him closer.
It rang again.
He cursed under his breath but kept going, kept kissing her jaw, her throat.
She wrapped her legs around him.
“Urghh, Don’t stop,” she moaned.
The phone rang a third time.
With visible irritation, he leaned over and grabbed it, ready to silence the caller permanently.
But the moment he looked at the screen, his entire expression changed.
She saw the change in his expression and glanced at it.
The name on the screen was short.
VEE.
“Who’s that?” she said.
He locked the phone.
Fast.
“Don’t worry about it, okay?”
She sat up slightly.
“It rang three times, Ethan.”
“I said don’t worry about it.” He was already pulling away from her, already reaching for his shirt on the chair.
She watched him.
The cold air hit her where his warmth had been.
“Where are you going?
It’s still raining.
I’m h*rny, Ethan.”
“I need to pick someone up from the airport.”
The words sat in the room and neither of them moved for a second.
“At this hour?” She stared at him.
“Ethan… who?”
He shoved his feet into his shoes and grabbed his keys and was out of the bedroom before she had finished the question.
The front door opened and closed.
She heard the rain come in for a moment, and then it was quiet again.
She sat in the middle of the bed in her robe, flushed and unfinished and alone.
“Seriously.” She grabbed the duvet and pulled it over herself.
Then she kicked it off again.
“Seriously.”
VEE.
Saved with a nickname, the kind you give someone when their name is something you say often enough that you shorten it out of habit.
And he locked the screen the second she saw it.
An hour later, she heard the front door.
Two sets of footsteps.
She came out of the bedroom and stopped at the end of the hallway.
Ethan was closing the umbrella.
And beside him stood a woman, tall, effortlessly put together even at this hour, dark hair still perfect despite the rain.
She had the kind of face that photographed well from every angle.
She smiled at Lily.
Warm, open and completely comfortable standing in Lily’s hallway at midnight.
“Lily,” Ethan said, “this is Vivian.
Her hotel booking fell through, it was the closest, just for tonight.”
Vivian smiled wider.
“I’m so sorry to impose.
I told him not to bother you.”
Lily smiled back.
“Of course.” She looked at Ethan.
“Can I just…,babe, a second?”
She pulled him gently into the bedroom and closed the door.
“Ethan.” She kept her voice low and even.
“How can you bring her here?
She has no relatives she could call?
No friends?”
“It’s just for tonight.
Our place was the closest.”
“Ethan, you left me unfinished….
You left our bed to pick her up.”
“Babe…She had nobody else to call.”
Lily looked at him.
“She had nobody else to call,” she repeated, very quietly.
“Just one night.” He held her gaze.
His voice dropped.
“Please.”
She stood there for a moment.
Then she nodded, and she opened the door, and she smiled down the hallway, and she was gracious every step of the way to the guest room.
Her jaw was tight the entire time.
Six billion people on this earth and this woman’s first call at midnight in a strange city was my husband.
And he left our bed and came.
Lily showed her where the towels were.
She was in the hallway getting water when she heard Vivian behind her.
“I’m so sorry to bother you again… I’m just a little cold.
Do you have an extra…”
Lily was wearing a coat.
She had put it on over her robe when the apartment cooled down, cream wool, soft at the collar, worn at the cuffs from years of use.
Her mother had pressed it into her hands before she died.
“For when you need to feel held, baby.” Her mom had said.
Ethan appeared from the kitchen.
He looked at Vivian, then at Lily, then at the coat.
“What’s happening?” He asked.
“I’m sorry to bother, but I feel cold”.
Vivian said.
“Lily, please give her your coat.”
“There are blankets in the hallway cupboard.” Lily turned toward it.
“I’ll get one…”
“She’s cold now.
Just give her the coat.”
“This is Mom’s coat, Ethan.”
“It’s just a coat.”
She looked at him in shock.
“It is not just a coat.
She gave it to me before she died and I am asking you to get a blanket from the cupboard that is literally right there.”
He looked at her.
Then at Vivian, Vivian, who was standing very still and saying nothing, which was somehow worse than if she had protested.
Then back at Lily.
“I didn’t know you could be like this,” he said quietly.
“It’s petty, Lily.
She’s cold.”
Petty.
The word arrived clean and precise, like something dropped from a height.
Lily looked at him for two full seconds.
Then she reached up and took the coat off.
She held it out, arm extended, hand steady.
“Here.”
Vivian took it.
She turned away toward the guest room, and at the very edge of her mouth, so small that it was almost nothing, barely a shift in the muscle, Lily saw it.
The corner of her lip moved upward.
Twenty minutes later, a knock on the bedroom door.
Vivian stood holding the coat with both hands, her expression full of apology.
The collar seam had a clean tear.
“I am so sorry.
The bedroom door, the handle caught it when I turned.
I’ll pay for it, I promise.
I’ll replace it, same style…”
“You cannot replace it.” Lily’s voice came out smaller than she intended.
“Same colour, same…”
“You cannot replace it.” Lily said again, angrily this time.
Her throat closed.
She took the coat from Vivian’s hands, closed the door and stood there holding it, her fingers over the torn seam, and something in her chest pulled open in the specific way it only pulled open for her mother.
Ethan crossed the room.
He saw her face and he saw the coat and he understood what he had made her do.
He took her into his arms without a word and she pressed her face against his shoulder and did not make a sound because Vivian was twenty feet away behind a door.
He said softly, through the door: “Be more careful, Vivian.”
He closed the world out and held his wife in the dark and made up for it the only way he knew how, slowly, completely, until the coat was on the chair and her mother’s name was the furthest thing from the room.
She was drifting, finally soft and heavy, his arm across her waist.
His phone buzzed.
She was too drowsy to
sit up.
Through half-closed eyes she watched the screen light up on the nightstand.
VEE.
One line before it dimmed.
‘Can I go to work with you tomorrow?…’
Dearest readers, Thanks for giving my book a chance.
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