Chapter 25
She put it in her pocket and walked home.
Sophie’s café was quiet on Thursday afternoons. Elena took the corner booth — the one by the window, the one she’d sat in that first night with borrowed clothes and wet hair and nothing.
Sophie brought her tea without being asked and sat down across from her.
“You look different.”
“Do I?”
“You look like you sleep.” Sophie studied her. “So. What now?”
Elena turned the cup a quarter-turn on the saucer.
“I don’t know. I’ve never had a what now.” She laughed. “I’ve only ever had a what he wants.”
“You could teach. You said you used to teach.”
“Maybe.”
“Or you could do nothing. For a while. That’s allowed too.”
Elena looked out the window at the street. It was raining again — a soft, ordinary rain, the kind that didn’t mean anything.
“Dominic asked me to stay,” she said.
Sophie’s eyebrows went up.
“Not like that. He said he could use someone who understands how men like Marcus work. Something about an office, something about how I notice things.” Elena turned the ring over in her pocket. “I said I’d think about it.”
“And?”
“And I think I’m going to say yes.” She looked up. “But not tonight.”
Sophie nodded and went back to the counter, and Elena sat in the warm café with her tea going cool, and outside the rain came down on a city that had no idea who she was.
She took the ring out of her pocket and looked at it for a long moment.
Then she slid it onto her right hand — the hand that had torn off the necklace, the hand that had signed the divorce papers, the hand that had paid her own father’s retainer with her own money. Not the wedding finger. She’d never wear anything on that finger again.
She finished her tea. She left money on the table — her own money, in her own wallet, from her own account — and she stepped out into the rain without opening an umbrella, because she wasn’t going to melt.
Behind her, on the wet pavement of Wabash Avenue, her footprints pointed forward.
THE END