Chapter 4
Elena heard herself laugh, and the sound cracked in the middle.
“Then he went back out there, put his arm around Veronica, and toasted to the people who make life worth living. He looked right at me when he said it.”
Jessica’s hand dropped from her arm.
“So yes. I humiliated him. In front of everyone who matters.” Elena wiped rain and mascara out of her eye with the back of her hand. “And you know what? It felt good.”
She stepped back.
“Tell him I’m not coming back.”
“Where will you go?”
The question hit harder than the rain. Elena stood there with her mouth open and no answer in it, because there wasn’t one. She had no coat. No phone. No shoes. No money. The only bank account she could access was a joint account Marcus checked like a man reading a ledger, and the only card in her clutch had his name on it.
She turned and walked away. Jessica called after her twice. The third time she didn’t.
Downtown Chicago blurred past — headlights smeared across wet glass, a bus hissing at a stop, a man in a doorway shaking out a cigarette. Elena’s mind was white static punctuated by flashes, like a slideshow running behind her eyes.
Marcus introducing Veronica as his invaluable partner, his hand on the small of her back, the same place his hand had rested on Elena’s an hour before.
The dinner in April, when she’d tried to speak over the table and his fingers had closed around her wrist under the tablecloth and squeezed, hard, until the bones ached — a warning, a reminder, and he’d smiled at the guests the entire time.
The night someone at a charity gala had asked about children, and Marcus had laughed and said, some women aren’t built for motherhood, and everyone at the table had laughed with him, and Elena had laughed too, and gone home and cried in the bathroom with the shower running so he wouldn’t hear.
She’d wanted children. Desperately. For years she’d thought the problem was hers — the appointments, the tests, the specialists. It was two years before she found the paperwork in his study. A vasectomy. Three years into their marriage. Without telling her. She’d sat on the floor of his study holding it, and then she’d put it back exactly where she’d found it, and she’d gone downstairs and made him dinner.