Chapter 5
She never mentioned it. Not once. That was the part she couldn’t think about too closely.
Elena’s legs gave out somewhere around Wabash.
She sat down hard on a bench and pulled her knees up into the ruined silk of her gown and shook. Not crying — she was too empty for crying. Just shaking, the whole body, teeth chattering, the rain coming down steady, a young couple across the street walking past under one umbrella, the woman’s head on the man’s shoulder, both of them laughing at something Elena couldn’t hear.
She couldn’t remember the last time Marcus had touched her with affection. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had.
“Miss.”
Elena looked up.
A young woman stood in front of her holding a jacket — puffy, dark blue, patched at one elbow. She had a round, kind face and wet hair and she was looking at Elena with an expression that Elena genuinely didn’t recognize for a moment, because nobody had looked at her that way in years.
Concern. That was what it was. Simple, uncomplicated concern.
“You’re going to freeze,” the woman said. She held out the jacket. “There’s a café around the corner. I work there. Come inside.”
“I can’t —”
“You don’t have to pay. Come inside.”
Elena wanted to say no. She wanted to prove that she could handle this alone, that she was not some fragile thing that needed rescuing ten minutes after walking out the door. Pride was a luxury she’d lost somewhere between the coat room and the ballroom.
“Okay,” she said.
The café was small and warm and half-empty, and it smelled like coffee and cinnamon and someone’s wet wool. The woman steered her into a corner booth and disappeared, and came back with water, a towel, and a menu she set face-down on the table.
“Tea, coffee? Kitchen’s closed but I can do toast.”
“I don’t have money.”
The admission burned all the way up.
“I didn’t ask if you had money.” Her voice was gentle. “I asked if you wanted something hot.”
“Tea. Please.”
The woman smiled. “I’m Sophie. I’ll be right back.”
Elena pressed the towel to her face and sat in that booth and did the arithmetic of her life.
Thirty-four years old. No job — Marcus had insisted she quit teaching, because a fourth-grade classroom was beneath the wife of Marcus Martinez. No money. No friends — he’d dismantled them one by one over the years, always with a reason, always so reasonable. No family close by. Her mother was three years dead. Her father had taken Marcus’s money and chosen it over her, again and again, every year at Christmas, every birthday.