Part 5
“Julian told them,” she said.
“Told them what?”
“That we’re married.”
Another silence.
“How do you feel about that?” Naomi asked.
Mara almost said relieved. Almost said betrayed. Almost said nothing mattered compared with the baby’s heartbeat.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s becoming your sentence tonight.”
“It’s accurate.”
“Okay.”
Naomi’s voice softened. “Then don’t decide anything tonight. Not about work. Not about the marriage. Not about public statements. Eat something. Go home. Lock the door.”
Mara watched Julian turn slightly, checking without appearing to check.
“Come tomorrow,” she said.
“I’m already looking at trains.”
“Not tonight.”
“Morning, then.”
After the call, Mara remained in the car.
Julian approached only when she looked toward him.
“She’s coming tomorrow,” Mara said.
“Good.”
He placed the severed braid, now wrapped in a clean hospital towel, in the back seat.
Mara looked at it. “I don’t want that near me.”
He removed it immediately and put it in the trunk.
On the drive home, neither of them spoke for the first ten minutes.
Snow moved through the headlights. The roads were mostly empty, salt-streaked and shining. Julian kept both hands on the wheel. Mara drank water from a hospital cup and counted the baby’s movements because counting gave fear a shape.
At a red light, Julian said, “I was going to surprise you.”
She turned toward him.
“I changed my flight,” he continued. “I thought I’d stand at the back during the auction, let you notice me, and then take you home.”
Mara pictured the version of the evening that had been denied them. She would have seen him near the musicians, pretending not to watch her. Later they would have eaten leftover gala cake in the kitchen because the caterer always sent extra. Julian would complain about fondant. She would say he ate it anyway. They might have argued about when to announce the marriage, but privately, in clothes that belonged to them.
“What happened before I came down?” he asked.
Mara watched the light change.
He drove on.
“She accused me of replacing the Harcourt ledger with a reproduction.”
“Why?”
“Because I had.”
Julian looked at her sharply.
“The original cannot sit in a ballroom for six hours under chandeliers with two hundred people breathing on it,” Mara said. “The facsimile was approved by conservation. The label explained it.”
“Then why accuse you?”
“Edwin Harcourt asked whether it was the real ledger. I said no before she could answer.”
Julian’s mouth tightened. “You contradicted her.”
“I answered a question.”
“To Vivienne, those are the same thing.”
Mara drank more water.
“She told me to bring out the original. I refused. She said I was humiliating her. I said the archive did not exist to decorate her donor pitch.”
Julian glanced at her.
“That was not diplomatic,” Mara admitted.
“No.”
“I was tired.”
“You were right.”
“I can be right and undiplomatic.”
A small, helpless breath of laughter escaped him.
It vanished quickly, but Mara heard it.
“She knocked the orchids?” he asked.
“I backed away. My hip hit the table. The arrangement fell. The vase cracked but didn’t shatter. She said I had done it deliberately.”
“And then?”
Mara looked out the window.
A gas station passed, bright and empty. A man in a knit cap stood beside a pickup truck, scraping ice from the windshield with a plastic card.
“She told me to clean it up,” Mara said. “I knelt because I was afraid I’d slip on the water. She came behind me. She said my braid was inappropriate for staff.”
Julian’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel.
“I told her not to touch me.”
He waited.
“She grabbed it anyway.”
The car’s tires hummed over wet pavement.
“Did she say anything while she cut it?” he asked.
Mara could hear the scissors again.
Two failed bites. A pause. Vivienne’s breath near her ear. Then the final closing of the blades.
“She said she was correcting the problem.”
Julian pulled onto the shoulder.
He stopped the car and put it in park.
For several seconds, he stared through the windshield at the falling snow.
Mara did not touch him.
When he finally looked at her, his eyes were wet but his face remained controlled.
“I am so sorry.”
The apology was different from the one in the library. It contained no argument.
Mara’s anger loosened enough for grief to enter.
“She knew I was pregnant,” she said.
“I know.”
“No. I need you to understand. She saw me holding my stomach. She knew.”
Julian nodded once.
Mara began crying then, not loudly. The tears came without sobbing, sliding down her face while she sat very straight in the passenger seat.
Julian unfastened his seat belt but did not reach across until she lifted one hand.
He held it between both of his.
They stayed on the roadside until her breathing settled.
At home, Julian heated soup while Mara showered.
Dark strands of hair clung to her shoulders and washed toward the drain. She stood beneath the water with one hand braced against the tile. When she touched the cut side, her fingers found blunt, uneven ends that did not belong to the image in her mind.
She had worn her hair long since graduate school, partly because she liked it and partly because cutting it required decisions she never seemed to have time for. Her mother had braided it when Mara was a child, pulling too tightly and apologizing only after Mara complained. After their mother died, Naomi had tried once. The result leaned sideways, and they laughed until both of them cried.
Mara turned off the water.
In the mirror, the asymmetry looked more severe.
She found Julian’s beard trimmer in the cabinet, held it for a moment, then put it down.
He knocked softly. “Food is ready.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“The hospital said—”
“I heard them.”
A pause.
May you like
“I’ll leave it on the stove.”
Mara wrapped herself in a robe and sat on the closed toilet lid. She remained there until the bathroom cooled around her.
