Chapter 2
She didn’t stop at the bottom of the steps.
The sidewalk was cold enough to shock her whole body awake — one flash of real, of now, before the numbness came back. The Grand Meridian’s lights threw her shadow long and thin across the wet pavement. Somewhere behind her the doors opened again.
“Elena.”
She kept walking.
“Elena — stop.”
Jessica’s hand caught her arm and spun her around. Marcus’s sister stood in the rain in a five-hundred-dollar dress with no umbrella, mascara running in dark ribbons down both cheeks, looking at Elena like she’d just watched someone walk off a cliff.
“What the hell were you thinking?”
“I was thinking I’m done.”
Elena’s voice came out steady. Too steady. It was the voice of something that had already broken and stopped hurting.
“Done.” Jessica’s laugh was awful. “You just humiliated him in front of the mayor. The city council. Every investor he has.”
“I know.”
“Do you have any idea what he’s going to —”
“He called me a placeholder, Jess.”
The words landed like stones dropped into still water. Jessica’s mouth opened. Closed.
“An hour ago. He pulled me into the coat room by the kitchen and he told me I was a placeholder. A beautiful, expensive placeholder. Until he found someone worthy of the Martinez name.”
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.
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.
May you like
She had nothing. She had a borrowed jacket and a cup of tea she couldn’t pay for.
Sophie set the tea down. Elena wrapped both hands around it and looked out the window at the rain, and for the first time in twelve years, she did not calculate how she was going to get home.
