Chapter 8 She Doesn't Deny It

• Chapter Eight: She Doesn’t Deny It
• He called at eleven at night.
• “Come downstairs.”
• I looked at my phone then as if I had all the time in the world. I slowly looked at the window. Then at the glass of wine I hadn’t finished.
• “I’m sorry?”
• “I’m outside your building.” A pause. “Please.”
• The please was the most alarming thing he’d said to me in two months because Daniel Ellison did not say please.
• He assumed and he proceeded and he twisted things when necessary but the word please in his mouth was a foreign object, something he’d had to locate from somewhere unfamiliar.
• I put on my coat and went downstairs.
• He was standing on the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets and no jacket despite the cold, which meant he’d left wherever he was in a hurry and hadn’t thought about it.
• His car was at the curb with the door still open, and the driver staring carefully at nothing.
• He looked at me for a long moment.
• “Walk with me,” he said, and I almost turned him down but what harm can a toothless dog do yeah?
• So we walked.
• Half a block in silence, the city doing its late night thing around us, sparse and indifferent. I kept my pace even and my hands in my pockets and I waited because I had been waiting for three years and another five minutes was nothing.
• “I found a photograph,” he said.
• “Okay.”
• “Old one. From a — it doesn’t matter where from.” He stopped walking. I stopped two steps after and turned to look at him. “The woman in it had your face.”
• “That’s an unusual thing to say to someone.”
• “She had your face and she was my wife.” His voice was very controlled like it had a whole lot happening underneath it. “My wife who died.”
• The street was quiet enough that I could hear the car idling at the curb behind us. I stood in the cold and I looked at him and I let the silence be whatever it needed to be.
• Like should i say ‘may your wife's souls rest in peace’ or something?
• “Daniel.”
• “Don’t.” The word came out hard. “Don’t do the thing where you make me feel like I’m losing my mind. I’ve been doing that to myself for two weeks and I’m finished with it.” He took a step toward me.
• “Tell me I’m wrong.”
• I looked at him for a long moment.
• “I can’t do that,” I said.
• The sound he made wasn’t quite a word. It moved through him like something structural giving way, slow and deep and irreversible, and I watched it happen but I kept my face very still and I did not look away because I had promised myself I would not look away from this part.
• “How,” he asked simply like it could unravel the wickedness of all he did to me.
• “Carefully,” I said. “And with a lot of help.”
• “You’ve been here for two months.”
• “Yes.”
• “The whole time you knew and you sat across from me and you —” He stopped. Pressed his hand over his mouth. Dropped it. “Mara.”
• “Don’t call me that.”
• The words came out quieter than I intended. He heard it and I could see the moment his eyes changed.
• “That’s not my name anymore,” I said. “That woman is dead. You made sure of it.”
• “I need you to listen to me —”
• “No.” My voice was still quiet and even. “You don’t get to need things from me. That’s not how this works.”
• He reached for my arm and I stepped back and something crossed his face at that, at the step back, at what it meant about what he’d become that my instinct was to move away from his hand.
• He dropped it.
• “I made a mistake,” he said.
• The laugh that came out of me was so small and it sounded like an evil cackle that it surprised us both.
• “A mistake?” I said.
• “I was —”
• “You put me in a box, Daniel and you called that a what? A mistake?”
• My voice was still level. That was the thing about three years of building toward a moment because when it arrived I didn’t need to be loud.
• “You broke my wrist and you put me in a box and you put me in the ground and you went home to her.” I tilted my head. “What word were you going to use after mistake? Because I’m curious.”
• He had gone very pale.
• “I can fix this,” he said.
• “You can’t.”
• “Whatever you’ve done — whatever you’re doing to the company — we can talk about it. We can —”
• “I don’t want to talk about the company.”
• “Then what do you want?”
• I looked at him standing there on the sidewalk, coatless in the cold, and I thought about the dinner where I’d watched him decide I was more convenient dead. The pale blue satin and the warm thin air. My hands against the wood.
• “I already have it,” I said.
• His phone buzzed in his pocket, then again. Then a third time in quick succession, the specific cadence of an escalating emergency, and I watched him register it without looking at it, watched him weigh looking at it against looking at me, watched him lose both.
• “Answer it,” I said.
• “Mara —”
• “Answer your phone, Daniel.”
• He looked at it and whatever he saw on the screen moved through his face in layers, confusion first, then a dawning that wasn’t unlike what I’d seen in his office two weeks ago except larger and faster and with nowhere to go.
• He looked up at me.
• “What did you do?,” he asked in a voice that was a shadow of his usual self. .
• I buttoned my coat against the cold.
• “Go handle your company,” I said. “We’re done here.”
• I walked back to my building and I didn’t look back but behind me I heard him say my name once more, the old name, the dead one, into the cold air and everything already on fire around him.
• I went upstairs to finish my overpriced wine.