Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
She didn't even want him for herself.
She wanted him for God.
The thought arrived without warning, and he set it aside with the efficiency of a man who had spent his life setting aside things that didn't fit his framework. But setting it aside took more effort than it should have, and the effort itself was information he chose not to examine.
His wife still looked like she had won a billion bucks when he kissed the top of her head before leaving for work. Her face was incandescent, the joy so total and so uncontained that it transformed her entirely, not into someone beautiful, because Chelsea's effect had never operated along those lines, but into someone whose happiness was so genuine that it made the air around her feel different, warmer, and she had absolutely no awareness of what it did to the people standing in its path.
He carried the book in his left hand. He had not put it in his briefcase.
She noticed. He knew she noticed, because her smile changed, deepened, softened, became something private and trembling, and he had to look away from it because looking at it was doing something to his ability to walk in a straight line toward the door.
"Have a good day, tesoro."
"You too." Her voice was small and bright and full. "I love—-I mean, I'll see you tonight."
She caught herself.
He heard it anyway.
The door closed behind him, and the last image he carried was her standing in the foyer in the oversized t-shirt she'd stolen from his closet on Day Three and the pair of wool socks she insisted on wearing indoors because the marble floors were cold, holding her chipped white mug in both hands and looking at him the way she always looked at him when he left, like she was already counting the hours until he came back.
The elevator was empty. He stood with his back against the wall and the book in his hand and his wife's voice in his head.
I love—-
She had caught herself. But he had heard it, the way he heard everything she said and everything she didn't say, and the difference between the two had become its own language, one he had not consented to learning but had apparently become fluent in anyway.
He looked at the book. Its spine was soft with use. A green tab marked a page near the beginning, and a pink one near the end, and several blue ones scattered throughout, and he thought of her color-coded Bible and her highlighters and the way she organized her faith with the same earnest diligence she brought to everything, and something behind his ribs shifted, not tightened, not ached, but shifted, the way the ground shifted before something gave way.
The car was waiting.
He slid into the backseat, and the door closed, and the city began to move past the tinted windows, and it was only then, safely away from his wife's joy and the luminous wreckage of her happiness, that he allowed himself to stop performing.
His jaw set. His hand, the one not holding the book, closed slowly into a fist against his thigh.
His wife loved him. And she loved a version of him that was real, those gestures were real, those impulses were not performed, but that man existed alongside another man who had sat in this same backseat nine days ago and calculated the utility of a convenient marriage while his new wife slept against his shoulder with her hand on his thigh.
The Marquez dinner had already happened. Three nights ago. Chelsea beside him in the green dress, her hand finding his under the table whenever the conversation paused, her genuine fascination with Miriam's work transforming what should have been a strategic dinner into something that had left the elderly couple visibly charmed and the deal all but signed.
She had been magnificent. And she had been magnificent because she was herself, and he had brought her there because he knew she would be, and the knowledge that he had used the very thing that made her extraordinary sat in him now like something swallowed that would not go down.
Precious is not the same as necessary, he had told himself nine days ago.
But that was before she had handed him a book about Jesus with tabs in it and asked him to go to Heaven. Before she had almost said I love you and caught herself and smiled at him from the foyer in his stolen t-shirt and her wool socks and looked at him like he was the entire world, and he had walked out the door carrying her book and her trust and the quiet, corrosive certainty that he deserved neither.
His brother's voice came to him, uninvited.
You understand exactly what you have. And you are going to ruin it anyway, because knowing frightens you more than not knowing ever frightened me.