The Things They Never Said

"He used to sleep outside my door."

Clara spoke so quietly that Damian bent his head to hear.

"Ethan. When we were little. I thought he was afraid of the dark."

Her fingers twisted in the sheet. He covered them with his hand, and for once she didn't try to make her distress smaller for him.

"There were too many children in that house. The money my father left never seemed to last. Lorraine played cards. Raymond stayed home. If something broke, somebody had to have broken it. If he couldn't find his cigarettes, somebody had stolen them."

Damian kept his face against her hair.

"Ethan always said it was him. Even when it couldn't have been. Even when he hadn't been home."

He had known Ethan as an anxious man who couldn't quite meet his eyes. A man who had accepted a job and then taken money he shouldn't have touched.

He had never pictured that man as a boy standing between a raised hand and a little girl.

"Before he left for college, he told Audrey to watch me. She was only two years older. He made her promise."

Clara swallowed.

"I thought he meant I shouldn't miss the bus. Or forget my coat."

The room was warm. Damian felt suddenly cold.

She looked past him toward the closed curtains.

"Raymond hurt them. Ethan. Audrey. Shelby too. Not just with his fists."

His hand stopped moving against her back.

For a moment he couldn't hear anything but his own blood.

"Clara."

She didn't seem to hear him.

"Ethan put me in boarding school when I was twelve. I cried because I didn't know how to make the bed properly. He did it for me. Tucked everything in. Told me I wasn't to come home for weekends unless he was there."

She gave a small, bewildered shake of her head.

"I thought he was sending me away."

Damian held her more carefully.

He wanted to ask a question he couldn't force through his throat. She answered it without knowing.

"He kept him away from me. They all did, somehow. And I left them there."

"You were a child."

"Later I wasn't. Later I knew enough. I just wanted to be somewhere else. I wanted clean clothes and a room nobody could come into. I wanted to forget we were related."

Her breath caught against his chest.

"Does that make me terrible?"

"No."

"They said I thought I was better than them."

"Look at me."

She couldn't.

He touched her cheek instead, catching a tear with his thumb and finding there were too many to catch.

"You got yourself out. Ethan wanted that."

"And what did he get?"

Damian had no answer that would bring anyone back.

He stayed while she cried. When she finally slept, her hand remained closed around his sleeve.

He sat very still until her grip loosened.

Then he went into the bathroom and stood beneath cold water, both palms against the tile, trying to get the image of a frightened twelve-year-old girl out of his head.

Before dawn he called Vince.

"Get the car."

"Where are we going?"

Damian gave him Raymond's address.

***

Clara slept through the following morning and most of the afternoon.

When she woke, the room was dark again. Damian sat beside the bed, still wearing the same clothes. His knuckles were swollen.

She looked at him for a long time.

"You're here."

He caught her hand and bent over it.

"I missed you," he said.

His mouth was warm against her palm.

They had spent months passing each other in corridors, exchanging practical messages, sleeping on opposite sides of beds. Yet she couldn't remember when they had last touched without either anger or exhaustion coming between them.

For a moment she wanted to pull him down beside her.

Instead she got up and went to wash her face.

He followed as far as the bathroom door.

"I'll get you something to eat. What do you want?"

She braced both hands on the sink.

The question in her head had been there since she opened Ethan's letter. Sleep hadn't changed it.

"Why did you fire him?"

Damian's reflection went still behind hers.

"Clara."

"It was three thousand dollars."

"He falsified an order."

"You've spent more than that on a dinner."

He stared at her.

She knew the comparison was wrong. She could almost hear her own voice from months ago, furious that he had employed Ethan behind her back.

But the money was in an envelope downstairs, and Ethan was dead, and all the reasons that had once seemed reasonable felt impossibly small.

"If he hadn't gone back to Seattle—"

"Are you blaming me?"

She shook her head. Tears fell anyway.

"He had nowhere else to go."

"I gave him work, and you were angry with me. He cheated the company, I let him go, and you're angry with me for that too. Tell me what I was supposed to do."

His voice rose on the last words.

She flinched. He saw it and looked away, breathing hard.

"I don't know," she whispered.

It was the only honest answer she had.

He struck the doorframe with the heel of his hand.

"Neither do I anymore."

When he left, the door slammed hard enough to shake the mirror.

Clara stood at the sink until the water went cold.

By evening she had packed three sweaters, her work clothes, and the books she'd brought home. She drove the silver convertible back to Westbridge with the roof shut and the heater turned too high.

Neither of them called to ask whether she had arrived.

***

December filled itself with deadlines.

Clara worked on project handovers, revised her portfolio, and enrolled in an evening admissions workshop. Cambridge was one possibility. So were programs in Paris and several American cities. She collected requirements before deciding which future she could afford to want.

Vince appeared outside her office twice before she noticed him.

The third time she walked straight to his SUV.

"Tell him to stop this."

Vince looked miserable.

"He just wanted to know you were all right."

"He has my number."

"You have his too."

She closed his car door more sharply than she meant to.

That evening Damian sat at a business dinner while the man beside him suggested, laughing, that he needed company.

A woman rested her hand on his shoulder.

"Someone this handsome shouldn't go home alone."

He removed her hand.

"I'm married."

"Since when? You never bring her."

The question stayed with him long after the laughter moved on.

Owen found him in a private lounge afterward, turning his phone over between his hands.

"Call her."

"She's busy."

"Then let her tell you that."

Vince arrived and reported, with the air of a man admitting military defeat, that Clara had caught him.

Damian cursed at him without much conviction.

"What's she doing?"

"Work. Classes. Putting together school applications."

Owen watched Damian's face change.

"You need to talk to your wife."

He went into the hallway to make the call.

Clara answered on the fourth ring, a pen between her teeth, a submission deadline bright on her screen.

"Why are you having me followed?"

He closed his eyes.

Behind him, somebody opened the lounge door. Music and laughter burst into the corridor.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"A dinner."

"Of course. I'm trying to finish something, Damian. I don't have time for this."

"For what?"

"For Vince outside my office. For guessing where you are. For hearing parties every time you call."

The door closed. The corridor became quiet.

He stared at his reflection in the dark window.

"When are you coming home?" he asked.

The line clicked dead before he finished.

Clara had already turned back to the drawing on her screen.

Damian stayed by the window, holding the silent phone to his ear.