Chapter 101

[ 833 words ]

Delia’s POV

I felt like crying because he will never change towards me. “Crystal,” I said.

“Good p>

I walked out. I pulled the door closed behind me with the same care I had used to open it. I stood in the hallway for a moment in the dark, the estate quiet around me, the particular silence of a house full of things unsaid.

Then I went to my room.

I sat on the edge of my bed, and I looked at the wall, and I thought about the way Julian had looked at me in the last thirty seconds of that conversation. The revised assessment. The acknowledgement that I am, after all, furniture.

I picked up my phone. My mother answered on the second ring, which meant she had been awake and waiting for a reason to be called, which with Martha Kensington was essentially always.

“I need to talk,” I said.

“I’ll put the kettle on,” she said immediately. “Come now p>

I looked at the clock. It was eleven fifteen. The Kensington house was forty minutes away. Julian’s car was in the garage. He was in his study and would not notice or care that I had gone.

“I’ll be there in an hour,” I said.

I got up. I got dressed. I went downstairs quietly and took a car from the garage and drove through the dark city toward my mother’s house with the specific, cold clarity of a woman who had just said something true out loud for the first time and was deciding what to do with the fact that saying it had changed nothing and also changed everything.

The city moved past the windows.

I thought about Dubai.

About Katia in Dubai.

About Julian in Dubai with Katia.

By the time I reached my mother’s house, I had stopped thinking about what I wanted and started thinking about what I was going to do.

Those were, I had learned, two very different questions.

My mother was already at the door when I pulled into the driveway.

She had that quality of always being positioned correctly. At events, at dinners, at the entrance of her own home at midnight when her youngest daughter arrived unannounced with something on her face that required tea and an audience. She stood in the light of the doorway in her robe and her reading glasses, and she looked at me the way she had looked at me my entire life — like I was a problem she was confident she could solve.

I had always found it comforting.

Tonight I was not sure it was going to be enough.

“Come in,” she said. She put her arm around my shoulders and steered me inside with the practised efficiency of a woman who had managed difficult evenings for forty years. “I’ve made tea. Sit p>

My mother’s kitchen at midnight was a specific kind of familiar — the particular smell of it, the way the light above the stove cast everything in warm yellow, and the faint sound of the house settling around us. I had grown up in this kitchen. I had eaten breakfast here every morning of my childhood and complained about school and argued with Katia and watched my mother move through it with the brisk authority of someone who considered the kitchen her operational headquarters.

I sat.

Mama poured. She set the cup in front of me and sat across from me and folded her hands on the table and looked at me with the focused attention she reserved for situations that required her full strategic capacity.

“Tell me,” she said.

So I told her.

Not everything — I was careful about what I gave my mother and had been careful for years because Mama was a woman who took information and used it, and not always in the ways you intended when you handed it over. I told her about the confrontation in the study. About what I had said and what Julian had said back. I told her about Katia — about the way Julian looked at her, the way every room they were both in had a specific gravity that pulled him toward her without him appearing to notice he was being pulled.

I told her Julian was going to Dubai with Katia tomorrow.

Mama listened to all of it. She did not interrupt, which was unusual for her — she was a woman who liked to insert herself into narratives, to redirect them, to take the wheel. Tonight she sat with her tea, and she listened, and her expression moved through several things I watched carefully: concern, calculation, something that looked briefly like guilt and was gone before I could be sure of it, and finally settling into the particular set of her jaw that meant she had reached a conclusion and was preparing to deliver it.

“You need to try harder,” she said. I looked at her. “A new dress. A different approach. Men respond to p>

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