Chapter 9
Chapter 9
"Sign the papers," she said. "I get the flat, the car, all liquid assets. You keep the child."
He picked up the papers and tore them down the middle, then in half again, then into small pieces, and dropped them at her feet.
"You told me," he said, "that you loved me regardless of what I had or didn't have. That you'd marry me if I was penniless. That upper-class grievances were not going to define our relationship." He watched her face. "Was any of that true?"
"That was then." Her chin came up. "I'm not staying with someone who can't support a family."
"Then we'll see what the court says."
He brought the letters to the hearing. Her texts. Her vows. The declaration she'd made in front of two hundred people: I choose him, in wealth and in hardship, without condition.
The judge looked at the evidence. She looked at Vivienne.
"Marital breakdown not established," she said. "Application denied."
Vivienne went home and threw every breakable object in the flat.
Ethan let her. When she stopped, he swept up the pieces, washed the dishes, and made dinner.
She sold her handbags and luxury goods to fund an escape. He'd already moved the money. Her credit cards had been quietly suspended. Her social accounts had gone quiet — the friends, sensing changed fortunes, had redirected their energy elsewhere.
She ended up at The Cavendish Hotel, which, in retrospect, was a poor choice of location. She found a man there — rich, bored, self-important — who was happy to provide what she was looking for.
Ethan provided the man with photographs, taken by someone he'd hired for the purpose.
The man was furious. Vivienne came home limping, with a broken bone in her leg that the doctors eventually confirmed would not heal straight.
After that, she stopped talking about leaving.
She started cooking. She started asking what Ethan wanted for dinner. She smiled at him in a way that was new — careful, watchful, placating. He looked back at her with the expression of someone who has long since stopped finding the view interesting.
She began to take her frustrations out on the child.
He saw the signs and said nothing, waiting.
One evening she went too far.
He called 999 for an ambulance and 999 for the police in the same breath and gave both operators the address in a level voice, and said that his wife had had a breakdown and there was an injured child who needed immediate attention.
Vivienne was taken to Ashford Psychiatric Institute.
The child — a boy, fourteen months old, with Ethan's eyes and a disposition toward calm that neither parent had earned — was placed at Brightfields Children's Home.
Ethan sat in an empty flat and thought about what he'd done and what it had cost and whether the calculation had been right.
He picked up his phone.
He found his mother's number. He pressed call.
The number you have dialled is not available.
He had been blocked. He had known he would be. He pressed call again anyway and listened to the recording end and pressed call again.
On the third time, sitting on the floor with his back against the sofa, he started crying.
He just wanted to hear her voice. Once. Before the end of things.
He woke up in St. Claire's Medical Center.
The ceiling was white. The smell was antiseptic. There was a drip in the back of his hand.
Not his mother sitting beside him.
Gemma.
She was peeling an apple with the concentration of someone who had decided this task was the only thing happening in the world right now. The peel came off in one long continuous spiral.
He tried to sit up. The drip caught and the needle shifted, and a small bloom of blood appeared on the back of his hand.
Gemma put a hand on his shoulder without looking up from the apple. "Don't."
He lay back.
"Did she—" he started.
Gemma shook her head without asking him to finish the sentence.
He stared at the ceiling. The light above him was steady and indifferent.
"She has people watching your situation," Gemma said, after a while. "Has done since your father was arrested. That's how we got to you in time."
He didn't say anything.
"She knows about the delivery work. The hand injury. The child's medical bills when you couldn't cover them. She knows you've been standing outside the building in the rain." Gemma bit into the apple slice. "She knows all of it."
His throat worked.
"But she won't see me."
"No."
"I put her through too much."
"Yes."
Gemma stood up and collected her things and walked to the door. She stopped with her hand on the frame.
"She's afraid," she said, to the door rather than to him. "Not of you. Of herself. Of what she'll do if she sees you. She's afraid she'll forgive you before she's ready. She's been hurt too many times by that particular reflex." She looked at the linoleum. "You almost died. And you're wondering whether to try again. I'm telling you — if you still want to die, go somewhere she won't hear about it. Don't put that on her."
She left.