The first thing Lena became aware of when she finally came round was the flowers. White roses-at least two dozen of them-arranged in a crystal vase on the windowsill with the sort of clinical perfection one gets by ordering flowers over the telephone, and not by wandering round some nursery selecting their own.
Perfect in the same sort of way that any expensive, anonymous object is perfect. Cold in the same sort of way.
The morning sun slanted in through the blinds in a series of stark, sharp lines, catching the petals at an angle that might have been quite beautiful at another time, and Lena just lay there in the cotton-wool haze of post-anaesthesia looking at them for a moment before it all rushed back.
The monitor. The surgeon's precise expression. The set of Margaret's ankles. The picture on her phone, so clear and candlelit, Vivienne's hair brushing the tip of Ethan's shoulder. She closed her eyes again. Breathed. Opened them. The flowers were still there. Ethan was still there.
He was sitting in the chair by her bed, minus his jacket, shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows, arm draped over his knee, his head propped slightly forward as though he had fallen asleep in that position a few hours earlier.
His hair was just not quite right, not so that any passing casual eye would be able to note anything that was out of place; he wasn't dressed in anything less than immaculate even when asleep, but the careful artifice was missing somewhere, something beneath the surface, something younger. The cup of coffee on the floor by his foot looked like it had been standing there for a long time. He'd been there for ages.
Lena watched him sleep longer than she would ever tell anyone.
This was always the hardest thing about Ethan Ashford, not the coldness, not the distance, not even Vivienne but these unmediated moments when the man she had loved briefly wore through the architecture he'd constructed around himself. The line of his jaw. The knitting of his brow even in sleep. He was always worrying. She loved him so much, so specifically, and for a long time believed that love of that precision required love of that precision in return. The specificity of it was a contract in itself.
She knew differently now.
She picked up the water glass on his night stand and woke him. He sat up so quickly that people who have trained themselves not to be surprised do, and before his face settled into its familiar expression there was a momentary flash across it of something exposed. Recognition, maybe. Guilt dressed as recognition. Hard to differentiate those two with Ethan.
You're awake, he said. It was a low rough sound and he cleared his throat.
"So it appears." She took a long swallow of water. The plastic tasted flat, it was true, but she didn't mind it. "You really didn't have to stick around."
Something flickered across his features. "Lena."
"I mean it. Routine procedure, they said to Margaret so..." She set down the glass and tried to keep her voice smooth. She had years of experience of keeping her voice smooth with this man, ironing herself out into such smooth surfaces that he had no purchase on, and she recognized, dully, that she was doing it again, without thought, merely out of the muscle memory ingrained through a lifetime of such behaviour. "You should have gone on home then. I believe there was some Hargrove closing this morning?"
His expression at the mention of the deal was not guilt, or not just guilt. There was too much that was more complicated than that for her to want to call it guilt. Guilt would have been simple.
"The deal can wait," he said.
"The deal couldn't wait last night."
The sentence sounded softer, not quite the sentence she had been expecting herself to make and lacking the armour she'd intended her words to wear as they landed, and the space between them held them captive, unable to move, unable to escape.
Ethan's eyes stayed on her face and she had to give him credit for that; he held her gaze and watched her in the brief moments of indecision when she could feel the calculations of the different choices that flickered through his eyes before they settled in his mind, then he dropped his elbows onto his knees and paused.
"I was here at eight," he said. "Waiting. Before you finished your surgery."
"I knew that."
He seemed surprised. She could see the surprise:
"Claire, the night nurse-she said so this morning when she was in checking vitals." Lena looked toward the roses on the sill. "She thought it was very romantic that you waited all night without letting anyone know you were here." There was a silence. "I didn't know what to do with myself."
Ethan was silent. The sounds of the hospital in the morning – the clatter of carts and steps, someone's television two doors down-were faint in the room.
"I sent for the flowers." It was such an Ethan answer, pragmatic and dismissive of the real thing and deflecting toward things to point at or order or arrange. A dinner. A piece of jewellery. White roses in a crystal vase procured by someone who didn't even know her name. Something in Lena's chest cinched tight with the familiar ache of something like love that had nothing to do with anything angry. He always did that. When the words didn't work or felt too raw, he threw something at the situation.
"They are lovely," she said. Because they were.
"Lena." He said her name with a new inflection now, lower, simpler. "Last night was... I shouldn't have. I was wrong."
And then she saw him. Really saw him. There were circles under his eyes and that particular tautness to the line of his jaw which said a man who didn't say sorry very often, and for whom even that sentence felt like building some impossible structure with unfamiliar materials. A part of her, the one that had known and loved him so precisely, still wanted to reach out and take that construction apart for him. It was still there. She wasn't sure what she was doing, still standing here.
But beneath that, buried somewhere deeper and quieter, was the other. The resolution that had taken shape while the anaesthesia ascended. The number she still remembered.
"You were photographed."
A pause, not long but she felt it. "I know."
"The gossip sites had it within an hour. And the article said someone sent it to them; Ethan, that picture didn't occur by accident, someone wanted it taken and they wanted me to see it." He visibly flinched; "I'm not saying that was you; I'm saying that someone orbiting you is playing a game where apparently I was the board that they've been moving around without anyone informing me there was a game."
"Vivienne and I attended the Hargrove dinner. Her family has an investment in the acquisition, her father, Marcus Cole, one of the board members who had to be managed prior to tomorrow. It was business."
"I know who Marcus Cole is."
A subtle flicker crossed his face, a contained movement, deliberate. "The picture made it look worse than it was."
"Most things do." She said it without reproach, just an observation and somehow that calmed him more than any of her anger ever could; she knew Ethan too well to ever really know anything about him; he hated it when she got angry; he knew what to do with that, but quiet made him squirm. "I'm not getting into a fight about Vivienne; I had surgery today, I feel like I've been hit by something the size of an elephant and I'm going to rest."
He stood up, deliberately slowly. Ran one hand over his already-disheveled hair. "I'll have the car waiting when they let you out. I could come back this afternoon and..."
"My friend Sera is coming over this afternoon."
There was another beat. Longer. "Right." It was said in the tone of someone who has completely overlooked someone and she'd witnessed it in her life with Ethan over the years – his penchant for conveniently not acknowledging that her life had a tendency to just keep going on even when he wasn't actually present in it. "I'll, um, tonight then. We can discuss it properly tonight."
He picked up his jacket from off the back of the chair, and she watched him, her head tilted back against the pillows, and she thought of three years of nights spent lying awake listening to him coming home in the early hours, three years of conversations that skirted entirely around what they ought to have been saying to each other, three years of being Ethan Ashford's wife that required, in a constant, quiet way, that she be somewhat less than what she was.
"Ethan." He stopped by the door. She kept her voice mild, as she wasn't cruel, and never wanted to be. "Thank you for the roses, they are beautiful."
He looked back at her, and she couldn't tell what he was thinking – there was something of a mixture of apprehension and relief in his gaze, like a man expecting a bombing that had only ever received a slightly inconvenient and frustratingly quiet air-strike instead.
"Sleep well," he said.
And he was gone.
Lena sat alone in the emptiness he left and after a moment she looked for her phone and thumbed through some forty notifications, and three voicemails from numbers she didn't know, and a text from Margaret that just read, glad you came through, and opened her contacts. Scrolled down to a name she hadn't touched in three years. A name she'd had stored on her phone by a single initial, because even storing her full name had seemed too much like turning a corner she was in no position to turn.
She sat there with it for a long time.
Then she heard the sounds of footsteps in the hall outside her door, quick and efficient, and the door burst open and Sera Okafor was upon her like a force of nature, scarf dragging on the floor, half-buttoned coat, a paper bag of take out in one hand, and the corners of her eyes red in the specific way that indicates someone who has been crying in a car and who is definitely not over it yet.
I swear to God, she said, dumping the bag on the visitors' chair, and coming directly to Lena and taking her face in both hands and looking her over with the kind of devoted, possessive fierceness that only friends who have known each other for half a lifetime could manage. I swear to absolute God Lena, if you ever, ever land in a hospital before you call me I will, I don't even know what I'll do, but it'll be dramatic. You okay? Don't tell me you're okay.
It wasn't, but Lena felt a space bloom in her chest. I'm okay.
Sera sat down on the edge of the bed and took hold of Sera's hand, not releasing her grasp and neither said a word for a good few minutes while morning light traced patterns across the white roses on the windowsill. Lena was silent, thinking as always, the wheels of something huge turning at a deliberate and considered pace at the back of her mind.
"Sera," she said, still not looking at the roses. "You remember three years ago... when I told you I was out of the company, out of all of it."
Sera went very still. "I remember."
"You remember what you said to me."
There was a beat of silence. Deliberate. "I said you'd regret it."
"I did." Lena looked down at her mobile, at the one letter in her contacts like a key. "I think I'm about to make a phone call."
Sera looked at her for a long moment. There was a shift of expression through her face, one of surprise first, then something older and more serious underneath it, a sort of knowing regard you might cast on someone watching the last moves of a very long game.
"How long have you been planning this?" Sera asked, quiet.
Lena looked up, and something in her expression had changed in a minute way, like a light turned behind glass, though, because Sera had known her fifteen years, she'd seen it. The softness was still there in some way, but there was also something else just underneath and below it- something that had been dormant for a very long time.
"I haven't been planning this," Lena said. "I've been surviving it. There's a difference." She looked back down at the mobile. "But I think I'm ready for that to end."
She pressed call.
