Beneath a Transparent Dream novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Terms

Eli offers two weeks of being seen together, a loft with a lock on the inside and three terms; a handshake lasts too long, and Cora texts an invitation to soup.

"First," Eli said, "I'm not asking you to forgive anyone."

He had pulled a second stool up to the drafting table and sat with his elbows on his knees, looking at the floor instead of at her.

"Say the offer," Matilda said.

"You want your money back and your building clear."

"And you?" Matilda asked.

"I want Cora out of my house and her studio sold to pay you. Neither of us gets that if they tell the story first."

"They already have the story. Forty people filmed it."

"They have the kiss," Eli said. "They don't have you. Right now you're the wife who threw a ring in the pasta and ran out."

"I didn't run."

"Nobody who was there will say that you walked out."

She was quiet.

"Here is what I'm offering," he said. "For two weeks you're seen with me."

"Where?" Matilda asked.

"Lunch, the yacht club, Zach's office parties."

She frowned. "Why would that help?"

"Nobody can call you unstable or alone while you stand next to a man who isn't afraid of either of them. They'll get nervous, and nervous people talk."

"You want me to pretend we're together."

"I want Zach to believe you are. Cora, too."

"Why would she believe that? She's your wife."

"Because she'll see it, and she'll do the sums," Eli said.

"What sums?" Matilda asked.

"She thinks she's the only one in the room who has been unfaithful."

Matilda looked at him.

Last night in the glass house he had stood still while his wife kissed another man, and today he was talking about it as a plan.

"Does it hurt you at all?" she asked.

"Yes," Eli said, in the same level voice. "I'd rather do something about it than say so."

She pressed her thumb into her other palm, the habit she had at the bakery when a tray of loaves came out wrong.

"Terms," she said.

"There are three." He counted them on the drafting table with a pencil. "One, it's for show. Nothing real happens between us."

"Fine."

"Two, you don't sleep in a house with anyone who is working against you."

"I have nowhere else," Matilda said.

"I have a loft above this office. It has a second bedroom with a lock on the inside. You take that one."

"And you?"

"I'll take the couch." He tapped the pencil a third time. "Three, no lies."

"Meaning?" Matilda asked.

"Anything you want to know, you ask me, and I answer. The same for me."

She thought about the mornings on Ocean Avenue when Zach had asked how she was and she had said fine.

"No lies," she said. "Even the ones that would be kind."

"Especially those."

He held out his hand.

His fingers were long and stained with graphite, and there was a small white scar on the knuckle of the first one.

Matilda shook it.

He did not let go straight away, and neither did she.

His thumb moved once across the back of her hand.

She heard her own breath.

She had not been touched on purpose by anyone in four weeks, and she noticed it now.

She leaned an inch toward him to look at the scar.

He had gone very still, and he was looking at her mouth.

"Don't," Matilda said, and took her hand back. "You're a married man."

"So I've been told." The corner of his mouth moved. "Repeatedly, by you."

"I've said it once."

"You'll say it again."

She picked up her duffel and did not answer that.

He walked her to the stairs and showed her the loft, which was bare and clean and smelled of cedar pencil shavings.

The second bedroom held a single bed with a grey wool blanket and a window that looked down on the street.

"There's a key on the hook," Eli said. "The lock works from your side."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. We have two weeks."

He went back down to the office, and she sat on the bed and listened to his chair scrape.

Then she lay down on the blanket with her shoes on, and for the first time in a month she slept through.

She woke at one in the afternoon with her phone buzzing against her ribs.

The message was from Cora.

Tillie, please. Can we talk, just us? I'm so sorry. I'll bring soup. Two o'clock at the Daily Grind, I'll wait all day.

Below it was a second text, sent a minute later, with a heart.

I never meant any of it to be like this.

Matilda read both of them standing at the window.

Down on the street Eli had come out of the building with his coat on.

He looked up, and she held the phone against the glass so that he could see it.

He read it from the sidewalk, and he nodded once.

Then he held up his own phone and mimed pressing record.

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