Separated Rooms for Three Years, He Panicked After I Moved Out novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Our Third Anniversary
At the anniversary dinner Elliot answers for Nina in front of the family, refuses her door again, and she moves out; he chases her to the gate and asks her not to go.
At our third anniversary dinner, my mother-in-law stood up with a glass of champagne and thanked me in front of twenty-two guests.
"To Nina," Margot said. "Who has made my son's life so peaceful."
Everyone laughed and drank.
Elliot sat beside me with his hand wrapped around his own glass.
It was a long table in the dining room of the Rainer house, with white roses down the middle and Margot's good silver.
For three years his hand had never once come to rest on mine in front of other people.
I looked at it anyway.
"Margot says you two still keep your own wings," said an aunt from the far end. "How modern. I couldn't do it. I'd miss the snoring."
A few people smiled at me and waited.
I opened my mouth.
"Nina likes her privacy," Elliot said.
He said it easily, to the aunt, without looking at me.
The table laughed again and the conversation moved on to somebody's boat.
I put my fork down.
I had asked him for that room on the first night of our marriage.
I had stood in the hall in my robe and said, "Can I stay with you?"
He had told me, "Not like this," and gone into the east bedroom.
I had asked again that winter, and the next spring, and a number of nights after that.
Margot leaned over to refill my glass before I could stop her.
"Don't let it bother you, dear," she said quietly. "He is just a private person. It has nothing to do with you. I have told him so myself."
She patted my wrist.
She had been kind to me from the first week, and she was the only person in that house who ever noticed when I was upset.
I thanked her, and I meant it.
After dinner I went upstairs with a small box in my hand.
It held a pair of cufflinks I had saved for since August.
His door was at the end of the east hall, with a strip of light under it.
I knocked the way I always knocked, twice, and then once more.
The door opened the width of his shoulder.
"Nina."
Behind him I saw a lamp, a desk, and a bed with the covers still folded flat.
"Happy anniversary," I said, and held out the box.
He took it and looked at it for a moment.
"Thank you," he said. "You shouldn't have."
"I wanted to." I breathed in. "Can I stay tonight? Just tonight. It's three years."
Something moved in his face and then was gone.
"Not tonight," he said. "I'll see you at breakfast."
"Elliot, I've asked you every month since the wedding."
"I know."
"Then why won't you tell me why?"
He kept one hand flat on the door and said nothing.
I tried to make it smaller, because I could not stand to leave without giving him something.
"I never thanked you properly," I said. "For Dad. The surgery, the rehab, all of it. He walks to the mailbox now. I know you never wanted a fuss."
Elliot went rigid.
It took less than a second, and I saw every muscle in his jaw lock.
"Don't thank me for that," he said.
His voice was hard and strange, and he did not meet my eyes.
Then he shut the door, gently, the way he did everything.
I stood in the hall for a long time with my hand still lifted to knock a fourth time.
I did not knock.
I walked to the west wing and took my two suitcases down from the closet shelf.
I packed for twenty minutes, mostly my work clothes and Dad's old watch.
I left my wedding ring on the dresser where Elliot would see it.
So I moved out.
Margot was in the front hall when I came down, in her navy silk with her reading glasses pushed up into her silver hair.
"Dear, it's eleven at night. Sleep on it."
"I did that for three years," I said.
She looked at the suitcases and then, very briefly, up the stairs.
"Then let me at least call the driver," she said. "I'd never forgive myself if you took a taxi."
She said it warmly and went to find her phone, and I let her.
I was at the gate with the driver holding the car door when I heard feet on the gravel behind me.
Elliot was running.
He had no shoes on and his shirt was open at the throat, and I had never seen him run anywhere.
"Nina."
He stopped an arm's length away, breathing hard.
"Don't," he said.
"Don't what?"
"Don't go."
I looked at him in the porch light.
His hands were shaking at his sides.
"Three years," I said. "You could have said that on any one of them."
"Please."
In three years Elliot Rainer had never asked me for a single thing.
I got into the car.
At two in the morning, lying on Bea's sofa with my coat still on, my phone buzzed.
It was Bea, from her bedroom, ten feet away.
There's a man sitting in our hallway.
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