They Thought I Was Asleep, So I Let Them novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Toast
Clemens announces on the microphone that he is marrying Marit's best friend, Marit hands back the ring and walks out, and on the sofa of the two friends who took her home she pretends to sleep as a hand settles on her knee.
Clemens laughed and tapped the microphone twice, and sixty people in the garden pavilion turned to look at him.
It was the anniversary of our engagement, fourteen months to the day.
He had carried my cake box all afternoon without once complaining.
I had made the cake myself, three tiers, lemon and elderflower, and it stood behind him on its table.
Pia had found me by the cake a little before and straightened my neckline.
"He's so nervous," she said. "Just tell him you're sure about everything. He needs to hear it tonight."
"I'm sure," I said. "He knows I'm sure."
"Say it anyway." She squeezed my hands. "For me."
She was my maid of honor and my best friend since we were seventeen, so I said I would.
Now she stood at the front of the crowd in her pale green dress, holding her glass with both hands.
Clemens smiled the smile he uses for clients.
"Thank you all for coming. Tonight I want to be honest with the people I love."
Somebody near the bar lifted a phone to film him.
"Marit," he said, and found me in the crowd. "You're the kindest person I know. That's why this is so hard."
I stopped breathing for a moment.
"I'm going to be a father," he said. "And I'm going to marry the mother. Pia and I couldn't keep it from you anymore."
Nobody clapped.
Pia was crying, and she wasn't looking at me.
I looked at my left hand, at the ring I had worn since the first of March last year.
Then I walked to the front of the room, and the crowd moved aside for me.
Clemens opened his mouth, and I held up one finger.
I pulled the ring off, and it came away easily, which I had not expected.
I took Pia's hand and put the ring in her palm.
"Keep it," I said. "It was always your size."
Her fingers closed around it. She still had not looked up.
I turned to the room.
"The cake is paid for," I said. "Please eat it. It's good."
Then I picked up my bag and walked out through the side door into the garden.
The gravel was loud under my heels.
I made it as far as the hedge before my legs gave way, and I sat down on the stone edge of a flower bed.
Behind me the music had started again, which meant someone had decided to pretend.
I had no flat of my own. The lease was in Clemens's name, and my keys were in my bag, and I knew that tonight they would not fit.
"Marit."
Nils Ostermann stood in front of me, holding my coat.
He was Clemens's friend from school, an ER nurse, with a red-brown beard and a laugh you could hear across a room.
He wasn't laughing now.
Behind him, Florian Hasse stood with his car keys already in his hand. He was tall and dark and quiet, and he had been to every dinner Clemens had ever cooked for me and said perhaps ten sentences at all of them.
"You can't go back to the flat," Nils said.
"I know."
"Then you come to ours." He put the coat around my shoulders. "We have a sofa and a lock on the door."
"I don't want to be with anyone who knew him."
"We do know him," Florian said. His voice was low and even. "We'd like to stop."
I looked at the two of them for a long moment.
It wasn't a kind thing to say, and it was the only thing anyone had said all night that I believed.
So I got into the back of Florian's car and let him shut the door.
Their flat was on the third floor of an old building in Eimsbüttel, with high ceilings and a long hall.
Nils brought blankets and a pillow and put them on the sofa.
I lay down in my party dress with my shoes still on, and Nils took them off for me without a word.
I turned my face to the back of the sofa and shut my eyes.
I did not want to be asked if I was all right, so I made my breathing slow, and after a while it worked.
The lamp went down. A cupboard door opened and closed.
Something small touched the floor beside my head, and I heard the clink of a glass.
Nils had put a glass of water exactly where my hand would fall if I reached out in the night.
"She's out," Florian said, from the doorway.
"Already?"
"Look at her."
Their feet crossed the room. I felt a shadow lean over me.
"She hasn't eaten," Nils said quietly. "She made a three-tier cake and didn't have a single bite."
"I know."
"Fourteen months, Flo. And he did it with a microphone."
"I know."
For a while there was only the sound of their breathing, and mine, which I was holding slow with all the strength I had.
"Do you want to know what I thought," Nils said, "when she took off the ring?"
"I was there."
"I thought: he's an idiot. And then I thought something else."
Florian didn't answer.
The blanket moved. Nils had drawn it down, just to my hip, and the air of the room touched the back of my thighs under the hem of my dress.
I should have opened my eyes then.
I didn't.
A warm hand came to rest on my bare knee, and it was not Nils's.
It was Florian's, and it was very still, and it did not move away.
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