Chapter 5: Guest Room

Claire waited until the car had pulled away from the curb in Sunnyside.

"Seven months," she said.

Weston sat beside her in the dark, with Ross's shoulders black and silent in the front seat.

"Yes."

"You told your mother in April that I would be your wife."

"I told her I'd met her."

"That isn't the same thing."

"No," he said. "It isn't."

She turned in the seat to look at him.

The streetlights came across his face in bars and went away again.

"You watched me leave that party with him."

"You watched me go on being engaged to him for seven months."

"Then you sat in a car on the day it fell apart and let me think I was the one who called."

"You were the one who called."

"That's a very clean way to say it."

"It's the only way I'll say it," Weston said. "You made the call. I'd have waited another seven months."

"Why?"

"Because if I'd come to you before you were ready, I'd have been one more man telling you what to do."

She had no answer to that.

She had spent four years being told what to do, and it had always been gentle.

She looked out of the window instead.

His building was in Midtown, and the lobby had a guard and a marble floor and a lift that rose without a sound.

His flat took up half a floor.

It was beautiful and very bare, with long windows and a dark wood table and almost no pictures.

"Your room is this one," he said, opening a door at the end of a hall. "Mine is at the other end."

"Ross picked up your bag from your flat, and he's put your coat on the chair."

"He picked up my bag."

"He has your keys. I asked for them at the bureau, and you handed them to me."

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