Separated Rooms for Three Years, He Panicked After I Moved Out novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Hallway Floor

Elliot has sat outside Bea's door all night; Nina demands a divorce, he asks for thirty days, and he leaves telling her she never had to act like she wanted the marriage.

I opened Bea's door at six in the morning and Elliot was sitting on the hallway floor.

He had his back against the wall and his legs stretched out in front of him.

His dress shoes were in his hand, and his socks had a hole in one heel.

The cufflink box was in his lap.

"You slept here," I said.

"I didn't sleep."

His voice was rough, and he had not shaved.

Behind me, Bea came out of her bedroom in her scrubs with her coffee already made.

She looked at him, and at me, and went back into the kitchen without a word.

I stepped into the hall and pulled the door almost shut behind me.

"How did you find this place?"

"Margot's driver drove you. I asked him."

"That's one way to get a man's address."

"I'm sorry." He did not try to stand. "I didn't know where else to be."

I leaned against the opposite wall.

It was a narrow hallway, with a stroller parked outside someone's door and a smell of toast.

We were about six feet apart, and I thought it was the closest we had been in a month.

"Tell me why," I said.

"Why what?"

"Why I wasn't allowed in your room. One answer, Elliot. Just one true one."

He looked down at the shoes in his hand.

"I wanted you to have somewhere that was yours."

"I had the west wing. I had a whole house that was mine. I wanted to be in yours."

"I know."

"Do you? I knocked every month for three years."

"I heard every one."

I stared at him.

"You heard." My voice went flat. "You stood on the other side of the door and you heard me."

"Nina."

"Do you know what that does to a person? I started counting the knocks. Two, and then one more. I thought if I got the number right it would open."

His eyes shut.

He stayed that way for a moment, and when they opened I saw they were wet.

"I'll sleep wherever you tell me to," he said. "In the hall. On the porch. Tell me where."

"That's what the doors were for," I said. "Wherever I told you."

"Then tell me anything else."

"I want a divorce."

He took it without moving.

I had expected him to argue, or to go quiet and polite and reasonable the way he did at dinner.

He only nodded, once, slowly.

"No," he said.

"You can't say no to that."

"I can't sign it. I'll pay for any lawyer you want. I won't sign it." His hand tightened on the box. "Give me thirty days."

"For what?"

"I don't know yet." He laughed, a short, awful sound. "To be the man who opens the door. If I'm not that in thirty days, I'll sign it with a pen you pick."

I should have said no.

Bea had told me, over four years of friendship and a long list of men, that the right answer to a plea was never yes in the first hour.

But I was tired, and I could still hear him on the gravel saying please.

"Terms," I said.

"Anything."

"You don't touch me. No flowers, no gifts, nobody sent to talk to me. You sleep in your own wing and you leave my father out of it."

"Done."

"And you stay out of my work."

"Done."

"You didn't even argue."

"I'd have taken one condition," Elliot said. "You gave me five."

He got up at last, slowly, his knees cracking.

He was a head taller than me even in socks, and in the weak hall light he looked tired and young.

For a second I wanted to take the shoes out of his hand and put them on his feet.

I kept my arms crossed.

He set the cufflink box on the floor by Bea's door, carefully.

"Those are yours," he said. "I couldn't wear them. They're too good."

"They were a gift."

"I know. I'm sorry. I didn't think I was allowed to keep things from you."

"What things?"

He opened his mouth and shut it again.

A door opened further down the hall, and a woman in a bathrobe looked out and went in again.

Elliot lowered his voice.

"Nina, you don't have to act like you wanted any of this," he said. "Not with me. I never held you to it. I want you to know that I never did."

I frowned.

"Act?"

"I've always known."

"Known what?"

But he was already walking to the stairs with his shoes in his hand, and he did not turn around.

I stood in the hall with the box at my feet and the toast smell going cold.

I had no idea what he had just told me.

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