He gets discharged on a Tuesday and we go home to the Tribeca penthouse.
This used to be the cage.
Now I'm the woman in the kitchen.
Cale is good to me in a way that puts me off-balance. He learns, badly, to scramble eggs because I mentioned in passing that I missed making my own. He hears me say once, in the elevator, that I like the new Cartier collection, and the next afternoon a woman from the Fifth Avenue store is at the door with a velvet tray.
He doesn't call me Shen anymore. He doesn't even say "Nora" all the time. Sometimes, half-asleep, he says Nor, like the rest of the syllables are too heavy.
When he looks at me there's no longer a second image trying to come up through mine. There's just the one.
I drown in the counterfeit happiness. I cannot make myself swim.
Luke comes by twice in the first month.
Each time, he tries to start the recovery.
"Cale. Look at this picture. You and Sloane in Provence. Three years ago. You don't remember loving her?"
Cale doesn't look at the photograph. He drops it into the kitchen trash, on top of the coffee grounds.
"Luke. I have warned you."
"My wife is Nora. She's not Sloane Whitford."
"Bring this kind of thing into my home one more time, and we are not going to be friends."
Luke goes a color you do not see often on a man with that much exposure to sun. He turns to me.
"Nora. What did you put in him? You honestly think you can keep this up forever?"
I tuck myself against Cale's back. I make my face small and bewildered and frightened.
"I — I don't — "
Cale shifts to put me fully behind him. Like a man whose territory has been crossed.
"Out."
One word.
Luke goes.
The door clicks shut and Cale's whole body lets down. He turns and pulls me into him and pats my back, like I am the one who needs to be talked off something.
"Don't. He won't be back."
I rest against the warm, expensive cotton of his shirt and my mind is calm.
I know Luke is not letting it go.
I do not care.
If Cale believes me, that's enough.
Late that night Cale is in the home office working. I bring him a mug of warm milk. He's on a video call. When he sees me he ends the call mid-sentence — we'll pick this up tomorrow — and shuts the laptop.
He pulls me onto his lap and takes the mug.
"Why are you still up."
"Waiting for you."
I loop my arms behind his neck. Chin on his shoulder.
There is a stack of paper open on the desk. A deal book. The cover sheet says Iverson Capital — Whitford Family Office co-investment opportunity, West Side Yards.
Whitford.
Sloane's family fund.
The bottom of my stomach drops out.
"Cale. This deal."
"Mm? Just a co-investment. Nothing." He sips the milk.
"You know the Whitfords?"
He thinks. He shakes his head.
"No. Luke brought them to the table."
Luke. Of course.
"Can you not do it?" I ask, soft.
"Why?"
He's not annoyed. Just confused. "It's a clean deal. The numbers are good."
I drop my eyes. My voice comes out small.
"Sloane. That's her family."
Cale stops.
He puts the mug down. He turns me on his lap and takes my face between his hands.
"Nora. Are you still on that woman."
"I told you. Past tense."
"It's a deal. It has nothing to do with her, personally."
I shake my head. I make myself stubborn. "I don't want you near anything that has her name on it."
"I'm afraid."
I look up at him. I let the tears come.
"I'm afraid that if you spend an hour in a room with her people, you'll remember her. And then you won't want me."
His face goes soft the way I know it goes soft.
He sighs. He pulls me hard into his chest.
"You idiot."
"I'm not going to not-want you."
"Fine. We're out."
He picks up his phone. He calls Luke directly.
"West Side Yards. Iverson Capital is pulling its commitment."
I can hear Luke's voice come through the speaker, sharp.
Cale doesn't let him finish.
"You don't need the reason. That's the call."
He drops the phone face-down on the desk. He bends and kisses my forehead.
"There. Better, my jealous girl?"
I smile up into the kiss.
The alarm in my chest is going off in a frequency only I can hear.
Luke is testing.
Sloane. Are you nearly back, then?
I don't have to wait long.
It is a Saturday afternoon. Cale is sitting on the kitchen island peeling an apple for me with a paring knife — a thing he learned to do from a YouTube video and is unreasonably proud of. His phone is on speaker, face up beside him, in case the trader on the West Coast calls back.
A number with no name comes up.
He thumbs it without looking.
"Iverson."
A woman's voice. Clear. Warm. Very lightly accented in a way that means she has been speaking French for two years and slipping back into English as a personal accent.
"Cale. It's me. Sloane."
"I'm home."
The temperature of the room drops by ten degrees.
The book in my lap hits the floor.
The paring knife stops, its blade in the apple's white flesh. He looks at the phone like it is a thing he found in his pocket from another life.
"Sloane."
He says it. Tasting. Uncertain.
"It's me, Cale. Tell me you didn't forget the sound of my voice."
Sloane is laughing a little. Like this is a joke they have, like she belongs in his kitchen on a Saturday.
Like she has not been gone.
Cale's brow knots. He is trying to find something in himself. Pain crosses his face.
I lunge across the marble and kill the call.
"Cale. Don't listen to her."
"She just wants to wreck this — "
He has both hands on his head. He is grey.
"Nora — my head — "
"Sloane — that name — I — "
He does not finish the sentence. His eyes roll back and he goes off the stool sideways. I get an elbow under his shoulder before his face hits the marble. I am already on my phone calling 911.
At Memorial Sloan Kettering, Cale lies in a curtained bay with his eyes closed and a saline drip going. Dr. Patel — the same Dr. Patel from the recovery floor — comes around the curtain and takes me aside.
"Ms. Shen. The clot has reabsorbed — that's not the issue. The issue is acute psychological stress on a patient with recent intracranial trauma. He's stable. But please. No more triggers. Not yet."
I nod.
I sit on the chrome stool by the bed and hold his cold hand in both of mine.
My lie is a balloon. Someone keeps blowing into it. The skin is starting to go thin and shiny.
Sloane is back.
She's been back for under a day and she has already, with one phone call, gone to the back of his skull and pressed.
Even with the front of his brain wiped, the deeper layer remembers her. Her name is etched somewhere I cannot reach.
What do I do.
Walk away.
Hand him back to her. Go back to the corner of the apartment where I lived for three years. Be a kept thing again. Be a face he uses on someone else.
No.
I can't.
I have tasted what it's like to be loved by him, with my own name on his mouth, and there is no version of me that goes back.
He wakes up around six the next morning.
He sees me asleep with my head on the rail of the bed. He stiffens, then remembers, then his face goes dim.
"Nora."
"Last night — I scared you, didn't I."
I shake my head and give him a thin smile.
"You're okay. That's the only part."
He sits up and pulls me into him.
"I'm sorry."
"I don't know why I — that name. That woman. Why did just hearing it — "
I cut him off.
"She is not important."
I lift my chin and look him straight in the eye and I lay it down one word at a time.
"Cale. Listen to me."
"Your world. Right now. Going forward. There is only me in it."
"You promised."
He looks at the cold thing in my eyes. He is quiet a long moment. Then he nods, slowly, then hard.
"Okay."
"Okay. I promise."
"No more unknown numbers. Not from anyone."
"There is only you in it."
He says it with conviction. He believes the words while they are coming out.
I know it is for now.
Sloane is back. Sloane does not let go of things she thinks she owns.
This is going to be a war.