My husband fastened another woman into the front passenger seat of my car while I stood outside in the icy rain like an inconvenience he wished would simply go away. Not a taxi. Not a company car.
My car. The Mercedes SUV I helped finance during the year his real estate business nearly collapsed. The same car where we once shared fast-food fries in empty parking lots because we were too exhausted and too poor to eat inside restaurants.
The car where he squeezed my hand after our first miscarriage scare and said, quietly, that when he made it, I would never sit behind anyone again. Yet that evening, beneath the glass canopy outside his Manhattan office building, David Sterling opened the passenger door for his twenty-four-year-old assistant, Cecilia Moore, and announced loudly enough for the doorman to hear that I should get in the back because she got carsick. Rain dripped from my eyelashes as I looked at him.
Cecilia stood beneath his umbrella without a single drop touching her. One hand rested against her forehead with the theatrical fragility of someone auditioning for a role. Her beige coat was buttoned incorrectly.
Her glossy pink nails wrapped around a handbag that probably cost more than her monthly rent. She looked at me once with wide, watery eyes, then lowered her gaze like an injured bird performing its injury for a specific audience. “David,” I said, keeping my voice level.
“That is my seat.”
He clicked his tongue. That sound was worse than a slap. It was the same sound he used with incompetent contractors, slow waiters, and interns who forgot coffee orders.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he replied. “She nearly fainted upstairs. She can’t sit in the back.”
“She can take a cab.”
“It’s pouring.”
“I drove through the same rain to pick you up.”
His jaw tightened.
A black sedan honked behind us. Rain slid down the collar of my silk blouse, cold against my skin. Cecilia made a small trembling noise.
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