“I asked you not to.”
Nick looked at me. “I know.”
Behind him, the corridor was still full of people trying to enjoy the evening. Someone laughed near the green room. A glass struck another glass. The ordinary celebration made our small group feel more exposed, not less.
Rhys looked from Nick to the passes.
“These are your guests?”
“Yes.”
“Then you need to take them back to the public area. Claire isn’t receiving anyone here.”
Daniel opened his mouth. Nick turned toward him.
“Come on.”
“We were only—”
“Now, Daniel.”
There was no smile in it. Daniel looked at him, then at me. For a moment I thought he might insist on having the conversation he had come for, as though the effort of arriving had earned him the right to it.
Sophie touched his sleeve.
“Let’s go.”
Before she turned, she looked at me. “I’m sorry. I really thought—”
“Please,” I said.
She stopped. They went with Nick down the corridor, Rhys following far enough to make sure the direction did not change.
Mina picked up the hanger she had set down. She looked at it, then put it down again.
“Do you want to go home?”
I shook my head.
“We haven’t finished.”
“I can finish.”
“I know. I want to.”
She nodded. We worked for a few minutes without speaking. I checked pockets, hung clothes, wrote down the repairs. My hands remembered what to do even when the rest of me seemed to have gone somewhere distant.
The little wrapper from Nick’s pocket still lay on the table. I put it in the bin.
Rhys came back alone.
“They’re out front. Nick’s with them.”
“Thank you.”
He rubbed a hand over his face. “I saw the names on his list. I told him your restriction still stood: green room, with him, no wardrobe. He said he understood. When I went to call the cast for photographs, he brought them into the green room.”
I looked up.
“He knew,” I said.
Rhys nodded. He did not try to make the mistake smaller by spreading it evenly between everybody.
“You can use the office if you need somewhere quiet. I’ll keep this corridor clear.”
I thanked him again. After he left, Mina put her hand briefly against my back.
“You don’t have to be efficient at this.”
“I don’t know what else to do.”
“For now, nothing.”
I sat on the stool. The room looked exactly as it had twenty minutes earlier, except that I no longer knew where to put my eyes without finding evidence of the evening I had been having.
The jacket on the rail. The repaired green coat. Nick’s script left on the table, his name written in the corner in quick, untidy capitals.
I had asked for one thing. I had been clear because I knew how easily clarity could disappear when everybody wanted a different answer. He had repeated it back to me. No passes. No arrangements.
I pressed my palms against my knees.
“This isn’t what Daniel did,” I said.
Mina pulled up a chair. “No.”
“I know that.”
“I know you do.”
I looked at her, furious suddenly at the tears arriving when I had managed not to cry in front of the others.
“Then why does it feel so familiar?”
She didn’t answer immediately. She gave me time to hear the question myself.
“Because you told him what you needed,” she said at last, “and he decided something else would be easier.”
I bent forward with my elbows on my knees. The first sob hurt my throat. Mina sat beside me while I cried, not saying anything else she would expect me to remember later.
When I could speak again, I asked for water. She brought it, and I drank half the cup as if I had come in from a long walk.
Nick knocked on the open door twenty minutes later.
Mina looked at me. I nodded once.
“I’ll be in the office,” she said. “I’m driving you home when you’re ready.”
She left without looking at him.
Nick remained near the door. He had changed into his own clothes. Without Julian’s waistcoat, without the flush of the performance, he looked exhausted.
“May I come in?”
“You can stand there.”
He nodded.
I waited. I had spent enough of my life helping people find the beginning of an apology.
“Daniel rang this afternoon,” he said. “He said your mother was determined to speak to you after the show. That if they couldn’t get a quiet moment, she’d wait in the foyer.”
“She was allowed to wait in the foyer.”
“I know.”
“You keep saying that.”
He looked down, then back at me.
“I thought I could keep it contained. Ten minutes in the green room after you’d finished. No audience. No argument in front of everyone.”
“Contained for whom?”
He didn’t answer quickly enough.
“For me?” I asked. “Because I’d already told you how to do that.”
“I know you had.”
“Then why?”
His jaw moved. I could see him searching for an explanation that would not make him sound as bad as the choice itself.
“Don’t make it nicer,” I said.
He looked at me for a long moment.
“I didn’t want a scene tonight.”
I felt the words land.
“Because of Elsa.”
“Because of all of it. The opening. The company. Elsa. Because Daniel kept saying he only wanted to clear the air, and I thought if I could give him a small amount of what he wanted, he’d stop pushing.”
“What you gave him was access to me.”
Nick closed his eyes briefly. “Yes.”
“Not your time. Mine.”
“Yes.”
I stood because sitting made me feel too small. He moved back a little, though I had not come toward him.
“Did you think I would agree once they were here?”
He swallowed.
“I thought you might get through it and be relieved it was over.”
For a moment I could not speak. There was my mother in the sentence, the old assumption that I would manage because I always had, dressed now in the voice of the man I had begun to trust.
Nick saw it. I knew he saw it because he looked away as if the expression on my face had become difficult to bear.
“You didn’t forget what I asked,” I said. “You heard it, and then you decided I could cope with the opposite.”
“I’m sorry.”
I folded my arms, not to keep him out but because my hands were shaking again.
“Did you tell Rhys I’d agreed?”
“No. I said they were my guests and I’d stay with them. He said you weren’t receiving guests. I told him I knew.”
“And then you left them.”
“For a few minutes. Helen wanted a photograph with Elsa and the cast. I told Daniel to wait in the green room, and he said he would.” Nick looked down. “Rhys had told me to stay with them. I left anyway.”
I stared at him. Every small decision had been made easier by passing the difficulty somewhere else.
“It sounds very reasonable when you break it into pieces.”
Nick’s face tightened. “It wasn’t.”
“No.”
We stood in the warm, cluttered room. Somewhere down the corridor, a door closed. The reception was ending. The evening was moving on without us.
“I’ve told Rhys it was my decision,” he said. “And Helen.”
“Good.”
“I took them out. Your mother wanted to come back, but I told her—”
“Nick.”
He stopped.
“I don’t need a list of the things you did afterward.”
He nodded slowly. His mouth looked as though it hurt.
“What do you need?”
I almost laughed. Not because the question was funny, but because I had answered it so clearly before any of this happened.
“Tonight? To go home without explaining myself again.”
“All right.”
“And then some time.”
He took a breath. “How much?”
I looked at him.
“I don’t know.”
He nodded. It was the hardest answer I had given him, and for once he did not try to improve it.
I picked up my bag. His script was beneath it. I moved the bag carefully so the pages stayed in place.
“The performance was good,” I said.
He looked startled.
“I don’t want you to think I said that because of us. You were good.”
His face changed in a way I could not bear to watch.
“Thank you.”
I went past him into the corridor. Mina stood by the office with her coat on and keys in her hand. She took one look at me and opened the side door.
Outside, the air was cold enough to make me shiver. We walked to her car without speaking. At the corner, I looked back once. The Portlight windows were bright. People were leaving in small groups, talking about the play, carrying their evening home with them.
Mina drove slowly up the hill.
“Do you want me to stay?” she asked when we reached my building.
“No. Kit’s waiting.”
“He can manage.”
I smiled faintly. “I know. I want to be alone.”
She touched my hand. “Ring if that changes.”
Upstairs, the flat smelled of the flowers Nick had brought two nights earlier, a small bunch of white stocks in a jam jar because I had complained about the price of vases. His marmalade stood beside the tea. A paperback lay facedown on the sofa where he had left it.
I had not realized how much of him was here already.
I took off my shoes, sat on the edge of the bed and let the silence arrive. I did not put his things in a bag. I did not decide anything while I was too tired to trust the decision.
After a while, I went to the kitchen and made tea. I stood waiting for the kettle with my hand against the counter, remembering the morning he had looked for a knife in the wrong drawer.
That memory was still good. I wished, for a moment, that it wasn’t. Anger would have been simpler if it could make every earlier kindness disappear.
The kettle clicked off. I poured the water and carried the cup to the sofa, leaving his book where it was.