Serena's POV
"Tomorrow came early," says Dominic.
He's standing at my door at seven on Saturday evening in a dark jacket and no tie, with his hands in his pockets and his hair still damp. He looks like a man who has run up a mountain and decided to stay at the top.
I'm in the studio, in my stocking feet, with my hair wet and a cup of cold tea.
I've been trying all day.
I've stood at the window and rehearsed it. I've opened my mouth six times. Each time, I've seen his face the way it was in the corridor this morning, white and haggard and fierce, as he steered my sister toward the elevator. It's all right, said his eyes. Whatever you've decided.
Not with Vance two floors down. Not with Brandt's spy in the next office. Not with a hundred cameras and a man who has my voice on tape.
"I haven't got my answer," I say.
"I know."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be." He tilts his head. "I haven't come for it."
"No?"
"I've come to ask if you're hungry."
I stare.
"It's been a very long week," he says. "I'd like to take a woman I like to dinner. Somewhere with no cameras and no lawyers and no one who knows who we are. If you'll come."
"Where?"
"You'll hate it."
"Dominic."
"It's a clam shack in Red Hook."
I laugh.
It comes out of me before I can stop it. A loud, helpless, completely un-Vera-like whoop. He grins, and for a moment I see him, all of him: the man who once drove through a blizzard to bring me a lobster roll because I'd had a craving.
"It's the best one in New York," he says. "It's run by a man from Stonington. I found it in a bad year."
"Is it a good year?"
"It's getting better."
***
It's a shack on a pier, under the old Red Hook cranes, with a corrugated roof and four picnic tables, strings of coloured lights and a smell of frying and salt. A radio plays something with a mandolin. A fat orange cat sleeps on a coil of rope. The man behind the counter is seventy and has forearms like hams and doesn't look up.
"Two rolls. Two chowders. One beer, one whatever she wants."
"Whatever she wants," I say, "is a root beer."
"Root beer," says the man. "Bottle."
Dominic doesn't blink.
We sit at the end of a table, on the pier, with our backs against the rail and the black harbour sloshing below. Across the water, the whole of Manhattan is lit up like a cake. The Statue of Liberty is a tiny green candle.
Nobody looks at us.
The lobster roll is perfect. Buttered, warm, tossed in nothing but a squeeze of lemon. I eat it with both hands and a groan of pure joy, and Dominic watches me, with a look on his face I can't read.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"I'm being a pig."
"You're being the most beautiful thing in New York."
My throat has gone tight.
"Don't," I say.
"Why not?"
"Because I'm going to cry in a clam shack."
"It's a good place for it."
"Dominic."
"I'm sorry." He takes a sip of beer. "I'm not good at this. I haven't been on a date in nine years."
"That's not true. You married..."
I stop.
Me.
"I married a woman I met at a charity auction," he says gently. "Nine years ago in March. She outbid me for a painting of hers that I'd come to buy."
My heart stops.
"I didn't know she'd put it in as a joke," he says. "She wanted to see how much I'd pay. I went to four hundred thousand dollars. I'd never paid more than twenty for anything."
"What did she say?"
"She said I was an idiot."
"Was she right?"
"Entirely."
"Did you buy it?"
"She wouldn't sell. She said she couldn't take money from a man who'd just proved he had none." He smiles, small and crooked. "She said, Buy me dinner instead. We went to a clam shack in Newport."
I put my hand over my mouth.
I don't remember laughing and crying at once. I don't remember the moment my hand finds his across the table. It's cold from the beer, and warm underneath. His thumb moves over my knuckles.
"I've never told anyone about the clam shack," he says.
"No?"
"Not even Marcus."
"Why are you telling me?"
"I don't know." His eyes are very bright. "I think I wanted to say it to somebody who'd understand."
I can't answer.
The mandolin plays.
The fat cat wakes up, stretches, and wanders over to inspect my shoes.
"I'll tell you tomorrow," I whisper.
"I know."
"I promise."
"I know." He turns my hand over and presses his mouth to the inside of my wrist, over the pulse, light as a feather. "Tonight," he says against my skin, "tonight, just be."
***
He doesn't kiss me in the elevator.
He doesn't kiss me in the corridor.
He waits until we're inside the door of his penthouse, and he has taken off my coat and put it carefully on a chair, and turned me round to face him with both hands on my shoulders, in the soft gold dark.
"Vera."
"Yes."
"Tell me to stop."
"I won't."
"Are you sure?"
"No." I put my palms flat on his chest. "I've never been less sure of anything in my life. And I've never wanted anything more."
His eyes close.
He bends his head, and I tilt mine, and our mouths meet.
It isn't like the boathouse.
The boathouse was a question. This is an answer.
It's slow, and deep, and so tender that I feel it in my knees, and the backs of my eyes, and the soles of my feet. His hands are in my hair. Mine are under his jacket, spread over the hard, warm planes of his back, feeling the beat of his heart against my palm. He tastes of salt and beer and the cold harbour wind.
He makes a sound against my mouth.
It's a sound I know.
I've been missing it for three years.
I draw him closer, and closer, and the whole world narrows to the breath between his lips and mine.
I don't know how we get to the bedroom.
I know the door.
I know the sound of the latch.
I know that, at the end of a long and terrible year, in a room full of moonlight and the distant hush of Park Avenue, a man takes a woman's face in both hands and looks at her as if he were seeing the sea for the first time, and says, hoarsely, please.
I know that I say yes.
And I know what comes after, the long, slow, trembling, tender dark, the hands, and the breath, and the names he doesn't say and I almost do, and the long, silent peace of two people who have been very far away and have just come home.
***
I wake at four.
It's quite dark.
The bed is warm, and the sheets smell of cedar and him, and a strip of grey light lies across the pillow. I put out a hand.
His side is empty.
I lie there for a moment, listening.
There's no sound. A clock ticks somewhere. A pipe knocks, once.
Then I sit up and pull the sheet round me and get out of bed.
The penthouse is vast and dim. Floor-to-ceiling windows, a leather sofa, a grand piano I've never heard him play. I pad barefoot across the wide polished boards, and I don't call his name.
I don't know why.
There's a light at the end of the passage.
Not the main passage. A narrow corridor, behind the library, that I've never walked down. Dominic's study. I know it by its dark green door and the carved lintel with the Hale crest.
The door stands slightly open.
There's a yellow line of light down its edge.
"Dom?" I whisper.
No answer.
I push.
The study is empty. Books, a desk, a green-shaded lamp. A brandy glass with half an inch in it. And on the far wall, the tall oak bookcase that's stood there since his grandfather's day has swung away from the plaster on a hidden hinge, leaving a dark rectangle like an open mouth.
Behind it, a steel door. A lock.
The lock hangs open.
A faint, cold, humming glow comes from the room beyond.
I stand there in his shirt and my bare feet, with my heart going slowly and heavily, like a bell under water.
It's none of your business.
Go back to bed.
Wait for him.
I take a step.
Another.
I put my hand on the steel door, and I push it wide.