She cooked a small dinner for herself—rice, greens, a piece of fish—and ate it facing the mantel. Halfway through she raised her glass of water in a private toast that would have looked foolish to anyone watching and did not look foolish to her: to Aunt Ruth, to the stoop, to the sound a number made when it finally met its consequence.
The weeks that followed were not a reconciliation so much as a rearrangement of distances.
Sloan did not call. Sloan sent a text two days after the watch went home: You humiliated me. Eleanor did not reply. Humiliation, Eleanor had learned, was often what people named the feeling of being accurately seen.
Harrison came on Sundays without Sloan for a month. He sat at Eleanor’s table and ate whatever she cooked—baked chicken, gumbo, a simple spaghetti when she was tired—and talked about work in the careful way of a man trying to prove he still knew how to be a son. Eleanor listened. She asked about Denise’s loan. He had paid Denise back in two installments and brought Denise flowers, which Denise reported to Eleanor with a sniff that was half annoyance and half approval. Eleanor asked about the rims. He said the car looked honest again. She did not ask about Sloan’s wrist. One Sunday she noticed he kept glancing at the mantel photograph, at the waterline in the gold, and she let him glance.
On the fifth Sunday he stayed after the dishes and said, “We’re in counseling.”
Eleanor rinsed a plate. “Both of you?”