He let himself out. The door closed with the same expensive click it had made when they entered, and the difference between those two clicks was the whole length of a marriage trying to understand itself.
Rachel took off the coat. It felt necessary and useless, like returning a library book after the fine has already been paid in public. The black dress, without the coat, was only a dress. She folded the camel wool over a chair and stood with her arms bare and cold under the pendants.
"I will tell you how long," she said. "If you still want it tonight."
"I wanted it when I asked." Jason ran a hand over his jaw. The stubble rasped. He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the flight. "Now I want to know if my daughter is going to come down those stairs and find us still destroying her card. So talk. Short. Then we figure out where everybody sleeps."
Rachel held the edge of the island. The marble was cool, a fact she could bear. "I met him in January of last year. The capital campaign. He was in the conference room with a notebook and he listened when I talked about the education program like it was not a line item. We were friends until November. Drinks after a reception. I talked too much about you being gone. He talked about a divorce he had already finished. Nothing happened that night except that I didn't want to go home to an empty kitchen, and I went home anyway." She swallowed. "The first time I lied to you was not a kiss. It was a text in December. You asked how the board dinner went. I said boring. It wasn't boring. I sat next to him and I felt awake. I told myself awake was not betrayal."
Jason listened the way he listened to engineers, face still, eyes on the middle distance, storing the numbers.