GODSFALL

An Empty Suite

Lena knew she had been gone for two hours and nineteen minutes. She knew this, since she had checked her cell phone in the lift and calculated it. Two hours and nineteen minutes is a very ridiculous long time to be away on your wedding night. Lena would have to apologize. It would have to be a very damn good apology.

She had been preparing what she was going to say in the car. She would say that she should not have gone, that she should have let someone else deal with it. She would say that Marcus had people in his life even if she seemed like the only one in them.

Lena was always one who made other people's problems her own. She had always been like that. It was one of her good qualities and one of her bad qualities at the same time. She had told Ethan about this a time ago and he had just listened, which is what she needed back then.

The elevator opened on the forty-third floor. The hallway was empty and very quiet with carpet that made it hard to hear footsteps. Lena slid the card into the door and pushed it open. The room looked mostly the same as when she had left it, the candles had burned down a bit more. Thou they were still burning; the champagne was still in its bucket. The flower petals were still on the floor.

Ethan was not there.

Lena stood in the doorway for a moment just taking it all in.

The room felt like a place where someone had just left like something was not quite right, like a sentence that ends one word soon.

Ethan?

She checked the bathroom. It was empty. Then she checked the walk-in wardrobe. Saw that his jacket was gone. She returned to the room and took a closer look around the room this time. His cell phone was not on the ledge where he normally keeps it. His cufflinks, however, were still there. His overnight bag was lying open on the luggage stand. Nothing seemed to be missing from it as far as she could tell.

She sat down on the edge of the bed. There must be an explanation for this she told herself. Ethan had probably gone downstairs maybe to get some air or food or because he gets restless at night sometimes. But she never really understood why he gets restless, it's something from his past that he had not explained to her. She had never pushed him to talk about it. Now she was thinking about it.

She looked at the pillow on Ethans side of the bed. On it was a document, several pages bound together with a clip. Next to it a small cream card with the hotel’s letterhead.

She picked up the card first. On it were four words, neatly written in Ethans angular hand-writing.

I heard everything. Do not look for me.

She read it twice, then set it down on the bedside table moving carefully. Then she picked up the document.

She read the title of the first page.

After that she sat down, motionless for a long time.

Outside Evergreen City was still going on. Taxis were running, lights changing, night was on, and everything was going on as usual, while nobody was paying attention to whatever was going on in the hotel room. The woman was sitting on the hotel bed wearing her wedding dress, holding a document that said her marriage to Ethan was over.

She did not cry. She noticed this about herself. It was strange. It wasn't sadness that she felt. It was more of a revelation of something that she had been avoiding realizing for a while. It was the moment when she realized she had been blind to something.

She picked up her phone. Found Marcus’s name, but then she stopped.

She set the phone down.

She stayed in the suite for a time, just sitting there not moving, not crying. Outside the city kept going. There was a transformation in her, something quietly and irrevocably changed.