The Surgeon They Buried

Chapter ten

Naomi’s apartment is quiet in the specific way apartments get quiet at night when the person living in them has nobody left to perform for. She’s still in the clothes she wore to the hospital, hasn’t bothered changing, hasn’t bothered with much of anything since she got home beyond the tea nobody drank. 

The tea’s gone cold on the counter, untouched since she poured it an hour ago out of habit more than thirst. She’d meant to review the final prospectus draft tonight. It’s still sitting open on her laptop two rooms away, cursor blinking in the same spot it’s been blinking in for the last forty minutes. A car alarm goes off somewhere down the block and stops. A neighbor’s television murmurs faintly through the wall. Somewhere below her window, a city she’s lived in her whole life keeps making its ordinary night sounds, and none of it reaches her the way it usually does. She can’t stop replaying the woman in the wool coat walking up that driveway like she’d been born already owning the property line.

She tells herself the jealousy is irrational. She signed the papers herself, in that same driveway, with her own hand, on her own terms. She has no claim left to defend and no right to feel the particular hot twist in her chest every time she pictures that woman’s calm, unhurried walk. She keeps replaying the sheer economy of the woman’s movements, the way she never once raised her hands or her voice or seemed to need either, the way even Renata, mid tirade, had visibly recalculated the moment that coat came up the path. Naomi has spent her whole adult life learning to project exactly that kind of unbothered authority in a boardroom, and it had taken this woman perhaps four sentences to make it look effortless in a gravel driveway. Telling herself all of that is irrational doesn’t make the feeling any smaller. If anything it just gives the feeling something to argue with.

She keeps circling back to the Grant she used to know, five years of a man who never once raised his voice even when he had every reason to, not during the trial, not during sentencing, not even when her own mother said things across a dinner table that should have ended the marriage on the spot. She remembers one dinner in particular, early in the marriage, when her father made something cutting about Grant’s residency salary in front of half the extended family, and Grant had simply passed the bread basket and asked someone a polite question about their vacation. She’d mistaken that, for years, for a man who simply hadn’t noticed the insult, rather than a man who’d already decided which battles were worth spending his voice on. It’s a strange thing to understand a person more clearly the same week she signed away any right to understand him at all.

She measures that memory against a woman who apparently doesn’t need to raise her voice either, and finds herself wondering, uncomfortably, what that particular kind of calm actually costs a person, and whether she ever once thought to ask Grant what his was costing him.

She thinks about the trust fund comment her mother let slip weeks ago in the middle of gloating and never once explained. Her mother had said it fast, under her breath, meant for Roland and not for anyone else in the room, and Naomi had filed it away the way she files most things her mother says without meaning to be overheard, as noise rather than information. She isn’t sure anymore that it was noise. She thinks about a husband who left a settlement check untouched on the hood of a car like it meant less than nothing to him, the exact opposite of a man with nothing left, and starts to suspect, slowly, uncomfortably, that she never actually knew what Grant was worth. Only what her family had spent five years carefully telling her he wasn’t. It’s an uncomfortable kind of arithmetic to do at midnight, alone, with nobody left to argue the other side of it.

None of it adds up to an answer. It only adds up to more questions she isn’t sure she has any right to ask anymore, about a man she chose to stop being married to, in a driveway, with her own signature.

Her phone lights up on the nightstand. Corbin Whitaker’s name, a gentle follow up to the engagement message she still hasn’t answered. She doesn’t need to open it to know roughly what it will say, some version of the same warm, reasonable paragraph he’s sent twice already this week, checking in, gently, about timelines and photographers and whether Thursday still works for the call with his publicist. Nothing in it will be unkind. Nothing in it ever is. It’s worded exactly the way he words everything, polished and patient and entirely certain, the specific confidence of a man who has never once in his life doubted he’d eventually get what he wants. It’s the kind of message that should feel like relief, from a man who has never once left her standing in a driveway wondering what she actually meant to him. She should feel lucky. She keeps waiting to feel lucky. She thinks about how certain she’d been, signing those papers, that she was choosing clarity over chaos, an easy, sensible future over a complicated, expensive past. She isn’t certain of very much tonight.

Naomi looks at it for a long moment, thumb hovering over the reply, and then sets the phone face down on the nightstand without answering, staring at the ceiling instead, no longer certain which parts of her life she actually chose.