Flowers of Darkness by Tatiana Rosnay (free ebook reader for iphone TXT) 📗

your studio. Keys and badges are done. Things of the past. Welcome to C.A.S.A., Mrs. Katsef.”

 NOTEBOOK

I’m not quite sure when it started. There had been warning signs, but I hadn’t paid attention to them. I guess I hadn’t wanted to see. I began to notice he was often late, or that I couldn’t get hold of him during the day. Most of the times, his phone was switched off, and I began to find that strange.

We had been through this before. Moments of pain I did not want to go back to. That dreadful instant when the suspicion takes over. When you can think of nothing else.

We had been through what many couples go through. Those bitter, painful, intimate moments where infidelity rears its head. It happens. And it had already happened quite a bit to us. He had always said the other women were not important. I had always managed to forgive.

Why had I been so lenient? I wonder now. With years comes a new kind of power. The idea that you don’t want anyone taking advantage of you anymore. The inner conviction that you have had enough.

It doesn’t happen overnight. It builds up slowly, like a thick liquid taking ages to boil. It took a while, for me.

There had been a truce. And it had lasted for years. He had been ill for quite a stretch. I suppose any thought of an affair had not gone through his head, nor mine. We were too busy tending to him, making sure he would pull through. His medication exhausted him. He slept most of the time.

I helped him get better, stayed by his side, listened to him. I got on with my life, wrote my books, wrote my TV shows, saw my daughter, my granddaughter, my friends.

He regained his strength and the illness became a bad memory. He got back to work, spent time with his team, and traveled. Sometimes he left for a day or two.

I’m trying to think back to what made me understand something was going on. The exact minute when I came out of the fog. The second I knew he was seeing another woman.

He had been late. He usually was, so I hadn’t paid attention. We were having dinner at the home of some friends, and he turned up with a bouquet of flowers, mumbling some excuse.

It wasn’t till later, when we got home, while he was in the bathroom, that I noticed the hair on his jacket. Long and blond. I remember saying to myself that this was like a scene out of a bad movie. Terribly clichéd. And yet there it was, that long golden hair stretching out like a snake on the sleeve of his jacket.

I didn’t say anything. Then I reached out for his jacket, put my nose against the collar. I picked it out immediately.

Another perfume lingering there.

I sometimes wonder. If I had noticed anything earlier, if I had done something, would that have changed the course of events?

I don’t think so. Everything was leading up to that moment.

Me, standing in front of that door, holding the key in my hand.

The key to Blue Beard’s secret room.

 2LAKE

If anybody could have saved me, it would have been you.

VIRGINIA WOOLF, March 28, 1941

Devotees of broken hearts should apply elsewhere.

ROMAIN GARY, December 2, 1980

THE CAT HAD been acting strangely for the past week. Clarissa thought perhaps she should bring it up with Jordan. Chablis ate less and less, and seemed to mew for hours. But what truly alarmed her was when he jumped, startled, as if he had seen or heard someone—the oddest thing. And yet, there was no one. No one, apart from herself. Silence ruled, always. Maybe the cat wasn’t used to it yet. Neither was she. There had been a perpetual racket in the flat she’d shared with François. Noisy neighbors, doors banging, people gabbing in the street below, under their windows. She had only ever lived in ground-floor or second-floor apartments before the C.A.S.A. residence. The early-morning glow dazzled her each day when she awoke. She didn’t need to ask Mrs. Dalloway to turn on any more lights. It was like living in the sky, in the clouds.

She had never anticipated she’d feel this lonely. She missed François. She missed him at unexpected moments. A blues tune on the radio. A whiff of Vétiver. The sweater he’d given her after a weekend in Ireland. Even if all the furniture was new, even if she’d painstakingly erased all traces of her past and all traces of François, her husband was still there. He materialized like a watermark interlaced into every nook of the apartment. She could even make out his sturdy, slightly stubby-legged outline, the one she had cherished for so long. There he was, sprawled on the sofa, poring over his device. There he was, under the shower, lathering up foam. There he was, asking Mrs. Dalloway for a cappuccino. François had never cared about being smaller than she was. He had no hang-ups about his height. On the contrary, he was proud to have her at his arm. Now that she’d left him, should she call her friends? She wondered what he had told those same friends about their breakup. He couldn’t conceivably have given them the truth. He must have spun a story. But which one? And what would she, in turn, say to her friends? She imagined their dismayed faces. Their pity. No, she must keep it bottled up. François would do the same thing. He didn’t have much choice.

No matter how hard she tried not to, she imagined him walking up the rue Dancourt. Opening the gate, striding along the passageway, entering the building on the left. She could see him going up to the sixth floor in the tiny run-down elevator. His key in the old ramshackle lock. She didn’t want to see what happened next. But the images swung back at her. It was impossible to make them disappear. She had