Miami Again
Chapter 01 - Miami Again
“Which hotel are you taking your mistress to?”
Victor Moretti stopped with his hand on the bedroom door. He was wearing the charcoal vest Claire had bought him for their twentieth anniversary. The top buttons of his white shirt were open, showing the edge of a tattoo she once knew well enough to trace in the dark.
“Claire. It's business.”
“Miami again?”
He glanced at the suitcase standing beside the bed. Hers, not his. An old brown leather case with a dent near the lock, purchased before they had enough money to travel anywhere worth going. She had taken it down from the attic herself.
“What's this?” he asked.
“My clothes.”
“I can see that.” His voice sharpened, then softened in the manner she had come to recognize as negotiation. “Baby, let me explain.”
She folded a blue sweater and set it on top of her shoes. She was forty-nine, and after twenty-five years of marriage, she knew that the gentler Victor sounded, the more carefully she needed to listen.
“Don't call me that today.”
Outside, rain threaded down the tall windows of their Manhattan bedroom. Newspapers called Victor a shipping magnate. Men on the waterfront still called him the head of the Moretti family, and lowered their voices when they said it. A man was waiting downstairs to drive Victor to the airport. In less than an hour, a woman named Dahlia Price would be checking into a suite at the Mariner Hotel in Miami, the one Victor preferred because its staff didn't ask questions.
He came closer. “You went through my phone?”
“No. I went to the anniversary dinner you said you couldn't attend.”
He frowned. “What?”
“Three Thursdays ago. At the Gramercy. I arrived alone, because you said you were meeting a client. You were already there.” She closed the suitcase. “Your client was wearing my earrings.”
Victor looked at her ears, bare except for small gold studs. Claire had given the diamond drops to a jeweler last winter to repair a loose clasp. Victor had collected them, or so he claimed. At the restaurant, she'd seen them beneath Dahlia's pale hair as the younger woman leaned across a candlelit table and kissed his hand.
“I can explain the earrings.”
“I imagine you've practiced.”
For a moment he looked almost angry. Then the bedroom clock struck eleven, and some part of him seemed to remember that he couldn't order his way through this conversation.
“How long have you known?”
“Long enough to stop wondering whether I was imagining it. Not long enough to stop feeling stupid.”
“You're not stupid.”
“That has never been the question.”
She lifted her coat from the chair. In the mirror she caught sight of the red waves of her hair, pulled back untidily. Once Victor had told her that color looked like a candle in a dark room. For years she'd repeated his compliments in her head when he came home late. There was something especially humiliating about remembering how faithfully a woman could preserve words the man who spoke them had forgotten.
“Claire, wait.”
He stood between her and the door. He had no weapon, no raised fist, nothing but the broad shoulders that made other men move aside. But she felt the old reflex to soothe him, to promise they could discuss this after dinner, after the trip, after whatever catastrophe required his attention.
She had spent half her marriage waiting for the right day.
“Move, Victor.”
“I'm not letting you walk out over something we can fix.”
She looked at him until he stepped aside.
“We can't fix what you won't name.”
Downstairs, Marisol, the household manager, stood near the front entrance. She was fifty-eight and had been with them since Elise was a toddler. At her feet sat a second, smaller suitcase. Claire had asked her to bring it from the guest room. Marisol did not look at Victor.
“Mrs. Moretti,” she said, and her voice caught. Then she cleared her throat. “Your car is around back.”
Victor had always trusted Marisol. He looked from one woman to the other, beginning to understand that Claire's departure was not a scene he could interrupt. It was a plan already in motion.
“Our daughter knows?” he asked.
Claire tightened her fingers around the handle. “Elise knows I'm leaving. She doesn't owe you a report.”
“Where are you going?”
“Somewhere I can hear myself think.”
His phone rang. The name on the screen appeared for less than a second before he turned it facedown: D. PRICE.
Claire had imagined this moment dozens of times. She'd expected to shout, perhaps strike the phone from his hand. Instead she felt strangely tired. She had not slept the previous night, because she had spent it reading hotel reservations and messages while her husband snored beside her.
“Answer,” she said. “She's probably worried you'll miss the flight.”
He let the call ring out.
On the porch Claire turned, not because she intended to stay but because she wanted one last look at the house where her daughter had learned to walk and where, at forty-nine, she had learned how quiet heartbreak could be.
Victor stood beneath the chandelier, his hands hanging uselessly at his sides.
“Tell me what to do,” he said.
She nearly answered. That was the cruelest instinct of all: even now he expected her to tell him how to repair the damage he had caused.
“Start by telling the truth,” she said. “To yourself, if nobody else.”
The car pulled away before he reached the front steps.
When Victor returned to the bedroom, rain had turned the windows silver. The bed was made. On the white quilt lay an envelope, a flash drive, and Claire's wedding ring placed carefully atop a set of divorce papers.
He picked up the ring. It was warm from the afternoon light, although the sun had already disappeared. Twenty-five years. He remembered putting it on her finger with hands that trembled more than hers. He remembered being poor and absurdly happy.
The envelope contained one sheet of stationery in Claire's familiar handwriting.
*I knew everything. I'm done. Do not send your men to find me. I am not missing.*
He put the flash drive into Claire's open laptop. Folder after folder appeared: photographs, dated receipts, voice messages. He clicked the first recording and heard Dahlia laughing. Then his own voice, low and affectionate.
“Claire won't leave me. She knows who she married.”
Victor shut his eyes. He had said it in a Miami suite after midnight. He remembered the expensive bourbon and Dahlia's hand against his chest. He remembered feeling clever.
The recording continued. Dahlia asked whether he would still bring her to the house after Claire left.
And Victor heard himself answer, “Elise will understand. I've already talked to her.”
He hadn't. Not once.
May you like
Then, from the hallway, came a voice he knew better than his own.
“Dad,” Elise said. “There's something else on that drive I need you to hear.”
