But something inside him had snapped the night of Melody’s birthday. He was genuinely horrified when the story came pouring out of Jack about the illegal sale of the Rodin. It was illegal! Whatever stupid things Jack had done over the years, breaking the law was a first (he assumed, he hoped). If he’d gone ahead with the ridiculous scheme and gotten caught, Walker couldn’t even bear to imagine what they’d be facing and not just personally—for him the repercussions would be professional. It was beyond imagining.
As he’d stood in their kitchen that night, watching Jack try to explain himself and toggle between evasive and indignant, Walker’s years of resigned tolerance evaporated. In the coming weeks, he would spend a lot of time trying to unpack that moment, not understanding himself how years of commitment and love and tolerance could just vanish. But they did. As he stood and watched Jack, he realized that for more than twenty years he had parented his partner. And on the heels of that debilitating thought, a brief flash of insight that leveled him: The reason they’d never had a child, something Walker had dearly wanted but had never been able to persuade Jack to want, was because Jack was the child—and Walker had let him be the child, enabled him. His husband was his forty-four-year-old petulant, needy, responsibility-avoiding son, and now it was too late for other children, and with that realization Walker was undone.
He thought he’d come to peace with the child decision years ago; it didn’t bother him that much anymore, just the occasional twinge. But seeing Melody’s daughters—so lovely, so sweet—had set something off and then when Stephanie said she was pregnant, he was overwhelmed by such a sudden and unexpected melancholy that he had to leave the room to breathe. Then the confessions, forcing Walker to stop ignoring Jack’s careless, greedy heart. It was as if on the night of Melody’s birthday a yawning crevasse had opened beneath him and he couldn’t clamber up the side to safety. Every day, all day, he felt a kind of vertigo, as if there were nothing holding him up, just a dangerous looming beneath, a valley of regret and waste.
The night before he moved out, he panicked. What if he was ascribing grief from his own decisions to Jack’s behavior? What if he was being unfair? What if he owed both of them another chance? He walked into the apartment after work if not entirely willing to reconsider a separation, at least willing to have a conversation. Jack was in the bedroom with the door partially closed, talking on the phone. He was arguing with someone. He was insisting he could find another “buyer,” encouraging the person on the other end to reconsider. He hadn’t, as he’d e-mailed Walker repeatedly, called off the sale of the statue. He was still trying to make it happen.
That was that.
Walker would take whatever proceeds he could get from the house on Long Island and buy his own place. He’d help negotiate Jack’s line of credit. He supposed they’d have to get divorced, but he was in no hurry to start legal proceedings. He’d probably end up paying for all of that, too.
CHAPTER THIRTY–EIGHT
The night of her nonbirthday dinner when she’d found Nora and Louisa in Jack’s bedroom and asked them what was wrong and why Louisa was crying, the night she wouldn’t let up until Nora finally blurted that they’d seen Leo in the park in a compromising position and then they both (in an effort, Melody now realized, to deflect from what would come out days later, the missing SAT classes; Simone) pointed to the wedding photo of Jack and Walker, Melody still believed the evening could be salvaged. Absurdly, she continued to believe it the whole time Jack and Bea were interrogating Nora and Louisa about the day they’d seen Leo in the park, and she’d even held out hope while Stephanie was disgorging the contents of her stomach in the corner of the living room and then the news of Leo’s disappearance. It wasn’t until Jack and Walker started fighting in the kitchen, hushed voices quickly giving way to shouting, that Melody finally realized dinner was never going to be eaten, the cake never cut, the pretty limoncello never poured.
She’d drained her champagne glass, removed her dressy sandals because her feet were killing her, and wondered if it would be rude to sneak into the kitchen and grab the remaining champagne