She said, “It’s over. If that helps.”
“Not really.”
“Do you remember how you were in Cairo?”
His damp eyes were back on her, brow twitching. “You’re not going to twist this into my fault, are you?”
She looked down at her glass, which she still hadn’t touched. He knew very well how he had been in Cairo, but he wasn’t interested in drawing a connection between that and her infidelity. Were she him, she would have felt the same way.
He said, “Do you love him?”
“No.”
“Did you love him?”
“For a week I thought I might, but I was wrong.”
“Were you thinking about a divorce?”
She frowned, almost shocked by the use of a word that she had never considered. “God. No. Never. You’re …” She hesitated, then lowered her voice, pushing a hand across the table in his direction. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, Emmett.”
He didn’t even acknowledge her hand. “Then … why?”
Anyone who’s committed adultery envisions this moment, plots it out and works up a rough draft of a speech that, she imagined, will cut through the fog with some ironclad defense of the indefensible. Sitting there, though, staring at his wounded face, she couldn’t remember any of it, and she found herself grasping for words. Yet all that came to her was hackneyed lines, as if she were reading from a script. But they were both doing that, weren’t they? “I was lonely, Emmett. Simple as that.”
“Who else knew?”
“What?”
“Who else knew about this?”
She pulled back her untouched hand. He was being petty now, as if it truly mattered whether or not someone knew of his bruised pride. But she could give him that. “No one,” she lied.
He nodded, but didn’t look relieved.
The food came, giving them time to regroup, and as she ate, cheeks hot and hand trembling, she reflected on how betrayed he had to feel. Hadn’t she known from the beginning that she would do this to him? Hadn’t she seen all this coming? Not really, for in Cairo she’d gone with the moment. In Cairo she’d been stupid.
Daniel had done an excellent job with her tagliatelle, perfectly tender, and there was a pepper sauce on Emmett’s steak that smelled divine. Emmett began to stab halfheartedly at his meat. The sight made her want to cry. She said, “What was it? In Cairo.”
He looked up—no exasperation, just simple confusion.
“You were a mess there. Me, too, I know, but you … well, you were impossible to live with. Paris was fine, and here. But in Cairo you were a different man.”
“So you are trying to blame me,” he said. Coldly.
“I just want to know what was on your back in Cairo.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said as he lifted a bite to his mouth. He delivered it. It was like a punctuation mark, that move.
“Cairo was bad from the start,” she went on, forcing the words out. “Not for me. No—I loved it. But you changed there, and you never told me anything.”
“So you fucked Stan.”
“Yes, I fucked Stan. But that doesn’t change the fact that you became someone else there, and once we left Cairo you returned to your old self.”
He chewed, staring through her.
“I’m not trying to start a fight, Emmett. I like the man you are now. I love him. I didn’t like the man you were there. So let’s get it out in the open. What was going on in Cairo?”
As he took another bite, still staring, something occurred to her.
“Were you having an affair?”
He sighed, disappointed by her stupidity.
“Then what was it?”
He still watched so coldly, but she could see his barriers breaking down. It was in the rhythm of his chewing, the way it slowed.
“Come on, Emmett. You can’t keep it a secret forever.”
He swallowed, his wrist on the edge of the table, his fork holding a fresh triangle of beef a few inches above his plate. He said, “Remember Novi Sad?”
There it was. Yugoslavia, twenty years ago. I saved you, Sophie. This is how you pay me back? She nodded.
“Zora?” he asked.
“Zora Balašević,” she said, her throat now dry.
“Zora was in Cairo.”
She knew this, of course, but said, “Cairo?”
“Working at the Serbian embassy. BIA—one of their spies. Not long after we arrived, she got in touch. Ran into me on the street.” He paused, finally putting down his fork. “I was pleased to see her. You remember—despite everything, we got along well in the end. We went to a café, reminiscing about the good stuff, careful to avoid the rest, and then it came. She wanted me to give her information.”
To breathe properly, Sophie had to leave her mouth open. This wasn’t what she’d expected him to say. Her sinuses were closing up. She said, “Well, that’s forward.”
“Isn’t it?” he said, smiling, not noticing anything. Briefly, he was in his story, looking just like her old husband. “I said no, so she put her cards on the table. She blackmailed me.”
She didn’t have to ask what Zora had blackmailed him with, and at that moment she had a flash of it: A filthy leg in a black army boot, spastic, kicking at the dirt of a basement. “The bitch,” she snapped, but she could feel herself reddening. It was so hot.
“You know what would happen if that came out. I’d never work in the diplomatic corps again. Ever. But I still said no.”
She was burning up. She grabbed the collar of her blouse and fanned it, drawing cool air down her shoulders. “Good for you,” she managed.
He shrugged, modest. “My mistake was that I didn’t report it.”
She tried to empty herself of all the heat in a long exhale. “You could have. You could’ve told Harry, or even Stan.”
“Sure, but I didn’t know that then. I’d been at the embassy less than a week. I didn’t know anything about those guys. Neither of us did. By the time I realized my mistake, it was too late. It would’ve looked like I’d been covering it up.”
He wanted affirmation, so she said, “I suppose you’re right.”
“Living under that cloud certainly didn’t help my mood. But that didn’t compare to later, when the whole thing came back to bite me.”
She waited.
“About a year ago, last March, Stan started asking questions. Not very subtle, your Stan.” A faint smile. “It turned out that loose information had been floating around, intel that originated in Cairo—intel I’d had access to. I was under investigation for most of last year.”
She moved back in time, remembering the fights, the moods, the drinking, the anger. It all played differently now. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
That faint smile returned. “I didn’t want to burden you,” he said. “You were having such a good time. Of course, I didn’t know why you were so happy, but …” A shrug.
She didn’t know how he could have said that without hatred, but he had. She felt a hard knot in her chest.
He said, “It turned out that Stan already knew about Zora. His guys had been watching me when we first got there—normal vetting procedure. He’d seen me with her, and when the compromised intel came to his attention he followed up on it. So I told him what happened. I told him what she tried to do, and I told him that I refused.”
“Did you tell him about … ?”
“I left the blackmail a mystery, and he finally let that go. He never asked you?”