Felix dragged himself out of bed at six, as Ella always did. Not that he’d slept. He unwrapped himself from the duvet, slipped his feet into the sheepskin slippers Ella had given him for Christmas, and padded down the hall to turn up the thermostat. The compressor rattled to life; heat whooshed up through a floor vent; the humidifier hummed. Moisture levels in the house were down to thirty-three percent. He would fill both water tanks before leaving for the hospital.
He peered through the thin strip of glass that ran the length of the front door. The hand of frost had painted the ground white. Mother would call it a hoarfrost. Harry would need layers for school—something more substantial than the beaten-up leather jacket he treated as a second skin. And a woolly hat. And gloves. And a scarf. Did Harry own winter clothes? They rarely needed them in North Carolina, but this winter was closing in with arctic cold and too many memories of a childhood spent desperate for warmth.
Shivering, Felix wandered into the kitchen and flicked on the recessed lights and the electric kettle. Tea was the way to start the day. And tea wasn’t tea unless it was served in an English bone china mug. He reached up into the cabinet and found his favorite: a Susan Rose Merton College Mug Full of History. Felix brewed his tea and, raising his mug, read the hand-painted words about the city of Oxford. Words that took him back to another place, another time, another life.
He headed into the master bath, the room he had gutted and rebuilt so Ella could have a state-of-the-art shower with multiple jets. It had been her fortieth birthday and tenth wedding anniversary present. He reached inside the shower and turned the dial as far round as it would go. Then he put the mug down on the vanity, slipped his T-shirt over his head, and stepped out of his pajama pants. Catching sight of his flat stomach in the mirror, he sucked it in until his ribs showed. He would never develop a paunch like Pater.
His plan was to shower and shave as he did every morning. Keep moving forward. Wake up the boys, he supposed. Offer them breakfast and push them out of the door. What time did Harry normally leave for school? Should he allow longer if Max was driving? Were student drivers meant to get there early? He didn’t know the routine; he didn’t know the rules.
The day loomed ahead as an unmoored horror. Investment banking, putting together deals, issuing bonds . . . those were in his marrow. Without the structure of work, without the bond market, he wasn’t Felix Fitzwilliam. Today he was someone he’d never been before.
Felix stepped into a cloud of steam. Water vapor misted up his shaving mirror and turned the glass shower doors opaque. He braced his arms against the tiled wall and let needles of scalding water pummel his body. But still he couldn’t erase Katherine’s words from the night before: “Harder for your wife.”
Returning home after a girls’ night out the other week, Ella had said, “Why do you make everything so hard, Felix?” Had he made her life too hard—driven her heart to fail? Decisions were hard, relationships were hard, life was hard, and according to Ella, he made it harder.
For seventeen years, he’d been waiting for his wife to wake up and say, “You know what? I deserve better than you.” And he would have agreed. That’s the thing—he would have agreed. He wished she had left him, because then she might be healthy: Ella Bella without the stress of being Mrs. Fitzwilliam.
Rocking back, he slammed the flats of his hands on either side of his head. All the thoughts, he needed them gone.
Everyone would expect him to weep and wail, but he hadn’t cried since he was six years old and Tom saved his life. He knew, with certainty, that Pater, who’d never lashed him more than once before, would have killed him that day. Felix was twenty and up at Oxford when his father died. He’d felt nothing. Even when Tom was diagnosed with AIDS, Felix hadn’t cried. He’d become the master of concealed emotions.
Felix slid to his knees. On the floor of his shower, with his skin beginning to burn, he prayed to be numb.