I left Frankie by the service elevator with my heart banging too fast.
I could not go back into that room and smile at people who had just watched my mother's bed used as a lever.
So I took the stairwell door and started down.
I made it one flight before my legs quit on me.
I sat down on the cold concrete and put my face in my hands, and the crying came.
It was the ugly kind. The kind I had been saving up for months.
The stairwell door opened above me. I did not look up.
Frankie: Elodie?
Frankie: I know a woman running for the stairs when I see one.
I scrubbed my face with both hands and made my voice flat.
Elodie: Go back to work. I'm fine.
Frankie: You are crying on a step.
Elodie: I'm fine and crying. It's a new thing I do.
She did not argue. She sat down beside me like it was the most normal thing in the world.
She did not tell me to stop. She just waited with her hands folded.
Then she turned and really looked at me. Not at my face. At all of me.
Frankie: How long?
Elodie: How long what?
Frankie: How long have you been crying in stairwells, Elodie?
I meant to say something small, something to let us both off the hook.
Elodie: Since the funeral. Mostly in the car.
Frankie: The car.
Elodie: I park in the garage. I cry for ten minutes.
Elodie: Then I fix my face and come inside like nothing happened.
And that was it. That little string holding me up all year just snapped.
I cried the way you cry when someone says the true thing out loud.
Frankie: You don't have to be strong with me.
Frankie: Not here. Not ever. You hear me?
She said it flat, like it was a fact I was too stupid to see.
Elodie: I have to be. If I'm not strong, he wins.
Frankie: That's not a marriage. That's a war you are losing inside your own house.
Elodie: I'm so tired, Frankie.
Frankie: There she is.
Her hand landed on my back, flat and warm, and it stayed there.
His reach did not stop at the penthouse. It went into my mother's room and my paycheck.
If he heard I told you any of this, you would be carrying boxes out of this hotel.
Frankie: Then I'll carry boxes.
Elodie: You have rent. You have a job you need.
Frankie: I have a mouth too. And I know exactly what he is.
Frankie: I have watched him use that table like a knife for a whole year.
Something warm and shaky moved through my chest.
Elodie: Everyone thinks I should have kept him happy.
Frankie: Everyone is scared of him. That's not the same thing as thinking.
Frankie: And the woman getting the nameplate? Let her decorate his hallway.
Frankie: She does not get your chair, and she does not get to watch you fall apart.
Elodie: I still catch myself wanting him to be sorry. That's the part nobody sees.
Frankie: That's not crazy. That's just grief wearing his face.
Elodie: Nobody has said one true thing to me in a year.
Frankie: I was scared to say it out loud. I saw how he looked at you in that meeting.
Frankie: Like you were a problem he could just delete.
She was right. He had deleted me from every room but this one.
We sat until my face was dry and the concrete stopped feeling so cold.
Frankie: Wash your face. I'll cover your morning rounds.
Elodie: He'll ask where I was.
Frankie: Then let him ask.
He would punish me for this. He always found a way to send the bill.
But Frankie had seen all of it, and she had not moved away.