Empire Falls

that in this happiness they’d both been betrayed .
    “Does he ever—”
    “Speak of you? I don’t believe so, but of course he wouldn’t, not to me.”
    “Does he know?”
    “About our present arrangement? Yes. When I told him he seemed to appreciate the irony in it.”
    Grace took this in in silence .
    “Have you any further questions before we put this subject forever to rest?”
    Grace shook her head .
    “Excellent. If my husband should ever attempt to contact you, I expect you to inform me. Will you do that?”
    Grace hesitated for only a moment. “Yes.”
    “If you fail to keep your word, I will know,” Mrs. Whiting said. “One look at you would reveal the whole truth.”
    “I’ll keep my word.”
    “I believe you,” Mrs. Whiting said. She seemed satisfied, as if she’d anticipated both the conversation and its outcome. “You’ll work here for the foreseeable future, I imagine,” she continued when Grace got to her feet. “You should know, I’ve grown quite fond of you, dear girl. Perhaps there’s irony in this as well?”
    Grace was unable to think of a suitable response. Might it be possible that what Mrs. Whiting had just said was true? If so, did that mean she’d been forgiven? Or was it possible to be genuinely fond of someone you’d not forgiven? Illogical as this last possibility seemed, it was precisely Grace’s impression .

PART FOUR

CHAPTER 23
    “D ON’T LOOK NOW ,” David said, looking up from his newspaper, “but here comes the happy groom, back from his honeymoon.”
    Indeed the Silver Fox was tripping up the front steps of the grill. Though Miles was not particularly pleased to see him, he couldn’t help but smile at the fact that he hadn’t heard the ticking of Walt’s van when it pulled up out front, a sound that had haunted him for nearly a year. One more way his life had changed for the better since his illness.
    After the wedding, of course, people kept asking how it felt to be a free man. Actually, to Miles’s surprise, it felt pretty good, as if the many delays in the divorce proceedings had exhausted even his capacity for self-recrimination. He’d expected his ex-wife’s wedding to take more of a toll on him, to intensify his feelings of personal failure. After all, he and Janine had promised till death do us part before God and family, and now here she was making the same promise all over again to another man. When the justice of the peace asked if anyone here objected to the proposed union, Miles was a little embarrassed to discover that he didn’t, at least not anymore. He’d always resisted Janine’s naive belief that you could just begin life anew, as if the past didn’t exist, but she seemed to be doing exactly that, which suggested that Miles could too, especially now that he’d made his decision.
    Of course, the jury was still out on Janine’s new life. Miles felt bad that her big day had been such a cut-rate affair. Of course secular weddings always struck him as foreshortened, the ceremony over and done with almost before it began. It took longer to close on a house, and Miles couldn’t help noting that purchasing real estate was viewed, these days, as a more serious occasion, an undertaking with more lasting repercussions. But then, maybe it always had been. It was marriage, after all, that determined the right of inheritance, the orderly devolving of real property from one generation to the next. Perhaps the solemnity that once accompanied marriage was merely a by-product of an even weightier—if not sacred—rite.
    The reception afterward was nearly as depressing. Janine had let it be known that what she wanted was a goddamn party, with a kick-ass band and a big dance floor where people could really cut loose. Where she could cut loose. The entire event seemed designed to illustrate Miles’s many failures as a husband. The whole time they’d been married, she seemed to be saying, she’d been wanting music and excitement and dancing, and now that she was finally shut of Miles Roby, by God she was going to get it.
    For this purpose, the biggest room around, if you pushed back the partition that separated the aerobics room from the Nautilus machines, was at Walt’s health club, so they’d moved the various instruments of torture—Stairmasters and stationary bicycles and treadmills—out of the way and leaned the yoga mats up against the walls, which suggested that some of the revelers might be driving bumper cars. Judging from