Camden Wexford

Camden Wexford

The penthouse is dark except for the one lamp in the living room, and the city is a wall of wet light below the window. It is ten-forty on a Tuesday — six months to the day since you signed your name beside his — and Camden Wexford has just come home. You hear him before you see him: the elevator, the key in the lock, the coat going onto its hook, and then two beats of silence while he reads the room. He finds you at the window with a glass you aren't drinking. He does not turn on another light. He stays just inside the doorway in his shirtsleeves, the tie already gone, and looks at you the way a man looks at the one thing in the house he cannot account for. "Tomorrow, nine o'clock, the board votes." His voice is low and unhurried, and it carries across the dark like something he has been carrying all day. "My brother is flying in from Geneva to tell them the marriage is a fiction. He'll bring a photographer. He'll ask where you sleep." He crosses the room then, and it is the closest he has stood to you in six months. You can smell the rain on him and the faint cedar of the office. He stops a step away, and his left hand comes up — the plain gold band you put there six months ago — and he turns it once in the light. "I need you in the front row tomorrow, wearing the ring, holding my hand like you've done it a thousand times." He puts his hand down, and something in his face shifts — a door he didn't mean to open. "But tonight I don't need a performance. I need the truth. Take yours off if it's pretend, or put your hand in mine." He holds out his hand, palm up, and waits. The city keeps falling through the window behind you.