It’s my job to protect you.
Elliott hasn’t said as much to me, though that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t, or that he’s not trying to protect me. But when Detective Evans says it, I believe it.
After what Wyatt did last night, we slept with the bedroom door closed and locked. And then this morning, I tiptoed around, afraid to wake him before anyone else was up to protect me from him. Because I’m afraid. Because yes, I feel unsafe living with him.
But I say, “No,” because I don’t know what would happen to Wyatt if I confessed to Detective Evans that I was afraid of him. “I told you that it was an accident. He didn’t mean to do it.”
Detective Evans nods, thoughtful at first, letting go of my shoulder and bringing his arm back to his side. “You said that when he was sleepwalking, he was worried about his missing lunch and about being late to school?”
I nod, remembering the way Wyatt spoke to me last night, the words he used.Are you fucking deaf? I’m going to kill you if I’m late for school.
I say, “He was looking for his lunch in the refrigerator, but it wasn’t there.”
Seconds pass. Detective Evans is quiet, contemplative, as if processing what I’ve said, trying to imagine Wyatt searching the refrigerator shelves in the middle of the night, thrusting other items aside to search for a lunch that isn’t there.
He asks, “Doesn’t it stand to reason then that if he was dreaming about being late to school, he was not dreaming about an intruder in your cottage?”
His questions knock the wind from my lungs.
Was Wyatt dreaming about a missing lunch? Or was he dreaming about an intruder?
Or was he dreaming about nothing at all?
Was he awake? Was he only pretending to be asleep?
Before I can find the words to respond, Detective Evans says, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
“What’s that?” I ask, breathless.
“While we were searching the cottage the other day, there’s something we didn’t find.”
“What?”
“Benadryl.”
My first instinct is to protect Wyatt, to come to his defense. “Maybe it wasn’t in a bottle,” I suggest. “Maybe it was a tablet, in a blister pack.”
“We looked, Mrs. Gray, but we didn’t find a blister pack either. Neither a bottle nor a blister pack.”
“Wyatt wouldn’t lie, if that’s what you’re suggesting. Maybe he was mistaken. Maybe Emily gave him something else for his allergies,” I say, but even as I do, I know as good as anyone that few things would have had the same sedative effect as Benadryl, making it possible for him to sleep through what happened without waking up.
Maybe Wyatt is lying after all.
There are mosquitoes beside my car. Dark clouds of them float on and around the doors and windows so that I don’t know how I’ll get inside the car without letting them in.
As I reach for the door handle, another car passes by on the street, catching my attention, and I turn to look as the car drives past. As I gaze toward the street, a familiar green catches my eye, visible through a small break in the trees.
My hand falls away from the car’s door handle and I find myself drifting to the end of the driveway, where visibility is better, where I can see all the way across the street to the house on the other side.
The green is sage-like compared to the green of the trees. Still, in real life, the color is more vivid than in Sam Matthew’s Polaroids, though the house and the shed look more aged at the same time. TheWelcomewreath is gone, removed from the door, and I imagine a rusty nail left in its place. The window boxes sit empty except for weeds.
A heavy feeling fills my whole body. There is a tightness in my chest. I tune out everything else around me—the bite of mosquitoes, the hushed, hard-to-hear sound of Detective Evans’s voice speaking to me from behind, the cool breeze blowing through the trees and upsetting the leaves—focusing only on the shed.
The green shed.
I gravitate toward it. Without meaning to, I leave the driveway and stray into the street, where another passing car nearly hits me, and I feel Detective Evans’s hand on my elbow, pulling me back.
“Mrs. Gray? Is something wrong, Mrs. Gray?”
