“It’s my phone too.”
Sarah shoots him a grateful look. She puts down her sandwich and gets up from the table. The piece of paper with Graham’s number is in her back pocket. She pulls it out and picks up the receiver, scowling at the rotary dial. “Is this the only phone in the house?” She doesn’t remember seeing one in the other rooms.
“Uh-huh. Caleb’s got a cell, and no one ever wants to talk to me.”
It takes forever to dial eleven digits. Sarah taps her foot restlessly as Graham’s phone begins to ring. Too late, she realizes if he doesn’t recognize the number, he might not pick up. She can always leave a message—but what can she say? How can she sum up the past few days—and months—in thirty seconds?
To her relief, Graham answers. “Graham Ng speaking,” he says.
“Graham!” she blurts out.
“Sarah? Where are you calling from? That’s not a Toronto area code.”
“I know. I’m in Sweetside. It’s a little town about a couple hours north of Toronto.”
“What the hell are you doing there? Is Ben with you?”
Her knuckles whiten around the receiver. “No. Listen, I need your help. I was coming to see you, and my car broke down, and it’s going to be a while before it gets fixed.”
“Why don’t you call Ben?”
“I left him.” She doesn’t say where or how she left him.
Graham’s slow exhalation rattles in her ear. “What’d you do that for?”
She twists the phone cord around her fingers. “It was a long time coming,” she says weakly.
“Jesus, you’ve been together for what—eight years now? Did you go to relationship counseling?”
“No. He—he’s not a good person, Graham. Counseling wouldn’t have helped.”
“What, did he hit you?”
She closes her eyes briefly. “Well, no.”
Graham’s breath rattles again. Sarah adds, aware of Elijah’s curious eyes on her, “He was cheating on me.”
“He’d never do that. Do you have any proof?”
“No, but it was obvious. He was always texting someone, and he wouldn’t tell me who it was.” And then there were the little things before the pandemic, which she can’t explain to Graham because he won’t take her seriously. The sudden whiff of another person’s perfume, like the pipe tobacco that haunts Jacob Vass’s bedroom. Or coming home to find the curtains drawn, and the bedroom closet and dresser drawers all neatly shut when normally they’d be a little ajar. By themselves, the little things might mean nothing, but together, they painted a bigger picture.
“But you don’t have any proof.” Graham sighs exasperatedly. “Take it from me. You don’t throw away so many years together on a whim. Did you at least talk to him about it?”
“Yes. He denied it, of course.” And stormed out to sleep on the sofa, and she found herself apologizing because his anger took up all the air in the room, and she was suffocating. Lockdown had stirred his mercurial moods into even more of a hornet’s nest, because he couldn’t get out to see this other woman, couldn’t leave Sarah because he was broke and unemployed and thought himself above living with his mother. And she couldn’t kick him out because he’d rage and play the victim, and she was terrified all that fury would spill over into physical violence.
Like it had when she’d tried to leave.
“But he’s a liar, Graham. He lies all the time about things. Money, his smoking—” Lies she could never prove, and he sure as hell would never admit. It had been maddening to exist in two opposing realities at once, like Schrödinger’s cat.
“And you’ve never told him white lies? Everyone lies in a relationship,” Graham says, and Sarah thinks viciously that maybe Angie was right to divorce him.
“He lies so you don’t get mad,” he adds, and her teeth grind together because that’s whathealways said. “I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding.”
“It’sabuse,” she snaps, and the familiar roar surges in her ears as her body anticipates the blowback. First he’ll deny it. Then he’ll lash out. If his anger doesn’t cow her, he’ll turn on a dime and pin the blame on her. Even though Graham isn’t Ben, at this moment, he might as well be. “I looked it up. The lying, gaslighting, stonewalling, always twisting things around so it’smyfault—it’s emotional abuse.”
“He hurt yourfeelings?Jesus, Sarah. Where’d you learn this from?”
“The internet.”
