She sits up. In the dim light, her eyes are two black pools. Her face looks too old and too serious for her age. “Do you have any family you don’t talk about?”
My heart simultaneously aches and beats faster. “Grandma and Grandpa died when I was a little girl. You know that.”
Collette nods. “But didn’t you have any other family? A brother or sister? Cousins? Aunts and uncles?”
My family sat in the courtroom, listening to the list of charges being read aloud. I tried to make eye contact with them—someone, anyone—but they all turned away, except for two. They still haven’t forgiven me. They still say it was all my fault. Not that I’ve contacted them recently to see if they’ve changed their minds.
“My grandparents died before you were born, honey. They were very old. But I know they would have loved to meet you.”
“Maybe we can visit their graves,” Collette says. “What if no one ever visits them? What if no one mows the lawn or takes care of it?”
“Their graves are very far away, Collette.” I don’t mean to snap at her, but I see her wince. It’s so rare for me to lose patience that she’s forgotten I even can.
I close her door and sit on the edge of her bed. She crawls up beside me.
“What is this about?” I ask her. “We’ve already had this conversation.”
“Not really,” she says. “You only told me that everyoneis dead. But—Dad’s side has Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt Linda and Ellen, and all the cousins. I just thought there might be someone you aren’t telling me about.”
There are a lot of things I’m not telling you about, my love.I study her. Where is this coming from? I know it wasn’t Waylen—he readily accepted my story about being adrift with no family to tether me elsewhere in the world. It’s even why he loved me so much and so fast when we first met. He had never been someone’s whole world before, and that was what he wanted. It still is.
My brother said it was for the best that it stays between us. He’s got his hands into too many messes. The cases he’s helped me work were all researched on his hard drives, following coordinates he sent and using vehicles he procured. He’s so careful, but if there’s ever a lapse and he’s caught, he doesn’t want any of it traced back to me.
“No,” I lie, and of all the lies I’ve told, this is simultaneously the easiest and the most painful. “There’s no one else.”
She seems disappointed. “Could we road-trip to Oregon sometime? Where you grew up?” she asks. “Could you show me?”
“It wasn’t in a big city like Portland, or anything you’d see on TV,” I assure her. “It was basically just wilderness.”
“Camping trip,” she says. “We could go, just us.”
I stand, pulling her blankets up. “Come on,” I say, mustering my best cheerful tone. “That’s a conversation for another time. Get some sleep.”
She climbs under the covers and asks for her iPad, insisting she just found a new meditation app that helps her fall asleep.
I concede, just this once, and leave her with the sounds of a Tibetan singing bowl and babbling brook, while a soothing voice murmurs affirmations about how strong she is.
When I get into bed, I’m just about to check my voicemail when Waylen enters the room. He sighs tiredly and starts to undress.
I watch him, considering the man I married. He is like a tall building with infinite windows, and when I peek through, I can’t be sure what it is I’ll find playing out inside him. Most days, he’s sensitive and kind, the long-suffering girl dad and attentive husband. Evidenced by the now faded unicorn sticker on the glove box of his otherwise pristine car from when Collette was little and used to pretend to drive while he washed the car in the driveway.
When it’s my night to host the book club, he brings trays of wine and veggie spreads into the living room, making polite small talk before jogging back upstairs to work. The ladies swoon and tell me how lucky I am, before regaling me with some story about how their own husbands are useless when they host parties.
But there are windows I haven’t peered into, or won’t. I assess the situation I’m in now: no vehicle, no privacy to check in with Bertram, or my brother, because the engine mysteriously died. Bertram thinks that Annie has been stalking him since they broke off their engagement in the summer, and found him again—at least that’s his claim—but it was Waylen.
But I could see the panic in Bertram’s eyes, in the driver’s eyes, as we raced around that parking lot. Does that mean Bertram was telling the truth, and he really did thinksomeone was out to get him? But who? If hedidkill Annie, he would have known it wasn’t her. Could there be someone else?
I pull up my messages with Elodie so that I can ask her to pick me up tomorrow morning. I’ll say I had car trouble and that it will be fun for our girls to carpool together. But when I open up our conversation, I see a message that was sent hours earlier:Call me, ASAP. Big development.
I glance at Waylen through the doorway of our bathroom, brushing his teeth now. If I get out of bed now to call Elodie, what will happen? Will he try to stop me, or say nothing but then find a way to listen in?
Whatever it is can wait until morning. I have no way to leave anyway.
When he comes to bed, he leans in to kiss me, and we make love quietly, our jagged breathing doing the talking for both of us. After, he goes to the kitchen and brings up two glasses of wine and turns on the TV. We snuggle up in bed to an old black-and-white film on TCM. Something about a beautiful young woman who meets a reporter who offers her a deal if she’ll let him write a story about her life.
That’s Bertram, I think: a beautiful subject with a dark story that I want to write. Only it’s not for the reasons he thinks.
Waylen kisses the top of my head. “We should go on vacation for Christmas,” he says. “We’ll both be done with work by then.”
