He says it with such confidence that I wonder if I told him I’d be done working on Bertram’s case before December. I try to scour my mind, but I’m too tired to think clearly.
“Sure,” I say.
“Can you think of anywhere you want to go?” he asks.
I don’t tell him about Collette’s strange request to visit my family’s graves in Oregon. That’s one state line I never plan to cross again.
“Maybe a beach in California.” I yawn. “Nothing too expensive.”
“Don’t worry about the cost,” he murmurs, drawing me closer. “I’ll take care of it. I’ll always take care of you.”
—
It isn’t my alarm that wakes me in the morning. Rather, it’s the opposite of my alarm. The house is so quiet that I hear the neighbor’s car backing out of the driveway, the splash of a puddle from yesterday’s torrential rain.
I can’t remember the last time I felt so well rested. For a moment I bask in it. I stretch my arms and legs in the crisp, newly laundered sheets.
Then I look at the clock.
Ten a.m.
I bolt upright. Collette is late for school. I never answered Elodie’s texts. I have so much work to do with Bertram—
“Morning,” Waylen sings, walking through the open doorway with a mug of coffee for me. “Collette and I finished off the frittatas, but there’s some fruit salad in the fridge if you’d like breakfast.”
I’m already climbing out of bed. “Why didn’t you wake me? I was supposed to take care of a million things today.”
“Whoa. Hey.” Waylen sets the coffee on the night table and then gently takes my shoulders and guides me back tobed. “I thought you might want a break, so I took care of getting Collette to school. Don’t worry, I made sure she had her homework. Besides, how were you going to do anything without the car?”
I put a hand to my head, as though I can grasp at a memory that I can feel is missing. How did I sleep so late? It feels incredible. No lingering tension headache, no urgent need to go somewhere or do something. No crushing sense that the entire house will fall apart without me to spin all the plates on all the sticks.
Waylen smiles at me pityingly. “You can take a day off, you know,” he says. “Until you get the call back about your car, at least.”
The car. I glance at my phone, resting face down beside the coffee that Waylen has brought me. It all comes back to me: The car breaking down. The heat of Waylen’s body as he kissed me on the side of the road. The picture-perfect evening we had.
Waylen was always full of surprises in the beginning. That all changed once we were married and he became predictably predictable. But now, for the first time in more than a decade, I can’t fit the pieces all together. He tracked me down like a bloodhound when I was with Bertram. If he was able to do that without my noticing, how many times has he done it before? Has he gotten into my phone?
He doesn’t know about your past, Margaux, I assure myself. It’s not as though there’s any physical evidence or spoken memories from that time. Mr. X and I have never spoken about it, much less put it into texts. And it happened so long ago, before the age of archiving small-townnews articles online. Googling my name will yield hundreds of unrelated results.
But he knows more about me than I wanted him to. Falling in love made me stupid and chatty. I consider my options carefully. It could be pure coincidence that my car broke down at the same time Waylen started his desperate ploy to stop me from working. Or it could be that he’s lying to me—only telling the truth about one part of it to throw me off the trail.
It could be that following me around to scare me was his whole plan. A sweet one, really, and easy to see through. This would mean he’s lost his touch. He’s admitting that he isn’t as clever as me—he’s always hated the sneaking around—but hoping that he can reel me in.
It could also be that he expected me to catch him yesterday and that he’s hoping I’ll let my guard down because he’s planning something much bigger in the near future. What, I don’t know. This would mean that I’m the one who’s lost my touch. It would mean that I am no longer the one in this marriage who’s always a step ahead. Or that I never really was.
I glance down at the steaming dark liquid, swirling with just a bit of almond milk. It looks normal, smells normal. So did the wine I had last night.
Did he do something to my drink to make me fall asleep, or was I simply so tired that I slept in because he’d muted my alarm? When I first met him, part of why I fell in love was because of how calm he made me. I slept better by his side. I forgot about my past when we were laughing together or taking long walks to look at the autumn leaves.
Last night, I was similarly calm. It was like our littlehouse was the only one in the world, and we were immune to the frigid wind that blew against our windows.
There’s a flash in his warm eyes. A challenge. A dare. A spark of the man I first lusted after. I call it lust because it was only meant to last for the short weeks that we were paired together on our vigilante mission. And we had fun. Ill-advised, wild, reckless fun.
But the Waylen I’ve been married to all these years is the man I love. Love is a more practical emotion. Love means taking turns washing the dishes after Saturday morning pancakes. Love is when he takes my car to get an oil change, and I remind him about a conference call he’s got on the calendar when I overhear him making plans on the phone. Love is striking that balance of remaining young and fit, and simultaneously eighty years old and comfortable.
Love is a nice house on a quiet street, and the promise that we can trust each other.
Is this the man I love? Or has this all been an act? Did the structured family man marry a skilled liar, or are we tit for tat?
