“Natalie—”
“You’re confessing all your secrets to some random man, and you think whatI’mdoing is strange?”
“It’s a woman.”
“What?”
“The therapist I’m confessing all my secrets to,” she replied flatly. “She’s a woman. And she says it’s fine for me not to follow you online. Anyways, I have to go, Natalie. Give hugs to the kids and Caleb for me, okay?” And then she hung up.
Infuriating. I’d been straining for a fight, but she was like water. I couldn’t get a grip on anything.
And then of course there was Caleb. “Turns out we made a lot of money last month,” he said one day. We were in the kitchen. It was late afternoon. Nanny Louise had been living with us for a week.
I was sitting at the table with my notebook, mapping out the plans for a rhubarb pie tutorial when he spoke. I paused and looked at him. “Did we?”
“Yeah, some sort of buyer calledQuickCash paid us eighty thousand. Can you believe that? Need to call the accountants, though, ’cause I’m not sure they actuallyboughtany of our vegetables. Must be some kind of processing mistake.”
Caleb was looking at me closely now. Scrutinizing me. It was a kind of look that hadn’t existed in his inventory of looks whenwe got married. But like my closet of smiles, Caleb had grown his own garden of expressions: a thousand variations of suspicion. That was what they taught you in the forums: to be suspicious of everything. I’d watched Caleb grow suspicious of schools, and then of the skies, and then of the world—and now, I realized with surprise, he was becoming suspicious of me. “Do you know whatQuickCash is, Nattie?”
I feigned uncertainty. “Ithinkthat’s the name of the payment-processing system for Instagram.”
“Are we making that much money on Instagram?”
There it was: that one single word I’d been dreading.We.
“I guess we did this month!” I said, with as much stupid housewife energy as I could muster. “Wow!”
“What about the month before?”
“Oh.” My gaze cast across the kitchen, as if the correct answer might present itself to me. “I’m not sure. I guess I’d have to go online and check.”
“Well. I spoke to our accountants and they said the money, that eighty thousand, was scheduled to go into some random banking account they didn’t have access to, which must have been some sort of mistake. Right?”
He was looking hard at me now. Like he didn’t believe I was real.
Stupid. What a stupid idea. So reckless and immoral. What had I been thinking? What kind of woman tries to hide money from her husband?
There were only two possible answers to that question, and neither was acceptable:
1)She is a woman who doesn’t trust her husband.
2)She is a woman who doesn’t want to share.
“Right,” I said finally. “Silly me. Pregnancy brain!”
Pregnancy brain.The latest phrase I’d been trying out, which—if the fury it elicited from the Angry Women was any indication—appeared to be perfectly fermented.
“That’s what I thought,” Caleb said, and chuckled. “Pregnancy brain. So anyways, I asked them to see if any other payments had been forwarded to that bank account, and what do you know: they had! Every payment fromQuickCash for the last four months has gone into that account. Two hundred and twenty thousand in total.” He laughed. “That’s a whole lot of pregnancy brain!”
I was feeling very cold now.
“Anyways. They fixed it, so the money will go straight into our officialLLCaccount from now on.”
“Thank you so much for—clearing that up. Do you know—I’m just going to go to the bathroom for a moment—”
I didn’t turn around, but I felt his gaze on me until I turned the corner.
Once I was safely inside the bathroom, I turned the faucet on and looked at myself in the mirror. I felt incredibly nauseous and a little bit lightheaded. “Stop it,” I said quietly. “Stop feeling this way.” But the nausea wouldn’t go away, and the pressure in my chest was unbearable. I was finding it hard to breathe.
