What is beyond the glossy black door of this pretty house? What am I about to see that I will never be able to forget? I sense that this moment will stay with me forever, whether Anders is in my life or not.
Kelly unlocks the door and ushers me into the hallway, herlips thin with dislike and determination. But then a change comes over her and she brightens her expression and calls out, “I’m home, Laurie, honey!”
I hear movement from the room adjoining the hallway and my heart skips a beat, but then an older man appears, looking frazzled. He sees me and his bushy eyebrows almost hit his receding hairline.
“She came,” he says out loud, gawping at me.
“Brian, this is—Wren, is it?” Kelly asks me flatly.
I nod, recalling that she overheard Anders say my name last night.
“This is my husband, Brian, Laurie’s father,” she continues her introductions. “And this,” she says in a forced, happy manner as she walks into the next room, “is Laurie! Hello, honey,” I hear her say warmly.
My heart is pounding so loudly I wouldn’t be surprised if Brian could hear it.
He stares at me, his face etched with misery, and nods toward the next room.
I put one foot in front of the other and walk through the arched doorway into a living room. It’s spacious and well lit, with shiny wooden floors, white walls, and an array of leafy plants. But that’s all I can take in. My attention has zeroed in on the blonde in the wheelchair.
She’s facing away from me, her head dipping slightly to the right. The long, luscious locks that I saw in photographs have been cut to jaw-length and lie limply against her slim neck. The ends of her hair are uneven, a little ragged, as though someone has done their best to feather them without much success. She’s wearing a pale blue T-shirt with lace cap sleeves.
Kelly goes around to the other side of the wheelchair andpulls out a slim wooden dining chair from under the table. “How are you, my darling?” She’s talking to Laurie as though I’m not even there.
I can’t seem to take one step farther into the room. I stand and stare as Kelly picks up some hand cream from the table and squeezes some out before lifting Laurie’s right hand.
“This is your favorite hand lotion, isn’t it?” she asks her daughter as she massages it in, before looking up at me and letting the smile slip from her lips. “And we listen to your favorite songs and watch your favorite TV shows, don’t we?” She pulls her gaze away from me to smile brightly at her daughter. “You’re in there, aren’t you, Laurie? You’re going to come back to us, I know you are,” she murmurs with torment before looking up at me again. “Don’t just stand there, come and meet my girl.”
I swallow, more on edge than I have ever been in my life.
This is Anders’s wife. He married her almost six years ago, promised to love her in sickness and in health.
Until death would they part.
I strengthen myself, because I owe Laurie this. I’ve fallen for her husband and I am so very sorry.
But I didn’t know, I tell her silently.I would never have tried to take him from you if I’d known you were alive. I never would have fallen in love with him in the first place.
Do I love him?
I’m not sure, standing here in Laurie’s parents’ house, in enemy territory with a woman who hates the very sight of me, that I do.
How could I?
How could I ever forgive him for this?
I never want to go through anything like this ever again.I just need to get through the next few minutes and then I can leave.
As I force myself to walk around the chair, Laurie’s legs, half hidden by a sunflower-yellow skirt, come into view. Kelly continues to massage her daughter’s hands, all the while talking to her lovingly, a devoted mother. The smell of Laurie’s perfume mingles with the hand cream and I recognize it as the scent I sampled in the grocery store in town. No wonder Anders reacted so strongly to smelling it on me—Kelly probably applies it to her daughter’s wrists daily.
I force my eyes downward from the top of Laurie’s head to her face, to the woman I saw in a wedding photograph smiling up at the man I’d put on a pedestal. I prepare myself to see her beautiful face, the face I’ve seen in pictures, a face lit with love and joy.
But that’s not what I find when my eyes finally reach their target.
Her cheeks are gaunt and washed out, drooping slightly where her head has dipped to the side. Her blue eyes are dull and lifeless, staring unseeingly at her mother’s lap. Her lips are thin and pale and turned down at the corners.
I’m awash with shock and horror. Because she does not look like the woman I’ve seen in photographs. She barely resembles a person at all. There is a human body sitting before me, flesh, blood, and bone. But the soul who existed inside it seems to be long gone.
I understand now why Anders can’t stop watching videos of her. He wants to remember her like that, as the woman he married, the laughing, happy girl of his dreams. The person he thought he would spend the rest of his life with, have children with, grow old with.
