I sat in the parking lot until the sky turned fully dark, and then I started the car and drove home, and I thought about what to say. I didn’t have any of it figured out by the time I pulled into the driveway.
EIGHTEEN
DANIEL
Something was wrong with Ellie.
I’d known it the moment I walked through the door. She was in the kitchen when I got home, doing something at the counter that had the quality of a task invented for the purpose of having something to do with her hands, and she’d said hey without looking up, which was the tell. Ellie always looked up.
I’d kept an eye on her through dinner. Gus had done most of the talking, a detailed account of a disagreement he’d had with the physical therapist about the correct number of repetitions for a particular exercise, which he thought was excessive and which the therapist insisted was not. I’d caught her twice staring at her plate with the look she wore when she was working through something she hadn’t decided how to say yet.
After dinner she’d helped Gus get settled and then come back to the kitchen and stood there, and I’d said, “What’s going on?” and she’d said, “Not here,” quietly enough that it didn’t carry, and something in my chest had tightened.
Not here meant somewhere Gus couldn’t hear.
My apartment still had the lease through April. It still had a bed and a couch and the bare bones of a life I’d mostlytransplanted to Ellie’s house, but it was empty and it was private and it was eight minutes away. I’d said, “My place?” and she’d nodded, and we’d told Gus we were going out for a bit, and he’d waved us off with the benevolent disinterest of a man deep in his sudoku.
The drive over was quiet. Ellie sat in the passenger seat with her face turned toward the window, as the dark streets of Huckleberry Creek scrolled past in the amber wash of streetlights. I tried to figure out what this was. It clearly wasn’t finally, let’s finish what we started in the kitchen. Whatever it was, it read as something that needed space to land, somewhere it couldn’t be overheard and softened. Something she’d been carrying since well before I’d walked through the door tonight. I ran through possibilities the whole way there: Gus’s recovery, the store, something I’d said or done without realizing. When I didn’t land on anything that felt right, I stopped guessing and just kept driving.
I unlocked the apartment and reached in to turn on the light before stepping aside to let her in. The room felt strange. Like it had stopped expecting me somewhere along the way. Quietly giving up and rearranging itself around my absence. Which, I supposed, it had every right to do. I’d left the couch, the kitchen table, the bed—all the furniture that hadn’t made sense to haul into Ellie’s already crowded space—but everything else had migrated. The room echoed, the way a space does when it’s mostly but not quite empty.
When had I stopped thinking of this as somewhere I’d return to?
Ellie followed me inside and stood in the middle of the living room with her arms crossed over her chest. It wasn’t a defensive posture. It was more like she was holding herself together, bracing against whatever she was about to say.
“Ray Whitfield came into the store today,” she said.
I waited, wondering if there’d been some setback in Gus’s recovery.
“He came to buy a pumpkin.” A complicated flicker moved across her face. “He was glad to see me. He said so. He said he was so glad things had worked out, and that when Gus had first come to him with this whole—“ She stopped. Pressed her lips together. Started again. “He tried to stop himself. But I cornered him.”
I was very still.
“The stroke was real,” she said. “He wanted me to know that first. The stroke was real, and the imaging was genuine. But the prognosis wasn’t. He was never as close as Ray told us. There was never a week, Daniel. Gus asked him to lie. He was very persuasive, apparently, which, yes. We know how he is. And Ray went along with it because he’s known Gus for forty years, and Gus was lying in that hospital bed doing the whole I just want to see her happy before I go routine, and Ray—” She exhaled. “He’s not proud of it.”
Nothing made a sound in the apartment but for the soft whoosh of her agitated breath and a thump from one of the neighbors below.
I thought about the hospital hallway. Ray’s face when I’d thanked him for being straight with her and the fraction of something I’d noticed underneath his expression and filed away without examining. I was examining it now. It had been guilt. It had been guilt the whole time, and I’d been so focused on Ellie that I’d let it go.
“So,” Ellie said. “My grandfather faked a deathbed. He recruited his doctor of forty years to deliver a false prognosis. He manufactured a dying wish in order to manipulate us into getting married.”
I let that arrange itself in my head. The hospital room. The ring. The vows. Donna from hospital administration with hernotary stamp. Sandra mailing the license because she’d found it and wanted to be helpful. The whole chain of events, every domino falling from the first one Gus had set in motion from a hospital bed with a borrowed diagnosis and forty years of knowing us both.
It was, I had to admit, an impressive operation.
“And I—I’m the one who came to you with all of this in the first place. Gus is my grandfather. His schemes are my inheritance, apparently, and you got pulled into it because you showed up, the way you always show up, and now we’re—“ She gestured vaguely. “We’re married. We’re legally married and living together, and none of this would have happened if I hadn’t?—”
“Ellie.”
“No, let me—I need to say this. You showed up because that’s what you do, and then you came up with this whole plan because you wanted to fix it for me, and the thing you were trying to fix was never as broken as we thought it was, and now you’re living in my house and sharing my bed, and I just need you to know that I understand completely if you feel like you were manipulated into a life you didn’t choose and you want?—”
She was apologizing. She was standing in my empty apartment apologizing for her grandfather’s scheme as if she’d engineered it herself, as if any part of this was her fault, and she was doing it with the careful precision of a woman who had been building this case against herself for hours and was now presenting it to the jury.
“Ellie.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry, and I get it if you’re?—”
“Stop,” I said.
