Page 12 of Jury Woman, Part 4 of 6

"Love you! Tell Mr.—"

I ended the call before she could finish.

Deputy Wells walked me back to my room as usual. The hallway was quiet except for the ice machine humming around the corner, and I could still feel warmth lingering in my cheeks.

At my door, I cleared my throat. "My sister has an overactive imagination."

He seemed to consider that. "I like the way she thinks."

Then he gave me a single nod and continued down the hall, leaving me standing there with my key card in my hand and no idea what to do with my face.

October 12, Monday

THE COURT was dark for Columbus Day, and nobody needed anything from me.

I went to the hotel gym at seven, before anyone else was awake, and walked the treadmill for forty-five minutes while the sky outside the window turned from charcoal to pale blue. Deputy Wells's replacement for the holiday, a young deputy named Ortiz, sat by the door scrolling on his phone, which suited me fine.

Afterward in my room I ran a bath so hot the mirror fogged over completely. I poured in the lavender salts I'd found in the gift shop and sank until the water reached my chin. At home, baths happened in five-minute increments between someone pounding on the door to ask where the charger was and someone else yelling that Tucker had eaten a sock. Today I stayed until my fingertips wrinkled and the water went tepid, and then I added more hot water.

Wrapped in the hotel robe, I finally opened Middlemarch. I'd bought it in college, carried it through three apartments and one house, and never made it past chapter two. By lunch I was on chapter nine, and a little alarmed by how much I recognized in Dorothea, a bright young woman so eager to devote herself to a man that she never stopped to ask what he would give her in return.

I closed the book and pulled out my journal.

Why don't I ask for what I want?

I stared at Jill's question in my own handwriting for a long time before I wrote anything.

Because I won't get it. So why bother?

It looked tidy on the page. Reasonable. But it wasn't the truth, or not all of it. I'd never asked often enough to know whether I'd get it.

I tried again.

Because if someone loves me enough, they should just know.

The pen stopped. That was closer.

I thought of Mom, and all the years I'd read her moods before she walked into a room. The headache coming on, the slam of a cupboard that meant she needed me to start dinner, the particular sigh that meant she wanted someone to sit with her and not talk. Nobody ever told me. I simply noticed, and I provided, and I felt proud of noticing.

Then I thought of Warren. I'd prepared his coffee before he came downstairs. I'd picked up his dry cleaning before he ran out of shirts. I planned the birthday dinners, bought tickets to the kids' games, and orchestrated quiet so he could decompress after a long Saturday at the dealership. He never had to ask for any of it. I saw what he needed and handed it to him.

And I'd waited seventeen years for him to do the same for me.

Maybe I just love more deeply than other people, I wrote.

I looked at that sentence and felt my cheeks warm. It sounded noble. It also sounded like something a person tells herself so she doesn't have to look at the rest.

Or maybe I expect people to read my mind. And then I punish them when they can't.

That evening room service brought grilled salmon and a glass of pinot grigio. I ate at the little desk by the window and watched headlights crawl along the interstate, and I let myself think about my marriage without flinching away.

How many times had I sat at the kitchen table, bone-tired, waiting for Warren to notice and offer to take the kids away for a weekend? How many times had he failed to notice, and how many times had I said nothing, and then felt that familiar, bitter satisfaction of being right about him?

I swirled the wine and watched it cling to the glass.

Maybe some small part of me liked it. Liked being the one who did everything. The one who sacrificed. The one nobody appreciated. There was a kind of power in it, a moral high ground that required nothing of me but silence.

A martyr never has to risk hearing no.