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“Alex, I—”

He holds up his hand to stop her; he wants to relish the vindication. “We can talk about this later. You should go get Langston, I’ll handle this,” Alex says, without slurring this time, as he turns his back to Simone and throws open the curtain to return to his grandfather’s bedside.

Poppy is fumbling with the container, unable to peel the plastic back with shaking hands. The sight of his grandfather’s helplessness sends a current of panic through Alex so that his own hands shake as he gently takes the Jell-O. “Let me help with that.”

Alex has never had to physically assist his grandfather with anything. Poppy’s diminished state gives Alex a perverse secondhand embarrassment, knowing full well how much he must loathe Alex, or anyone, seeing him like this—fragile collarbones protruding from a hospital gown; weak, vulnerable, sick, old… all things Alex somehow never thought Poppy would be. He hands him the opened container and the spoon with another wave of panic that he’ll need to actually feed him. Alex can’t imagine anything more horrifying… for either of them. His grandfather snatches the plastic utensil and digs in. “Don’t even think about it. I’m not an invalid. Jesus Christ.”

Poppy settles back with a satisfied sigh at his first bite. “Delicious.” He relishes another one before his eyes narrow on Alex. “Listen, you need to tell Simone this wasn’t her fault. She’s doing right by me. She’s a good girl.”

It’s the same phrase he’d used to describe Simone when Alex first brought her home. She seems like a real good girl. Condescending, yes, but also the stamp of approval Alex had longed for from his grandfather. But his wife isn’t a good girl, is she? Good girls don’t sneak off to Chicago with their ex-boyfriends. His anger over that fact has been rekindled and he doesn’t know how to extinguish it. Maybe he even wants to stoke it, to poke other holes in his wife’s stories.

“Poppy, Simone said you didn’t recognize her. She said you called her Reba. And you called her a bitch.”

His grandfather’s eyes snap open, indignation reddening his face. “What? Never. I would never say that to her.”

“I didn’t think you would, but she was upset.”

“Then she misunderstood. You know me better than that.”

Do I? Alex thought he did, but he thought he knew his wife too, and he didn’t think she’d lie to his face either. Not telling him about Kwame counted as a lie. And that leads straight to an even more unsettling line of thinking… have there been others?

CHAPTER NINE KWAME

It feels like they’re doing something illicit.

Kwame knows as soon as he sees Simone’s face that her meeting up with him is a secret. It’s the furtive way she looks around, like she’s worried about being spotted even though there are exactly two cars in the parking lot—Kwame’s Acura and the Range Rover she just arrived in.

He can’t lie, it gives him a little thrill on top of the one that came with her agreeing to meet up with him at all. When he sent her that text from Jedidiah’s bathroom that he was coming up her way, he put the chances of this happening at fifty-fifty. But then he heard back from her before he’d reached the rental car return at Jacksonville International.

As she walks toward where he’s standing by the water’s edge, Simone tightens the belt of her wool peacoat against the wind and adjusts her knit hat as if she’s preparing herself for something.

“I was starting to think I’d been stood up,” he calls out when she’s close enough to hear him. She’s only ten minutes late, but enough to make him worry she’d changed her mind.

“Sorry… I just… I just have a lot going on. I brought cocoa.” Simone awkwardly thrusts a large black thermos at him by way of greeting.

“Oh, nice. I don’t think I’ve had hot cocoa since I was a kid. It’s cold as fuck out here, though, so… this’ll hit the spot. I thought I knew something about winter in Chicago, but this Wisconsin hawk is something else.”

“Hawk; wow, I’ve only ever heard my dad call the cold that when I was a kid. I thought it was an old man thing.”

“You calling me old, Simone?”

“Never that.” She smiles, but it’s so faint he has to squint to see it. There’s something up. Her whole vibe is off, subdued, but he can’t exactly press her, especially three minutes into the conversation.

“You get used to the weather,” Simone says with a shrug. “But then, I wouldn’t have picked this place for a meetup this time of year. This must be it, though, huh? The ‘local reservoir’ mentioned in that article you showed me about Wade.”

“Yep.”

Simone’s neck swivels around like she’s taking in the place for the first time or in a new light. The beauty of the bare branches, frosty expanse of water, and cloudless skies turns ominous just like that.

“Kinda changes the vibe from all the times we’ve brought Langston out here to fish in the summer…”

Kwame stops listening to Simone because the mental image of her little boy holding a squirming fish while his dad gives him pointers about getting it off the hook overtakes him. The whole scene plays out in his mind in all its torturous, idyllic glory. It doesn’t help that this area is straight out of a storybook. He drove around earlier, taking in the pastures and meadows, old red barns and fields filled with actual sheep and cows. He passed a crew of catalog-model-looking blond kids in plaid flannel running a cider stand on the side of the road. The bucolic vibes were a little too in your face for Kwame’s taste. Give him his gritty roots any day. He lived in Brooklyn until he was ten, old enough to remember cockroaches as big as his fist crawling across the subway floor, garbage-strewn stoops, the bass that thrummed through Bushwick at night like a lullaby. Chicago Heights had its fair share of grit too. A panel fell from the ceiling in his high school and smacked Kwame on the head during a biology quiz. He still aced it, even with the concussion. There was a lesson there. Having to build yourself up when everything else was falling apart around you made for a particular sense of resilience and a healthy cynicism that seemed impossible to forge if you grew up in a place like Sawville, where you’d never see a pothole or two rats having a deathmatch over the remains of a bag of Cheetos.

Kwame forces himself back to the conversation by focusing on Simone’s silky eyebrows, the ones he had loved to trace with his index finger once upon a time.

“Langston does love coming here. I don’t let him get that close to the water, though. It’s too deep and there’s a current and all this hydrilla at the bottom. Dangerous. But I’m fine with the picnics and feeding the ducks, and it’s a pretty little drive out this way.”

It is a pretty drive from her house. Kwame knows because he took the exact route earlier, going miles out of his way to see where she lives. He had her address from the wedding save-the-date she’d had the audacity to send him. The one he’d had the stupidity to keep, for reasons he couldn’t explain other than he was a sucker for punishment. He’d dug it out last week from where it was stuffed in the back of a drawer with past tax returns, expired licenses, and old clippings. Literal old news. Fitting. He wasn’t stupid enough, or that much of a masochist, to actually go to the wedding; Simone must have come to the same conclusion because she never sent the real invite, only the save-the-date. Or maybe sending the save-the-date was more of an eff you than anything else. Every time he got mad about that, he realized he probably deserved it if it was.