Chapter 9
Audrey
I am a strong, independent woman who needs no man.
I say it to the bathroom mirror with a toothbrush in my mouth, so it comes out wrong. I spit into the sink and say it again. The woman in the mirror looks skeptical.
I am a strong, independent woman who needs no man.
I am a strong, independent woman who needs no—
My eyes cut to the roses.
They're on the little table by the chair. The chair. They've been there for four days, opening too fast in the dry heat of the house, dropping petals one at a time onto the wood like they're keeping count.
The note came tucked into the stems. I've read it more times than I'll ever admit.
Doe Eyes,
You're in control. Let me know when.
—A
He's leaving it up to me, all of it. When, if, how, where—the whole thing set down in my hands like he trusts me to carry it.
That's the problem.
Because I've never been the one in control before. Not once. And four nights ago, I sat over him in that chair, set the pace myself, and watched him come apart underneath me. And the thing I keep circling back to—the thing that scares me most—isn't that it happened.
It's that I liked it.
Heat crawls up my face at the memory.
I really liked it.
Thomas and I were each other's firsts and each other's everything. There was the first time in the car where we fumbled into the whole thing. Then we came into our marriage bed still half-blind, still very inexperienced, raised on the same shame. A scene would turn in a movie and one of us would reach for the remote without a word. A passage of scripture would mention it, and it’d suddenly be glossed over.
We loved each other in the dark, quietly, the way we'd been told was decent.
God's always watching, my mother used to say. About all of it. About me, mostly.
And then I went and walked a man I barely knew up my staircase. Took him by the hand past my children's doors.
I set the toothbrush down. I pick up my phone.
His number sits there, saved under nothing but a single letter, and I know what a strong, independent woman would do with it. She'd delete it. She'd call the chair a fever and tell herself she'd broken it.
My thumb hovers.
I put the phone face-down on the counter instead, which is its own kind of answer.
Sunday service is an hour of empty nods and silently mouthing hymns.
The words come out of me from muscle memory, the way they have my whole life, and somewhere over the second verse I think, not for the first time, how much easier this would be if we were Catholic.
A booth, a grille, a stranger's voice telling me to say my prayers and go in peace.
Somewhere to set the burdens down that isn't inside my own chest.
Instead, I sit in the pew between my children with my hands folded in my lap. The good widow, the grieving wife, every inch of me arranged into the woman everyone expects, and I've performed her so well I've convinced the entire congregation and not one bit of myself.
I run into the bathroom five minutes before the service ends. There’s no way I can face Melinda today.
We come home to flowers on the porch.
I see the color before I register anything else—loud, bright, nothing like the white lilies that filled the house after the funeral. My stomach drops anyway, an old reflex, my body still thinking flowers are for mourning.
I get them up the stairs before Sophie can read the card.
He does it again two days later. Then again. Then three mornings in a row, until I open my bedroom door to a wall of flowers and a smell so thick it follows me into the hall.
That's it. I have had it.
He answers on the first ring.
"Hey, doll face."
"Don't doll face me right now." I'm standing in the middle of a room that's stopped being my bedroom and is now a florist's cooler. "You have to stop sending flowers."
"How am I supposed to know you're even getting them," he says, insultingly relaxed, "when you won't text me back?"
"Asher." I press two fingers to my temple, where the headache lives. "Please stop. I don't want my kids walking in here and thinking somebody died."
I pick up a fallen petal.
"Again," I add, quieter.
The relaxation goes out of him all at once. I hear it—a rustle, fast, like he just sat up from whatever he was lying on.
"Shit. Audrey. I didn't even think about—I'm—"
"Language."
I wait for an answer.
Instead, there's a strangled noise, as if he's inhaled his own drink.
"Did you just language me?"
"Sorry." I wave my free hand at the empty room. "Habit."
There's a beat where I can feel him deciding not to laugh, for my sake, and I’m too wired to laugh at the situation.
"No more flowers," he says, once he collects himself. "I promise. I really am sorry. I just—I wanted you to know I was thinking about you. That's all it was."
"I'm sure the rest of your roster loves waking up to a jungle, but I'm at capacity on shelf space."
"You're the only one I've ever sent flowers to."
I blink.
The admission lands somewhere I'm not prepared for. I should probably assume he says things like this to every girl after they wake up and find him gone in the morning, but something about the way he says it makes me believe him.
The vents hum. Downstairs, the dishwasher rolls over into its next cycle, oblivious.
"You don't send flowers to all your—" I can't find the right word for myself. "Your flings?"
"Never." A long breath goes out of him, into the phone, warm against my ear like he's closer than an hour away. "I don't think of you like that, Audrey."
Something turns over in me, slow and entirely unwelcome.
And I can't help it. The question's out before the smart part of me can stop it.
"How do you think of me?"
I can practically hear him smile on the other end.
"Let me see you again," he says. Quiet. Sure. "And I'll tell you."
There it is.
The hook, set so gently I almost don't feel the barb. And I understand, standing in my wrecked garden of a bedroom, that this is exactly why I've gone days without a word—because I knew the second I heard doll face in that voice I'd come apart at the seams I've been holding so carefully shut.
I reach for the mantra like a railing.
I am a strong, independent woman—
"I'm not sure," I hear myself say.
"What time?"
"Asher."
"Audrey."
I press my lips together. The dishwasher hisses. Petals tick down onto the table one by one.
I'm already decided. I think I have been since the first vase of roses. I've just been waiting for him to make me say it.
"Eleven," I say. "After the neighbors’ lights go off."
He gets there at eleven on the dot, which surprises me. I half-expected him to be the type of man who's fashionably late on principle.
I open the door before he can knock. Porch light off. I told him to park a couple blocks away so the headlights wouldn't stir the neighbors.
"Hi," he says quietly, like he knows the rules without being told.
"Hi." I step back to let him in.
He follows me up the stairs. I'm aware of every one of them, the third from the top that creaks, and of him behind me, matching my pace. He doesn't reach for me. Doesn't crowd me. But somehow I know he'd catch me if I slipped, and the thought feels strangely protective.
I open my bedroom door and switch on the lamp instead of the overhead light. Then I watch him take the room in.
I've redone it.
The bedding is new—a light green I'd never have picked when Thomas was alive.
When everything was beige because everything else was too girly.
Thomas's dresser is clear. His ring, his loose change, the little dish that he'd empty his pockets into every night—gone into a box on the closet shelf where I don't have to see it.
The family photo that lived on the nightstand is downstairs now on the mantel, where it can be a thing the kids can see and I don't have to lie next to.
I washed everything with new detergent. The room smells entirely new now. Something labeled fresh cotton.
I did all of it the day after the chair. I told myself it was for me.
Maybe some of it was.
I watch the moment he understands.
He doesn't say anything. But his eyes pass over the comforter, the cleared nightstand, then come back to me, and there's something careful in them. Something that knows exactly what this costs and won't make me hold it up to the light.
"Hey." His voice drops. "You okay?"
"I'm fine."
He just looks at me.
I sit down on the edge of the bed. The new comforter is stiff, unfamiliar under my palms. "I'm not sure how I should feel," I say. To my hands, mostly.
"About what?"
"This. Any of it." I make myself look at him.
"I walked into church this morning and sat there and I—I feel like I'm a good person.
I've always thought I was a good person.
But how can I be, when I'm—" I gesture at the room, at him, at the wreckage of the woman I was supposed to be. "When I'm like this."
He's quiet for a moment. He doesn't sit. He stays standing by the dresser, hands loose at his sides, and I can see him actually thinking about it.
It's not what I would expect from the Harlow Heartbreaker.
"I grew up in it too," he says finally. "Church.
Every Sunday. The whole thing." He rubs the back of his neck.
"I don't go anymore, I know—” he says, giving me a look when he sees my face.
He continues. “But the part that stuck with me—the part that still makes sense—isn't the rules. It's finding out who you actually are."
I watch him, blinking.
He sighs. "They tell you to remember you're a child of God. Like it's a fact you're supposed to hold onto." He shrugs, and there's something almost embarrassed in it. "But I think you've gotta find that out for yourself. What you are. Not what somebody stood at a pulpit and told you you were."
I don't say anything. I can't, for a second.
"You're not a bad person," he says, gentler now. "I think you're just finding out who you are, underneath what you were told. That's all."
The insight lands somewhere deep, in a place I usually keep shut.