Chapter 4
The morning arrived with the flat, gray clarity that only a New England October could manage.
By eight-thirty, Tucker had already left long ago for the local commuter rail, his departure marked by the usual brisk symphony of a Friday morning—the violent snap of his briefcase latches, the hurried rustle of the morning paper he never finished reading, and a quick, dry kiss pressed to the corner of Felicity's jaw while he was halfway out the mudroom door.
"Don't forget Brianne’s train gets in at six," he had called back over his shoulder, his voice competing with the low purr of his sedan idling in the driveway. "If I'm stuck at the office, she can just take a cab from the depot, but try to keep an eye on your phone."
Now, the house was hers again.
Felicity sat at the kitchen island, a small bowl of steel-cut oats growing cold in front of her.
Her fingers wrapped around her second mug of coffee—the dark charcoal gray one that occupied the far right of her cupboard's middle shelf.
She hadn't looked at the paperback on the coffee table all morning.
In fact, she had deliberately kept her eyes fixed on the floorboards as she walked past the living room, treating the volume like an expensive piece of fragile glass she couldn't afford to break.
It was just an accumulation of standard domestic details, she reminded herself.
Mugs. Toothbrushes. Silver dishes by the sink.
If you took any hundred suburban homes within a fifty-mile radius, you would find the exact same inventory of habits, arguments, and minor organizational compulsions.
The human experience simply wasn't as unique as people liked to believe.
She rinsed her bowl in the sink, her movements deliberate, before picking up her keys from the granite counter.
Fridays were for errands. It was the day she drove into the village to pick up the dry cleaning, buy the heavy cream for the weekend's coffee, and visit the small, independent bookstore near the common to see if the biography she had actually wanted had finally arrived from the distributor.
The drive into town always helped to clear her head.
The road twisted through dense stands of maple and birch, their leaves turning a brilliant, violent orange that seemed almost too bright against the heavy gray sky.
She rolled the window down an inch, letting the sharp, damp smell of rotting leaves and wet bark fill the car's interior.
This was what she had wanted when they left their brownstone in the city—space, quiet, and a sense of permanence that didn't depend on the whims of a landlord or the noise of a subway line.
She parked in front of The Paper Mill, a small shop tucked between a bakery and an old hardware store with a faded green awning. A bell chimed softly above the door as she stepped inside, the air thick with the comforting, dusty scent of old paper, vanilla, and fresh printer ink.
"Morning, Felicity," Bill, the store's elderly owner, called out from behind the counter. He was peering over a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses, a thick black marker held between his ink-stained fingers. "That biography came in yesterday afternoon. I’ve got it held back here for you."
"Oh, wonderful. Thank you, Bill," she said, leaning against the polished oak counter as he pulled a heavy, cloth-bound volume from a shelf behind him.
"I was actually going to call you," Bill muttered, his thumb smoothing down the corner of the book’s jacket. "But I figured you'd be in today anyway. You're like clockwork on a Friday."
Felicity smiled, reaching into her purse for her wallet.
As she did, her hand brushed against her phone, and a sudden, idle thought struck her.
It was a small impulse, born entirely out of curiosity rather than anxiety.
"Bill, let me ask you something. Have you ever heard of a thriller called The Inconvenient Wife? By an author named Bethany Bricker?"
Bill paused, his brow furrowing as his eyes drifted upward, searching his mental inventory.
He had run the shop for nearly forty years and prided himself on knowing every regional imprint and mid-list title that entered the state.
"Bricker... no, doesn't ring a bell. Is it a local press?
We get a lot of self-published historical mysteries from the coastal towns, but I don't recognize the name. "
"I’m not sure who the publisher is," Felicity said, her tone remaining perfectly casual as she handed him her credit card. "A trade paperback. Dark cover with a house in the woods. I just found a copy and wondered if it was getting any traction."
Bill tapped his chin with the marker, then turned to the ancient, beige computer monitor that sat at the end of his desk. His fingers clicked rhythmically against the keys for a long minute, the screen throwing a pale green glow across his weathered cheeks.
"Well, that's odd," he said, squinting at the text. "It’s listed in the central catalog, true enough. Published last month. But there’s no stock history for it anywhere in the region.
None of the independent distributors are carrying it, and the system says 'out of stock at publisher' for the physical print run.
Usually, that means it was a limited distribution or a private printing that hasn't cleared the main warehouses yet.
" He looked back up at her, his glasses slipping down his nose. "Where’d you say you found your copy?"
"Oh, Tucker brought it home," Felicity said automatically, the lie slipping past her teeth before she even had the chance to consider why she was hiding the truth.
She offered another quick, polite smile as he handed her the receipt.
"He probably ordered it online or picked it up at one of the larger transit kiosks in the city. "
"Must have," Bill agreed, sliding her biography into a brown paper bag. "They get everything first down there. Have a good weekend, Felicity. Oh, and tell Tucker those tools to clean out the gutters are ready to borrow whenever he has a free Saturday."
"I will. Thank you, Bill"
The bell chimed above her as she left, but the sound felt lower this time, muffled by the sudden, heavy quiet that seemed to have followed her out onto the sidewalk. She stood next to her car for a long moment, the brown paper bag tucked securely under her arm.
Out of stock at publisher. A limited run. A book that wasn't even sitting on the shelves of the most thorough bookstore in the county, yet it had appeared on her nightstand, tucked neatly beneath her toothbrush traveler's cup, inside a house with an unblemished security log.
She drove back to the house with the radio turned off, the only sound the steady, rhythmic thrum of her tires against the asphalt.
By the time she pulled into the gravel driveway, the gray clouds had lowered further, misting the tops of the pine trees with a fine, silver dampness that looked exactly like the jacket art of the novel waiting for her inside.
She let herself in through the front door, the mechanical hiss of the deadbolt sliding into place behind her sounding less like an automated comfort and more like a heavy latch falling into a slot.
She carried her groceries into the kitchen, unpacking the heavy cream and the small bunch of rosemary she had bought for dinner, her eyes remaining fixed on her hands, on the white quartz counter, on anything that wasn't the living room archway.
But when she finally walked into the living room to drop her car keys on the entry table, her gaze dragged itself down to the low walnut surface of the coffee table.
The Inconvenient Wife was still there, exactly where she had left it the night before, its dark matte cover catching the gray light from the windows.
She stood over it for three long minutes, her hands buried deep in the pockets of her trousers, her breathing shallow and quiet in the vast expanse of the room.
Slowly, almost reluctantly, she reached down and picked it up.
She didn't open it to chapter five. Instead, she flipped back to the very front of the book, past the copyright page with its sterile numbers and legal warnings, to the short, standard dedication page that she had skipped over during her first afternoon of reading.
The page was mostly white space, a clean, blank sheet containing only two lines of small, centered italics.
For those who prefer the quiet of the woods, it read. And for the husband who never quite learned how to listen.
The dedication page felt cold against her fingertips. Felicity stared at the thin, centered italics until the letters blurred into a dark smudge against the cream paper. For the husband who never quite learned how to listen.
It was a standard, slightly biting dedication—the kind of wry, literary nod a woman might give to a spouse who supported her writing financially but didn't actually read her work.
It wasn't an explicit accusation. It wasn't a confession.
Yet, coming directly after the "garrison" of mugs and the rigid bedroom nightstand rules, it settled into Felicity’s chest with the heavy, unyielding weight of an anchor.
She closed the book with a sharp snap, the sound echoing flatly off the concrete floors, and tucked it onto the lowest shelf of the living room bookcase, pushing it deep behind a row of oversized art monographs where its spine was completely hidden.
"Enough," she whispered to the empty room.
She had a dinner to prepare. She had a husband who loved her, a lifelong friend of his who was arriving in less than two hours, and a perfectly beautiful, ordinary life that did not involve translating common publishing tropes into personal threats.
She was an intelligent woman. She was not the kind of person who built monsters out of thin air and anxiety.