18. Delphine
— ? —
Delphine
I woke to gray morning light filtering through the curtains and Heath’s arm draped across my waist.
For a moment, I let myself feel it. The warmth of his body against my back, the steady rhythm of his breathing, the familiar weight of his arm holding me close.
For a moment, I pretended nothing had changed.
That we were still the couple we used to be, waking up together in our bed at Fairhaven, ready to face another day side by side.
Then reality crashed back in, and I slipped out from under his arm.
He stirred but didn’t wake. I gathered my clothes from where they had been scattered across the floor and dressed quickly, not looking at him. If I looked at him, I might climb back into that bed. If I looked at him, I might forget all the reasons I needed to keep my guard up.
Last night was a mistake. A beautiful, devastating mistake that I couldn’t afford to repeat.
I was sitting by the window, watching the snow continue to fall, when he finally woke.
“Morning.” His voice was rough with sleep, and I heard the sheets rustle as he sat up. “How long have you been awake?”
“A while.”
Silence. I could feel him watching me, could feel the questions he wanted to ask pressing against the air between us.
“Del.”
“Don’t.” I held up my hand without turning around. “Don’t say anything about last night. It happened, and now it’s over, and we’re going to move forward as if it didn’t.”
“I don’t think I can do that.”
“You’re going to have to.” I finally turned to face him, making my expression as neutral as I could manage. “I meant what I said. That wasn’t forgiveness. That was just... it was just a night that happened.”
He nodded slowly, his jaw tight. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I told you I would keep trying. I meant it. If you need to pretend last night didn’t happen, I can do that. But I’m not going to pretend I don’t love you. I’m not going to pretend I’m not going to fight for us.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. So I just turned back to the window and watched the snow fall.
***
The roads were clear by noon, and we drove back in silence.
Heath kept his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel, respecting the distance I had created between us.
I stared out the window and tried not to think about the way his hands had felt on my body, the way his mouth had moved against mine, the way he had said my name in the darkness.
My phone buzzed with a text from Miranda Okafor.
Miranda: Good news and bad news. You were right about the water, and nobody else caught it, which has made you very popular around here. Bad news is the fix is going to take weeks and the client wants you on site for it. Personally. Can you be here regularly?
I stared at the message, my mind racing. Newport regularly. That meant finding somewhere to stay, finding transportation, figuring out logistics for a project that was suddenly demanding much more of my time than I had anticipated.
“Everything okay?” Heath asked.
“Work stuff.” I put my phone away. “They want me on site. A lot more than I expected.”
“How much more?”
“Several meetings over the next few weeks. Maybe more.”
He was quiet for a moment, his fingers drumming against the steering wheel.
“You could stay at Fairhaven,” he said finally.
“What?”
“The house is empty. There’s plenty of room, and it would save you from having to commute back and forth from Boston.”
I stared at him. “You want me to stay at your house. With you.”
“Our house.” He glanced at me briefly. “And yes. No strings attached. You can have the master bedroom. I’ll sleep in one of the guest rooms. We don’t have to... it doesn’t have to be anything more than convenient.”
“Convenient.”
“Practical.” He returned his eyes to the road. “You need a place to stay while you work. I have a place. It makes sense.”
I hated that he was right. I hated that the practical option was also the one that put me in close proximity to my estranged husband, in the house where we had built a life together, surrounded by memories I was trying not to drown in.
“Damn you,” I muttered under my breath.
“Is that a yes?”
“Wait here.”
We had reached my parents’ house. I got out of the car without looking at him, walked up the steps, and let myself inside.
My mother was in the kitchen, reading a book at the table. She looked up when I came in, her expression carefully neutral.
“How was the meeting?”
“Fine. There was a storm. I had to stay overnight at a lodge near the site.”
“I heard.” She closed her book and set it aside. “Your father checked the weather reports when you didn’t come home. We assumed you were stranded somewhere.”
“I was.”
She studied my face for a second too long, and I wondered how much she could see. The sleepless night. The confusion. The tangled feelings I couldn’t sort out.
“Heath drove you back?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And I need to pack a bag.” I moved toward the stairs, avoiding her eyes. “The project needs me in Newport for the next few weeks. I’m going to stay at Fairhaven.”
“With Heath.”
“It’s the practical option.”
My mother didn’t say anything. She just watched me climb the stairs, keeping whatever she thought to herself.
I packed quickly, throwing clothes and toiletries into a suitcase without much thought. When I came back down, she was waiting in the hallway.
“Be careful,” she said quietly. “Your heart is more fragile than you think right now.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“I hope so.”
I kissed her cheek and walked out the door.
Heath was still waiting in the car, exactly where I had left him. His eyes widened when he saw the suitcase in my hand.
“You’re coming?”
“It’s for the job.” I threw the suitcase in the backseat and climbed into the passenger seat. “Don’t make it weird.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
But he was smiling as he pulled away from the curb, a small, hopeful smile that set a flutter going in my chest.
I ignored it. I was very good at ignoring things.
The drive to Newport took three hours. We talked a little, mostly about the project, about the house, about practical matters that didn’t require me to acknowledge the elephant in the car. Heath kept his distance, physically and emotionally, giving me the space I had demanded.
It was infuriating how considerate he was being.
Fairhaven looked the same as it always had, grand and imposing and achingly familiar. I had spent nine years learning to call this place home. Walking away from it had been one of the hardest things I had ever done.
Walking back in was somehow harder.
“I’ll carry your suitcase up,” Heath said, grabbing it from the backseat before I could protest. “The master bedroom is still set up. I’ve been sleeping in one of the guest rooms.”
“Which guest room?”
He hesitated. “The blue one. At the end of the hall.”
Not the rooms where Montana and Kendall had stayed. I wondered if that was intentional.
I followed him up the stairs, down the familiar hallway, past the closed doors of the guest rooms. He set my suitcase inside the master bedroom and stepped back, giving me space.
“I’ll let you get settled,” he said. “No hurry. I’ll be downstairs if you need anything.”
He left, and I stood in the doorway of the room that used to be ours.
The bed was made with fresh sheets. The curtains were drawn back, letting in the afternoon light. Everything was clean and orderly, no sign of the chaos that had consumed our lives over the past few months.
I should unpack. Settle in, get organized, prepare for the work ahead.
Instead, I found myself walking back into the hallway.
I told myself I was just exploring. Just checking to make sure the house was as empty as Heath had claimed. Just satisfying my curiosity about what had changed since I left.
My feet stopped outside the door to the room Montana had been staying in. It was clean and bare, stripped of any trace of her presence. Good. I never wanted to see evidence of that woman in my home again.
I moved on to the next door. Kendall’s room. My hand hesitated on the handle.
I pushed the door open and stopped.
It was not a guest room anymore.
The walls had been painted a soft sage green, warm and soothing.
A mural covered one wall, half finished, trees and birds and a moon that was only partly colored in.
A white crib stood against the far wall, its bedding pristine.
A rocking chair sat by the window, draped with a soft blanket.
There was a changing table, a small dresser, a bookshelf already half filled with children’s books.
A nursery. He had turned Kendall’s room into a nursery.
Tears pricked at my eyes, and I pressed my hand over my mouth to hold back the sound that wanted to escape.
“I wanted to surprise you.”
Heath’s voice came from behind me, quiet and tentative. I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t. If I looked at him right now, I would fall apart completely.
“When did you do this?” My voice came out strangled.
“Over the past few weeks. A little bit every day.” He moved closer, and I felt his presence at my back, warm and solid. “I couldn’t sleep most nights. I needed work for my hands. Work that felt like hope.”
The tears were falling now, sliding down my cheeks despite my best efforts to hold them back.
“The mural isn’t finished yet,” he continued. “I was going to hire someone to do it properly, but then I thought maybe you would want to be involved. Maybe we could do it together.”
His hands settled on my waist, gentle and careful. He turned me slowly to face him, and I let him, too overwhelmed to resist.
His thumb swept across my cheek, wiping away the tears that kept falling.
“If there’s anything you don’t like,” he said softly, “tell me and I’ll change it. The color, the furniture, the mural, any of it. I want it to be perfect for you. For both of you.”
“I like it.” The words came out as a whisper. “I like all of it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
His face softened, and the heat in his eyes made my heart pound. We were inches apart. I could feel the heat of his body, could smell the familiar scent of him, could see the pulse jumping in his throat.
My hand moved without my permission, fisting in the front of his shirt.
I wanted him. God help me, I wanted him so much it hurt. I wanted to kiss him and touch him and forget about everything except the way he made me feel.
He must have seen it in my eyes, must have felt the way my body leaned toward his. For a long moment, he just looked at me, his gaze dark with a hunger I recognized all too well.
Then he stepped back.
“I’ll make dinner,” he said. His voice was rough, strained.
He smirked, a knowing little smile that made heat rush to my face.
“You should rest. It’s been a long day.” Then he winked at me.
Actually winked. And he turned and walked out of the nursery, leaving me standing there with my heart racing and my hand still clenched in empty air where his shirt had been. I wanted to smack him.
I went to the window after he left, because I’m not made of steel and I had just been abandoned in a half-painted nursery.
There was a car on the lane.
Just parked, past the gate, on the grass shoulder where the hedge breaks. Cream-colored. Nobody in it that I could see. It’s a public road. People park on it. Delivery vans, the man who does the hedges, once memorably a photographer.
I looked at it for a while. Then I went and unpacked my suitcase, and when I came back down it was gone, and I did not mention it to anyone.
Because what’s there to mention. A car was parked on a road.
***
The thing on the doorstep came four days later.
It was morning and I was the first one down, and I opened the front door to bring in the milk the way I did every day, and there was a knife in the wood of the doorframe.
Not a threatening knife. That’s what I told myself for the whole of that first terrible minute, crouched down looking at it, my heart going like a trapped bird.
It was a small silver fruit knife, the pretty kind, the kind that lives in a set on a sideboard, and it had been pushed into the soft old wood of the frame at exactly the height of my throat, and folded over its handle, held on by the blade, was a photograph.
It was the one from the dinner parties. Heath at eighteen, brown and laughing, the girl in the white sundress looking up at him. I would have known it anywhere. I had been made to look at it a hundred times.
Somebody had drawn a line through me. Except I was not in the photograph, I had never been in the photograph, so what they had actually done was take a pen and draw a small neat line across the throat of the girl who was not there, across the empty air beside Heath where a wife might have stood, and it took me a moment to understand that the empty air was meant to be me.
I did not scream. I’m proud of that. I pulled the knife out of the wood, and I took the photograph inside, and I stood at the kitchen counter with both of them in front of me and my hands not quite working, and I thought about a cream-colored car parked on a lane.
There was no proving it. That was the thing that would come to define the whole of what followed, the thing the police would say to me gently again and again in the weeks after all of it came out.
A fruit knife has no fingerprints worth having.
A photograph anyone in Newport might have owned.
A car nobody had seen the plate of. There was nothing here.
There was a woman standing in a kitchen holding a knife and a photograph and knowing, in her body, exactly whose hand had held them last, and no way on God’s earth to make anyone believe her.
I did not tell Heath. Add it to the list of everything else I did not do that winter.
I told myself he had enough to carry. The truth is uglier.
The truth is that I had spent nine years being called hysterical by his mother, and some animal part of me was afraid that if I stood in front of my husband holding a fruit knife and saying his ex had left it in my door to threaten our child, I would watch his face do the thing everyone’s face always did, and I could not have survived it from him.
So I put the knife in a drawer and the photograph under the lining of my suitcase, and I told no one, and I started, without quite admitting it to myself, to lock the doors I had never once locked in that house.