Chapter 3
EDEN
Ireached the kitchen before my legs gave out, caught the edge of the counter, and lowered myself to the floor.
Ryder came in behind me and didn’t touch me, and now that there was nobody on the porch to watch him do it, he left the path to the medication open.
I hated him for knowing what came next. I hated myself for following the routine we had built together: stop talking, get out of the heat, sit upright, use the rescue medication, give it time, decide whether I needed more.
The steps belonged to me. Ryder had been inside them so long that lifting the pouch down off the counter felt like taking something out of his hand.
I sat with my back against the cabinet and ignored the chair he pulled out. The inhaler shook, so I braced my wrist against my knee and made the first dose count. Ryder crouched several feet away and didn’t reach for me. Jess stood inside the door with her purse hanging from both hands.
“Do you want me to call Aris?” The voice was different from the one he had used on the porch.
He was the man who knew the name of my doctor, the location of every prescription, and the exact face I made when breathing turned frightening.
He was also the man who had stood in a doorway with his hands at his sides.
I shook my head. Speaking would cost air I needed, and I refused to let him treat that as consent to anything else. Ryder read it correctly. He took out his phone, set it faceup on the tile between us, and put his hands back on his thighs.
Jess moved toward the doorway. “I should go.”
I raised one finger before she could. “Did you know I have asthma?”
Her eyes went to Ryder. “He said you were sick sometimes.” Shame followed the answer across her face.
“I’m not sick sometimes.” I had to stop and breathe, furious that even the correction came apart in front of them. “I have asthma all the time. It gets bad sometimes.”
“I’m sorry.” Jess pressed a hand over her mouth. “I didn’t know this would happen.”
“She needs space,” Ryder said, appointing himself to manage the room he had filled.
It burned through the relief just starting to reach my lungs. “Don’t speak for me.”
His mouth opened and closed. Jess waited until I nodded before she stepped outside.
Through the window over the sink I watched her cross the yard and take the gravel back toward the main lot, where a gray sedan sat at the end of the visitor row with a windshield full of white sky.
She walked it alone. Ryder didn’t follow her or call after her, and some pathetic part of me wondered whether he would let the woman carrying his child leave that easily if he loved her.
My next breath went deeper. The panic in my muscles eased before anything in my head did, and it left me sweaty and able to see the whole room.
The eggs sat cold beside his phone. Gladys held a bowl of abandoned dough under her raised head, and the top of it had already skinned over in the heat, which meant the batch was finished no matter what else happened today.
Three hundred pastries cooled on every flat surface I owned.
The whole house smelled like butter going to waste.
“How long?” I asked.
“A few months.” He gave me no beginning I could stand anywhere near.
“Where did you meet her?”
“Diner outside Terre Haute. Forty miles out.” Forty miles was nothing. Forty miles was an errand. He had done forty miles twice in a day to get me a part for the proofing cabinet.
“You know which pharmacy fills my controller medication, which brand of butter I won’t use, and which side of you I have to stand on so you can hear me,” I said. “You learned enough about her to get her pregnant. Did she know about me?”
Ryder took long enough that I understood the answer would be worse than silence. “She knew your name.”
The floor tilted a little. Jess had carried my name around for months, in a car, in a diner, in whatever room he took her to, and I had not carried hers for an hour.
“Did she know where we lived?”
“Not at the beginning.”
“Did you bring her inside this house?”
“No.” That one came fast and hard, as if keeping her out of the bedroom had preserved something I was supposed to thank him for.
“Where, then?”
“Motel off 41.” He watched me take the number and put it somewhere I would never get it out of again. I knew that stretch of road. Cinder block, a gravel apron, a sign with two dead letters in it, outside our gate if you kept moving. I had ridden past it behind him with my cheek against his back.
I used the counter to stand. Ryder rose with me and stopped when I looked at the hand he had lifted. He hated lowering it. I put the inhaler in the pocket of my dress and walked toward the bedroom.
“Where are you going?”
“To put on clothes that don’t have your hands all over them.
” I could feel last night everywhere: a tender place on my thigh, the faint scrape on my neck from his beard, the ache left by sex I had believed belonged to a happy marriage.
Jess had been pregnant while he touched me.
He had known it, and I had whispered that I loved him with my legs around his waist.
Ryder followed me through the hall. “Last night wasn’t planned.”
“You say that like you tripped and landed inside me.” The bedroom was exactly as we had left it that morning.
Bed made. Board still on the dresser where I had set it to stop him proving a point, the pieces standing in the trap he had been building for three days, the white queen on the nightstand beside my inhaler where he had put her at two in the morning with his laugh still against my shoulder.
I yanked the dresser drawer open, pulled jeans on under my dress, dragged the dress off over my head, moved the inhaler out of its pocket into my jeans, and threw the dress at the hamper. “You could’ve said no.”
“I know.” Ryder lifted a hand when my shirt caught, then dropped it before I had to tell him not to.
“Did you want to?” I hated the question as soon as it was out, because either answer turned last night against me.
He looked at the bed and said nothing, which was worse than any lie he could have picked. If he said yes, I had slept with a man who didn’t want me. If he said no, he had wanted me while another woman carried his child.
“When did you stop loving me?”
“It wasn’t one day.” He ran a hand over his jaw. “We changed. I didn’t want to keep having the same fight.”
“What fight?” My shirt caught around my elbow. I tore it free and shoved my arm through hard enough to open a seam at the shoulder. “We argued about the fundraiser yesterday. You apologized, we fixed it, and then you took me to bed. Was that the fight? Gladys? Flour on your maps? Name one thing.”
His gaze came up and met mine. “I had to plan every ride, every trip, every argument around whether you could breathe. I got tired.”
I stared at him until the room blurred. In June he had held my hand outside the specialist’s office in Terre Haute and told me I never had to apologize for the life we had.
He packed medication into his saddlebag when I rode with him.
He checked hotel rooms for dust. He had learned, slowly and against his own nature, where concern stopped and hovering began.
I had believed he did all of it because he loved me. He had been keeping a receipt.
“You could’ve told me.” My voice broke for a reason that had nothing to do with the attack. “You could’ve said you didn’t want to take care of me anymore. I would’ve hated you. I wouldn’t have spent five years thanking you for it, out loud, in this room, more times than you could count.”
Ryder took a step and stopped when I moved back. “I wasn’t keeping a tally.”
“Then how did you know exactly which one to use?”
He looked at the dresser. It was fast, and he corrected it, and I had spent six years learning that face.
I crossed the room before he could get in front of me and lifted the route folder off the pile of keys and receipts he emptied out of his pockets every night of his life.
A black phone lay under it, smaller than his, in a clear case I had never seen.
The screen woke when I picked it up. No passcode.
A message sat on the lock screen beneath a contact saved as J.
I know today is going to hurt her. I can’t keep pretending the baby isn’t coming.
Something small and clean at the back of my head said the word convenient.
An unlocked second phone with no code on it, lying on a dresser under a folder, in a house where he had known since at least Friday that I would be turning out drawers by noon.
This was a man who locked a gun in a drawer and then tested the drawer twice.
No photographs of anybody’s body. No screenshots.
Nothing but a tidy readable life. I heard the objection and I put it out of the room, because a cheap affair was a thing I had a shape for and whatever the alternative was, I didn’t, and I needed the smaller betrayal to be the true one. I opened the thread.
The messages ran back through months. Some were short arrangements about the diner or the motel.
Others built the life Jess had described on my porch.
She asked whether he had eaten. He promised her she wouldn’t have to worry about money.
She told him she had been sick in the morning and was frightened about the baby.
He wrote that he would take care of both of them.
There were no naked bodies, no invented desire I could dismiss as strangers performing for a screen.
The intimacy was worse for being ordinary.
Ryder asked whether her car had started.
Jess reminded him about an appointment. He told her to drink water.
All the care I had watched him come home too tired to give had apparently been divided between two households, one of which existed entirely in promises I had never seen.
I kept reading until I found the phrase.
Stay where I put you. I’ll come get you.