Chapter 50
Marin
The argument starts over water.
It doesn’t end over water.
“It was never about Vanessa,” Charles says. He’s not angry. That’s the worst part. “You know that. You’ve always known that.”
“I don’t want to hear about Vanessa.”
“But you need to, Marin. You need to hear what I’m telling you.”
He keeps going regardless of what I want. A match made in heaven as Luke would say.
“She takes what I give her. That’s it. She doesn’t need the rest. She doesn’t need every room in the house. Every hour. Every thought. She gets a ring and an apartment and she’s happy. She doesn’t ask where I was Thursday night. She doesn’t need me to be something I’m not.”
“She’s a doormat.”
“She’s realistic. There’s a difference.”
“There’s no difference.”
He leans his head back against the wall. Looks at the ceiling. “She’s pregnant, Marin.”
I stand there. Halfway up the basement stairs. Holding a glass of water that was too warm.
He’s lying. He has to be lying. Because if he’s not then everything I’ve done—the trailer, the restraints, the cover story, the town, the casseroles, the prayer beads, all of it—was to avoid a truth I could have faced at a dinner table for free.
I study his face.
He’s not lying.
“You could have told me that at any point, Charles. Any point. At the dinner. In the trailer. Any night I brought you food or adjusted your cuffs or sat on a concrete floor watching The fucking Notebook with you. You could have said it and I would have let you go. You know that. You know I would have let you go.”
“Marin—”
“I bought a ball gag for you, Charles. I told a Baptist minister you have a brain tumor. I tased you. I moved you to a basement. I have committed—I can’t even count how many felonies I have committed—and you sat there the whole time knowing one sentence would have ended all of it.”
“Because I knew how you’d take it.”
“How I’d TAKE it? I would have taken it by opening the goddamn door!”
“Look—”
I’m up the stairs before he finishes whatever he’s saying next. I leave the basement door open. Six inches.
I call Luke.
“Yeah?”
“Come over.”
He doesn’t ask why.
I stand in the kitchen and wait. I don’t fix my face. I don’t fix anything. I’m done fixing things for men who don’t deserve the effort.
Everything I’ve done—all of it—has been for nothing.
The kidnapping. The trailer. The lying. The cover story I built so well it should be on my résumé.
The potty chair I bought from a woman who thought it was for my grandmother.
The ball gag I bought from a man who thought it was for my weekend.
The four times I changed the sheets because a grown man weaponized his own bladder.
The casseroles I accepted with a straight face.
The prayer I sat through while Meg Ryan orgasmed beneath my feet.
The movie nights. The Notebook. The concrete floor.
All of it. Every unhinged, criminal, delusional minute of it.
For a man who had one sentence in his pocket that would have ended this and chose to let me keep mopping up his piss instead.
Everyone was right about him. Luke. Mrs. Mather, probably. The cashier at the kink store, for all I know.
I am a woman with a graduate degree and a corner office résumé who committed a list of felonies a prosecutor would need a second page for—and the man I did it for couldn’t be bothered to tell me the truth.
That’s not love. That’s not even delusion. That’s just stupid.