Chapter 54
Tessa waited. Her silence, she knew, said more than any words. It screamed louder than any rage, and rumbled darker than any thunderstorm. Henry wasn’t dead. And that was the only excuse that she would have accepted.
From the look on his face, he might be wishing he were dead.
She waited. Imagining Linny holding up Zack’s laptop, imagined her seeing Zack’s shredded Pikachu sticker on the back of its case, imagined the chaos of explanatory sentences that must be tumbling through her husband’s mind.
In the silence of the distance, and the distance of the silence, Tessa kept waiting; waiting him out.
What Henry said next might change their lives, and what she said after that might do the same thing, and right now, standing on the thick jewel-toned paisley carpeting of the hotel elevator bank, aluminum sliding doors on either side of her, and with a mysterious message in a sealed envelope tucked into her purse, her world was on the verge of collapse.
Henry was wearing his favorite black T-shirt, a thin quarter-zip pullover on top, his hair tousled and his face bristly and unshaven.
Clinically, technically, empirically, any person would think Henry was a fortysomething knockout, and Tessa was not surprised that some predatory and bored suburban housewives had set him in their sights.
Whoa, Annabelle said. Really?
Fine. She was being unfair and wrongheaded in every way, and yet Tessa could not decide whether she was being tormented by rage or by sorrow.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Henry finally said.
Her two children were in the room, hanging on every word just as she was, assessing their father, and assessing their mother, and assessing the ruined kitchen and Henry’s unexplained disappearance. She would not be the one to incite that battle. She would not.
“Hi back,” she said. Waiting. “What’s new?”
She could see Henry evaluate; watched his brain computing whether possibly Zack had not told her he’d been “out.” That extravagant dishwasher had been Henry’s undoing. And now he would have to own it. But she had control of how that would happen.
“You were right about the too-expensive dishwasher, honey,” Henry began.
“How so?” She longed to see the expressions on her children’s faces, but Linny was stolidly aiming the camera toward Henry.
Henry ran both hands through his hair, mussing it even more, which made him even more attractive. “Well,” he said, “apparently it was running, and God knows what went wrong but water is… was… It’s totally screwed up. It might be the hose connection.”
And here was the moment when she could pull the rug out from under him. She could confront him, right now, about the omission that he had not been home.
Henry had secrets, all right. Exactly like Zack said.
And he was clearly in the midst of covering them up.
But she couldn’t force the issue with her children in the room.
Whatever he had done, wherever he had been, whoever he had seen or been with or whatever he had been sneaking around doing while he left their children alone—it had already happened.
It could not be erased. But it did not have to be faced at one in the morning when her poor kids were exhausted and confused and afraid.
“What a mess,” Tessa said, meaning every word of it.
“We’ll handle it.” Henry waved off her concerns. “Don’t worry about a thing. But the kids are bushed, it’s late for them, but I’m glad they got to say hello to you—I didn’t hear the phone ring though.” He looked past her, apparently at Zack and Linny. “I thought you guys were sleeping.”
“Long story.” Tessa interrupted his obvious testing to see whether he could suss out the extent of her previous conversation with Zack and Linny. “Let me say goodnight to kid one and kid two,” she went on, “and you and I will talk in the morning, Henry.”
Linny turned the laptop to put herself on camera. “Don’t forget the soaps, Mom. I love the soaps.”
“Bring me something, too,” Zack called from off camera.
A whir of machinery in the background announced the arrival of an elevator, and if it carried curious and eavesdropping passengers, Tessa did not want to have extra company for this conversation.
“My elevator is here,” she said. “I’ve got an early plane, so good night, you all, and—”
“To Des Moines? According to your website?” Henry had turned the phone screen back to himself. “So did you sell books tonight? Did you find Locket Mom?”
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow.” She took a step toward the elevator, feeling more like she was walking a fraying rope bridge stretched precariously across a bottomless abyss. “I’m getting in the elevator, and I know the call will get cut off as soon as I do.”
“Safe safe,” Henry said.
The elevator doors opened, revealing no one inside. Tessa stared at the phone screen, where Henry’s face looked back at her, expectant.
Waiting.
Tessa walked into the empty square mahogany and mirror cube and the doors slid closed. And she hung up.