34. Lydia
LYDIA
The duffel bag is the same one I used seven years ago. I don't know why I kept it. I don't know why, out of everything in that closet, my hand went straight for the one bag that already knows how this goes.
I fold in three shirts, underwear, the phone charger, and my toothbrush, and I don't let myself think past the zipper. Thinking past the zipper means deciding what I'm actually doing, and I'm not ready for that yet. I just need to be somewhere with no memory of last night. Somewhere that's mine.
I woke up already certain. That's the part I can't get past, lying there at five in the morning listening to Nico breathe beside me like nothing had happened, like the whole night hadn't cracked something down the center of us.
He didn't reach for me after. Not once. I lay there rigid and waiting, and he just let the silence sit there between our bodies.
Somewhere in that waiting, I stopped being his wife and started being a woman making a list.
I'm not running yet. I tell myself that twice while I zip the bag, like it'll make it true. I just need one morning where I'm not anybody's wife, anybody's problem, anybody's asset. One morning that's mine.
I'm at the top of the stairs when Giorgia finds me.
She doesn't say my name like a question.
She doesn't ask where I'm going, or why there's a bag over my shoulder at seven in the morning, or whether Nico knows.
She just stands there in the hallway with a stack of towels against her hip, looking at me the same as she has since the day I moved in, like she already knew this morning was coming before I did.
"You'll eat something first," she says. It isn't really a question either.
"I'm not hungry."
She nods like that's an acceptable answer, which surprises me. Then she sets the towels down on the hall table, unhurried, and comes closer, and puts one hand flat against my cheek for a second. Just a second. Her palm is warm and smells like rosemary and dish soap.
"Be careful," she says.
Two words. She doesn't dress them up. She doesn't ask me to stay, doesn't call anyone, doesn't do a single thing to stop me.
But something in the way she says it sits heavier in my chest than a full conversation would have, and I carry it all the way down the stairs and out the door and into the car, a weight I can't put down.
I drive to Gravesend without deciding to.
I don't tell myself I'm leaving Nico. I don't let the word divorce anywhere near my mouth.
I just need one place in this world that's mine, that was mine before any of them, before the money and the name and the ring I still haven't taken off.
My mother's house. My house, technically, now, though it's never once felt that way.
The key still works. Of course it does. Nothing in this house ever changes.
I let myself in, and the smell hits me first, dust and old carpet and the ghost of my mother's cigarettes baked into the walls. For a second I just stand in the front hall, breathe it in, and let my eyes sting.
The nausea's been sitting under my ribs for weeks now.
I've been blaming it on everything except the obvious thing, stress, the wedding, Dad, the folder of documents that blew my whole life open.
I've had six different explanations, and none of them have been the right one.
I think some part of me has known that for a while and has been too scared to check.
There's a drugstore two blocks from here. I still remember it clearly, and I still remember the pain that goes with this place.
I buy the test with cash, in a paper bag, like I'm seventeen again and hiding something from a man who is, as far as I know, three hundred miles away doing whatever men like Frank Carpenter do when they're not making my life a horror movie.
I take it in my old bathroom; the one with the cracked tile and the window that always sits a half-inch open.
I sit on the edge of the tub and wait. The three minutes stretch out longer than any three minutes I have ever lived through, and somewhere in there I stop breathing and don't notice until my chest aches from it.
Two lines.
I sit on the cold edge of that tub, don't cry, don't laugh, and don't do anything. I just look at it, at the two pink lines that don't care one bit what kind of week I've had. A baby. Nico's baby. Growing right now, right here, inside a body that woke up this morning already planning to leave him.
The timing is obscene. I almost say it out loud, just to hear how ugly it sounds.
There's no one to tell. That's the thought that finally breaks something loose in my chest, quiet and complete.
No mother to call. No husband I trust enough to say it to.
No friend I could tell without inviting forty questions I don't have answers for.
Just me, and a plastic stick, and a house that has felt dangerous to be alone in for as long as I can remember.
I sit there a long time. Long enough that when I finally stand up, my knees have gone stiff.
I carry the test out into the hallway with me because I can't make myself put it down, can't make myself throw it away yet either, and I'm halfway to the kitchen, trying to figure out if there's a version of today where I eat something, when I hear him.
"Welcome home, Lyddie. Knew you'd come crawling back eventually. Just like your mother did."
I stop moving.
He's already inside the house.
He's sitting in my mother's living room, in the same chair he always sat in, like he's been waiting there since I left at seventeen.
I never had the one thing I'd counted on, a window, a warning, a few seconds to run.
He's got nothing but time, because he's known for seven years that a door this house left open would eventually swing back toward him.
This is what I've been afraid of since the night I fled this house with nothing but a bag over my shoulder.
"Frank."
His name comes out of me smaller than I want it to.
He stands up out of the chair slow, almost lazy, and there's nothing careful about him anymore, none of the performance he used to put on for anyone who might be watching.
No concern in his voice. No coy little smile that pretends to be affection.
Just a man who has finally stopped pretending, in the one house where pretending was never required.
I go for the door.
He's already between me and it.
He's bigger than I remember. Or maybe I've just spent years shrinking him down in my memory so he'd be small enough to survive thinking about.
Either way he fills the doorway now, filling the only way out of the house that raised me, and my whole body understands before my mind catches up that there is nowhere in this room to go.
Seven years of moving through the world half braced for this exact moment, and somehow I still didn't picture it right. I always imagined I'd see him coming. A car on the street, a shadow at a window, something.
Instead he was just already here, sitting in my mother's chair, waiting on a morning he had no way of predicting and every reason to expect eventually.
That's the part that scares me worst. He didn't need to know when. He only had to know I'd come back here someday, and he was patient enough to wait me out.
The gun clears his jacket before I can even think about running.
He does it with the same flat competence he's carried a badge with his whole career, no drama, no shake in his hand, just a man doing a thing he's done, or trained to do, a hundred times before. He levels it at me like he's pointing at a chair he wants me to sit in.
"Sit down, Lyddie."
I don't sit. My legs won't do it. But I stop moving, because there's a gun between us now and every cell in my body has gone very, very still.
He's talking, something about how good it feels, how long he's waited, how satisfying it is finally, and I'm not really hearing the words.
I'm watching his eyes, and his eyes have gone somewhere else, somewhere pleased with himself, somewhere so busy enjoying this that they've stopped watching my hands.
My phone is still in my back pocket.
I don't decide to do it so much as my thumb decides for me.
I slide it half out, enough to hit the button on the side, enough to wake the screen without looking down at it, and I find the recorder app by feel alone, months of muscle memory from a marriage full of things worth documenting.
I press it and shove the phone back down into my waistband where the fabric of my shirt covers it, and I don't breathe until it's done.
He never looks down once.
"You've got nothing to say?" he says. "After everything I did for you?"
The test is still in my other hand.
He sees it a half second after I remember I'm holding it. I try to close my fingers around it, too late. It slips, or he knocks it. I'm not even sure which. It clatters onto the hardwood between us, rolls once, and stops with the little window facing up.
Two lines.
For one whole second neither of us says anything.
Then his face changes.
I have never once, in the entire time I've known this man, seen him look anything but pleased with himself, some flavor of smug or cruel.
Not now. Now there's something raw underneath it, something that looks almost like rage, and it takes me a second to understand: it's fury that this exists at all, not fury on my behalf.
"He knocked you up," he says, and his voice has gone flat and ugly. "Little prince gets his heir. That's rich."
"Frank."
"No, that's..." He laughs, short and humorless. "That's just perfect. That's just one more thing of his I get to hold now, isn't it? One more thing that belongs to me, same as you do."
"It doesn't belong to anyone," I say, and my voice shakes on every word.
"Everything belongs to somebody, Lyddie. You learned that lesson young. Guess your kid's gonna learn it younger."
He crosses the room while he says it, gun never wavering, and takes my wrists in one hand hard enough to bruise, and there's a length of cord already looped through his belt like he packed for this, like he knew exactly how this morning would go before I did.
"You don't get to decide what happens to it," he says, working the knot. "Same as you never got to decide what happened to you."
I don't fight him. I can't, not with the barrel a foot from my face, not with something growing inside me that I can't protect if I'm dead. I just stand there and let him bind my hands and hate every second of my own stillness.
"You want to know something?" he says, low, almost gentle now, a calm that means he's about to hurt someone.
"I built all of it. Harry. Bianca. Seven years of keeping your mother sick just enough to keep you coming back.
And the last few weeks, pointing you at your father's own files, letting you find just enough truth to blow your whole marriage up yourself.
" He leans in close enough that I can smell coffee on his breath.
"Didn't even have to push you, Lyddie. Just had to open the door. You walked through it all on your own."
Something in my chest goes hollow and cold, and for a second my legs go weak under me.
He gets the cord tight, checks it once with a cop's hands, and turns me toward the door.
"Let's go home," he says.
The last thing I register, before the front door of the house that raised me swings shut behind us both, is the click of the latch. A gun at my back. And no one in the entire world who knows where I am.