40. Avery
AVERY
Declan arrives at Hawthorn Park with no cut, no motorcycle, and no visible weapon.
He parks on the opposite side of the lot from my car and waits beside shelter three rather than walking toward me, leaving enough open ground that I can choose whether the conversation begins.
Daylight comes through new leaves that haven’t filled out yet, and maple seeds spin down over grass where last week’s mud has finally begun to dry.
Two mothers push strollers along the path, and an old man feeds a goose and six goslings beneath a sign ordering him not to.
I picked a public place. The questions scare me; Declan does not, but the difference would sound foolish to anybody who watched me shoot his mistress six weeks ago.
My hands have counted the exits of this shelter twice since I parked, and the part of me that fired both shots still has nowhere to be filed, only a letter in my bag saying the state is finished asking and an interview date with the federal people who are not.
At thirty-four weeks and four days pregnant, walking from the car to the shelter gives me enough time to regret coming.
Crossing the lot also gives me nothing to think about except the fact that I killed a woman.
I have given the account five times. Twice at the hospital, once at the station over a floor plan of my own conference room with a pen I was told to use to mark where I stood, and twice more to people who wrote nothing down and thanked me for my patience.
I have started to hear it in my own mouth as if I am describing somebody else.
My hands were steady in that room and in the ambulance.
They came apart in the hospital bed, and since then they keep a schedule I do not set.
They are fine on a keyboard, fine on the wheel, and useless on anything with a lid.
At the station my signature came out wrong at the bottom of page nine, a shape I have been making since I was fifteen, and the detective slid the page back so I could initial the correction to my own name.
I sleep in ninety-minute pieces and make up the difference in my desk chair at two in the afternoon with the door open, because the only sleep my body still trusts is sleep somebody could interrupt.
Sasha is a body now. The younger detective read her property inventory aloud in my hospital room: two encrypted drives, three phones, the credentials list, the copied files, and a receipt for gas bought that morning eleven miles from my office.
I think about the receipt more than the drives.
She filled her tank, drove to my building, and expected to drive home again.
I do not grieve her, and I have stopped setting a place for the guilt everybody keeps expecting.
Marisol could find out in a morning who claimed her. I have not asked.
Some part of me judged the distance and timing while her hand came off her chest and closed around the grip, and it fired without consulting the rest of me.
That part is mine now. I will carry it into a delivery room.
I would fire both shots again. I have tested that answer at three in the morning the way I test the lockbox.
It holds every time, and it does not help.
None of it is finished. I carry it across the last of the grass with everything else I have not found a place for in that house.
I know the dates, locations, money, lies, and every night he returned home after Sasha.
I know he thought of me while he was with her, mocked my fertility tracking by letting Sasha see it, and had sex with me on nights when another woman could have exposed me and our baby to an infection, which he knew and kept to himself.
Those facts can be checked against records and his disclosure.
Only Declan can tell me why he kept choosing them after swearing that loving me made betrayal impossible.
Declan stands when I reach the table. The bench stays where it is and the thermos stays beside his phone. “Do you want me across from you or at the end?”
“Across.” I lower myself onto the bench and put my bag beside me. “What’s in the thermos?”
“Coffee. I brought it for myself. You didn’t ask me to bring anything for you.” He moves the thermos to the ground, removing even the chance that I will mistake it for a favor. “I’m ready when you are.”
I almost laugh at the lie. Neither of us could be ready for me to take the worst parts of our marriage apart in a park while geese fight over stale bread, but Declan means he will sit here until I finish. That is enough.
“Did you love her?” I ask, and down at the water the geese pick that moment to start shouting at the old man.
His face gives me nothing I can use to escape the answer. “No.”
The relief is immediate, unwanted, and humiliating.
My body accepts the word before my mind reminds it that six months of fucking somebody does not become harmless merely because love stayed home with me.
I grip the edge of the table, angry at Declan for the affair and at myself for caring whether Sasha owned one thing he claims she did not.
“Don’t make that sound better than it is.” I keep my gaze on him when his eyes lower. “If you didn’t love her, you destroyed us for somebody you didn’t even want a life with.”
“I know.” Declan places both hands on the table where I can see them. “Not loving her makes what I did uglier. I wasn’t confused about whom I wanted to come home to. I knew I wanted you, our house, and the baby we were trying to make. I went to her anyway.”
“Did she think you loved her?” I press before relief can make that one word feel like enough.
“She wanted me to. I let her believe she could become more important if she kept giving me what I wanted. I never promised I would leave you, but I knew why she copied your things, asked about our marriage, and waited for me to choose her. I used her hope the same way I used your trust. One kept her available. The other kept you from looking too closely.”
Sasha stood in my office and told me she never asked him to stop loving me. At the time, I heard it as cruelty dressed as honesty. Now I understand Declan kept both of us useful by making sure neither woman had the whole truth.
“Did you ever want to leave me?” I ask. “Not whether you planned it. Did you sit in that safehouse and imagine a life where you stayed with her instead?”
“No.” He answers before he can revise it. “I never wanted her instead of you. I wanted her in addition to everything you gave me, and I was selfish enough to treat your marriage like something nobody could take from me.”
“My marriage.” I repeat the phrase until he hears what he said. “You mean ours.”
“No. I treated it like mine.” Declan’s fingers curl against the table. “I believed your love, your body, our home, and the future you were building would wait while I took whatever I wanted. I said ours when I wanted comfort. I acted like it was mine whenever your choice threatened me.”
The answer hurts. I recognize the man who existed beneath every possessive promise I once found romantic. Declan loved calling me his wife. He used the word as a warning to other men and never considered that being mine should have required something from him too.
“Did you compare us?” I ask. Since the safehouse, I have wondered every time I dress for work and every time I stand naked beneath a shower that smells like lemon. “When you were with her, did you compare her body to mine? The sex? Did you think she was better?”
Declan’s jaw works. He could protect me with a lie. I would recognize it now, and the fact that he knows that is the only reason I can remain seated.
“I noticed differences,” he says. “Anybody who says they wouldn’t is lying.
I noticed what she liked, how she touched me, and what felt new.
I wanted the newness. I never thought her body was better than yours, and the sex wasn’t better, but I used that comparison to tell myself it was separate.
I told myself what I had with her was easy and what I had with you mattered, as though calling you important made what I was doing less cruel. ”
My throat aches, and I hate that the question makes me sound smaller than I am. “Was I hard to love?”
“No.” The word comes out too hard. Declan stops, brings the volume down to something a person could sit across from, and starts again.
“You were hard to lie to. You knew me. You saw when I avoided paperwork. You knew when a route worried me, when my father got inside my head, and when I was ashamed. Sasha knew only what I showed her at first. I called that easy. You asked me to be known, and instead of admitting I was afraid you would see something weak and stop respecting me, I went where hiding felt like being admired.”
“I already knew you couldn’t read the way you pretended.
” I lean forward despite the baby pressing beneath my ribs.
I had let myself call his avoidance impatience even while I knew fear sat underneath it, and I built our life around the gap without ever naming it.
“I didn’t know the word for it, but I knew forms took you longer.
I knew you memorized menus before dates and made me read the mail. I loved you anyway.”
“I know that now.” Declan looks at me with the grief of a man who learned the answer after destroying the person who could have given it.
“Then, every time you covered for me, I thought you were one mistake away from understanding how much help I needed. I wanted your respect more than I trusted your love. Sasha found out and made knowing feel like worship. She checked a page and told me nobody else could do what I did. She needed me to be ashamed so I would keep needing her.”
“She used it to steal from the club and endanger every family in those files.” Anger rises before sympathy can make the wrong person smaller. “But she did not make you take off your wedding ring.”