Chapter 4
Audrey
The first sob catches me three miles past the turnoff, and I clamp my teeth around it before it can become a sound. I glance in the side mirror of Nora’s car, twisting to check the back seat.
Eli's mouth hangs open against the window, a damp spot fogging the glass where his breath hits it. Sophie's chin is dropped to her chest, the seatbelt strap pressed into her cheek the way it always leaves a mark by the time we get home.
They're asleep, both of them. So I'm safe.
Nora has her left hand at the top of the wheel, the fingers of her right drumming lightly against the center console. She doesn't talk, thank god, because I don't think I could handle it right now without breaking.
I turn my face to the window, and the scripture comes up, unbidden.
Cleave unto thy husband, and ye shall be one flesh.
I press my knuckles into my mouth.
Eight months. I can name the date. I sat in a folding chair in the funeral home and watched men I've known since I was a teenager carry the casket my husband was inside. And eight months later, I let a stranger put his hand up my dress in a bathroom that wasn't even mine.
My stomach turns.
The tears come without permission.
His mouth on my throat, the lock turning, the way he laughed when I said please don't, like he was already two steps ahead of me.
I didn't think about Thomas.
I didn't think about Thomas.
A small sound escapes me before I can catch it, the air suddenly harder to breathe. I cough to cover it, hoping Nora won't notice, but she's too far inside her own thoughts. I know I should be asking how it went with Nate—with his mother, his son, his friends—but I'll feel guilty about that later.
Declan slides in next, uninvited. Two years he carried it: a dead wife, an unborn baby, two years of him walking around the world like a person who continued loving the dead. And I am eight months in and let a stranger take me against a door.
The difference between us cracks something inside me.
I drop my chin and the tears come faster, falling into my lap now, dark spots blooming on the cotton of my dress where I can't blink them away anymore. I watch them land.
"He lost someone too." The voice that comes out of me is steady, sounding nothing like the one inside my head.
Nora glances over. "Declan?"
"Mm." I keep my eyes on my lap. "His wife." My throat closes up, and I can't make myself say the rest.
Nora doesn't say anything. The road hums beneath us, and after a moment, her hand leaves the console, crossing the space between us to cover the back of mine, her fingers curling gently around the side of my palm.
Then I see it at the edge of my vision—a small lift at the corner of her mouth, the smile a person tries not to make when she thinks the woman beside her is finally letting it out.
She thinks these are good tears. She thinks I’m crying because I finally talked to someone about Thomas, the way the doctors wanted, the way she's been hoping I would for months.
She is so proud of me.
The thought is unbearable.
I curl my fingers into hers like a child clinging to the only comforting thing in the room.
I don't deserve it.
In the back seat, Sophie shifts in her sleep, her knees bumping the back of my chair. I turn to look at her. Her mouth hangs slightly open, her lashes dark against her cheek, nine years old and already tall for her age.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
I'm not sure my mother ever spoke the seventh commandment out loud in our house. She didn't need to. Boys weren't allowed, dating was forbidden, and she never once had to say don't sleep with anyone before marriage, because in her house it should have been obvious.
The last time I forgot was ten years ago.
I was past curfew, almost two hours late. Thomas had walked me to his car from a bonfire out by the lake, and we'd taken the long way home, parked in the empty church lot, and then—
Well.
I came in through the side door at two in the morning to find my mother already waiting at the kitchen table, lights on, wearing the robe she only put on when something was keeping her awake.
She looked at me, and that was all it took. I couldn't lie. I'd never been able to lie to her.
I don't remember what words I used. I remember her face and the way her hands stayed folded in front of her on the table.
She didn't raise her voice or lift her eyes, didn't pull me into a hug the way she always had when I cried in her kitchen as a girl.
She just listened. She nodded once. Then she told me to go to bed.
She didn't speak to me for six weeks.
She handed me my plate at dinner. She helped unpack the groceries after I carried them in. She thanked the pastor when he spoke of me at church.
But she wouldn't say my name. Wouldn’t look at me directly. Never once asked me how I was. She did all of it in front of my father, who never noticed a thing, the way he never noticed anything that happened in the spaces between the women in his house.
I learned in those six weeks what my mother's love cost.
The morning sickness started at the end of week five. I hid it for a few days, not sure at first what was even happening to me. Then she walked into the bathroom while I was on the floor with my forehead pressed to the cold porcelain.
She stood there for one long moment, and I saw the moment she understood. Then she just walked out, still not saying a word. Not that day, and not the next.
But a week later, on a Saturday afternoon, Thomas came over and asked to speak to my father in the den.
He came out an hour later and got down on one knee in our living room, asking me to marry him with a ring he couldn't possibly have chosen himself.
My mother watched from the kitchen doorway, her arms folded.
She still didn't say a word to me, not until I said yes. Then she crossed the room and laid her hand against my cheek, and for the first time in two months, she called me her sweet girl.
The wedding came together within a week.
My dress was cut loose on purpose, just in case, even though it was still so early.
Thomas's mother fussed over the hem and never once asked why we were rushing, never wondered why her son hadn't mentioned a proposal until the day he announced my acceptance to everyone.
The whole town came. My mother smiled in every photograph.
Sophie shifts again, and I feel her knee pressing into my back through the seat.
She was born seven months after the wedding. Seven pounds, two ounces. A healthy, full term baby, though we never once called her that. We told everyone she'd come two months early, and they cried with relief that she was so big and so well.
Three people on this earth ever knew. My mother. Thomas. Me.
Two of them are dead now.
My mother passed away one month after my father. The doctors called it a cardiac event, but everyone who knew them said she died of a broken heart, and I believed it. They'd been married forty-one years, and she didn't know how to be in the world without him.
She knew how to cleave. She'd clung to my father from the day she married him up until the day he died.
My mother's verdict finds me again.
I look at Sophie in the side mirror, asleep with her mouth open, the daughter that whole lie was built around. The daughter I've spent nine years trying to be worthy of, asleep in the back seat tonight while her mother cries about doing the very same thing all over again.
I bite down on the inside of my cheek until I taste copper.
The house smells like lavender hand soap and the cinnamon thing Nora plugs into the outlet by the front door.
I make it three steps into the entry hall.
Nora is behind me with Eli on her hip, sleep-warm and heavy, his cheek mashed into her shoulder. Sophie trails behind, towel-bag bumping her knee, eyes glassy.
"Audrey."
I turn. She's giving me the look, the one she's been using on me for eight months now. The triage look.
"I've got them," she says. "Go take a shower. Or don't. Just go get in bed."
"Nora, I can—"
"Go."
I don't argue. I climb the stairs in the dark and close my bedroom door behind me.
I don't wash my face or even change. I crawl onto the bed in the dress I've been wearing since this morning, on top of the comforter, and I lie on my side with my knees pulled up.
I hear the sink running, Eli's voice slurry with sleep, Sophie's calmer underneath it, then Nora answering them both. Bare feet pad down the hall. I hear a bedroom door clicking shut, then another.
I close my eyes.
I see him every time.
Not the way I want to. In a way I can't help. The crook of that half-smile when he sat on the stool beside me. The blue-green of his eyes when he caught me watching across the yard. The wet shirt clinging to the shape of him.
The way he said doll face staring at my lips.
I sit up.
"Stop," I whisper into the dark of the bedroom. The word comes out small and stupid.
I reach for my phone, telling myself I'm only going to check the clock, but my thumbs are already moving on their own.
Asher pro baseball Harlow
I stare at the screen for five full seconds before I tap search.
The screen detonates.
Every image at once, a whole grid of them before I've even scrolled. Him in a Falcons uniform, mid-throw. Him in a tuxedo on some red carpet event. Him shirtless on the cover of a magazine I don't recognize.
Asher Calloway.
The name blooms hot beneath my skin.
I've seen that last name before, on the side of a building downtown, on a billboard off the freeway. It's the kind of name that belongs to people who don't exist in my world.
I scroll.
Calloway Spotted at The Quack: Falcons' Favorite Bachelor Closes Down Copperside
Shortstop Doesn't Stop Short: Asher Calloway's Year in the Spotlight
Harlow Heartbreaker: A Look at the League's Most Determined Bachelor
I tap the last one.
League sources have long joked that Calloway's love life moves faster than his glove.
The Falcons' charismatic shortstop has built a parallel reputation as the most determined bachelor in professional baseball.
Calloway, asked in a recent press scrum whether he had any plans to settle down, laughed off the question.
"I'm a one-night-at-a-time kind of guy," he said. "I'm just having fun."
I close the article and scroll faster, the photos starting to blur together. A brunette outside a club. A redhead at a gala. A woman in a slip dress on a hotel sidewalk, his hand spread low on her waist, too close to the way it sat on mine just hours ago.
I scroll back. I scroll forward, checking again.
None of them are the same woman.
Every photograph has a different one. The hand is always in the same place. The look he gives them is the same heated, half-lidded thing. The grin never changes. Only the women rotate.
The pattern snaps into focus.
It is a career.
And I am one of them now.
Not in the photos themselves. The photos don't include me. But in the math of it. In the count. In whatever invisible ledger this man keeps of the women he's had against doors at parties he wasn't even hosting.
My throat burns.
Then I find one I'm not ready for.
He's on a balcony somewhere that looks like a concert, stage lights behind him in gold and pink, some other man's arm slung around his shoulder.
Both of them are laughing. His head is tipped all the way back, mouth open, his tongue out the way men do when they're drunk and being photographed, wanting the whole world to know what a good time they're having.
My breath leaves me.
That tongue.
That is the tongue that was in my mouth. The same tongue that was down my throat and on my earlobe and against the soft place under my jaw, with a lock turned behind us and my dress shoved up around my waist.
I look down at it now.
I twist and tug until the dress comes up over my head, and it takes longer than it should because my hands won't stop shaking. I throw it across the room. Stare at it where it lands.
My hand goes to my mouth before I can stop it, pressing the pads of two fingers to my lower lip, and I can still feel where he bit it. Not hard, not enough to mark. Just enough that hours later, in my own bed, in the dark, the memory of it sits on my mouth like a brand.
Doll face.
The way he held me up against the door like I weighed nothing. The way I made sounds I didn't recognize as mine, and he caught every one of them in his mouth so the people on the other side of the wall wouldn't hear what I was doing in their host's downstairs bathroom.
Heat rolls up the back of my neck.
Not the right kind of heat.
Not the right kind, not the right kind, not the right kind.
I drop the phone face-down on the comforter like it's burned me and press my back hard against the headboard.
The picture of Thomas and the kids is on the dresser, the one from the lake the summer before he died, exactly where I left it. Thomas's wedding ring is in the small ceramic dish next to it. I put it there the night they handed it to me at the hospital, and I haven't moved it since.
I sit with it for a long time.
Eventually, I see the clock on the dresser turn over. Eight fifty-four. Eight fifty-five.
When I speak, it's in my head, and it's the steadiest thing I have said all day.
This was a mistake.
It was one mistake.
One mistake is not who I am.
I drag the phone to the edge of the nightstand, screen down, far enough that I can't reach it without leaning. I lie back down on top of the comforter, still in my swimsuit, and pull a corner of the throw over my legs.
I am Sophie's mother. I am Eli's mother. I am Thomas Sullivan's widow. I am not a woman in one of those photos.
I won't be.
It was one afternoon, one stranger, one bathroom door. I will never see him again, and tomorrow I am going to get up and put on the concealer, make the breakfast, pack the lunches, and do better.
I am going to do better.
The resolve settles into me. Heavy. Certain. Done.
I close my eyes.
In the dark, behind my eyelids, his tongue catches the gold-pink stage light, and his head tips back. My fingers move to my lower lip without asking me first.
I press down where he bit me.
I feel it down to my toes.
I've spent month after month numb to everything that wasn't grief or guilt.
Now every nerve in me feels alive.
And it scares me how addicting that already feels.