Chapter 5 Sleeping Beside a Stranger
Living with Blake after reading those messages is a special kind of torture that I wasn't prepared for.
Every interaction feels contaminated. Every word out of his mouth passes through a filter in my brain that sorts it into true, possibly true, or definitely a lie.
Most of what he says lands in the third category now.
The things that used to feel comfortable between us, the quiet dinners and the lazy mornings and the easy silence of two people who've known each other for years, all of it feels wrong.
I'm sharing a life with someone I no longer recognize and he has no idea that anything has changed.
The mornings are the hardest. Blake wakes up and rolls toward me and puts his arm across my waist and presses his face into my neck.
He's done this for years. It used to be my favorite thing about waking up next to him.
The warmth of his body and the weight of his arm and the way he'd mumble something half-asleep before pulling me closer.
Now his arm feels heavy in a different way.
His breath on my skin makes something inside me recoil and I have to concentrate on not flinching.
I lie still and wait for him to get up and go to the bathroom and then I stare at the ceiling and count the hours until I can leave for work.
He kisses me before he leaves every morning.
A quick kiss on the mouth or the forehead or the cheek.
Then he grabs his keys and his lunch and he's gone.
Those kisses used to mean something. They used to be the last nice thing before a long day at the salon.
Now they feel like routine maintenance on a relationship he's already abandoned.
He's not kissing me because he loves me.
He's kissing me because it's what he's always done and stopping would raise questions he doesn't want to answer.
I wonder sometimes how quickly he switches.
How many minutes after walking out our door does it take before he's texting Hailey?
Does he think about her on the drive to the jobsite?
Does he call her during lunch while the crew eats their sandwiches around a fold-out table?
Does he plan their next meeting while he's framing walls and pouring concrete and building someone else's house while ours remains imaginary?
I don't know the answers. I don't want to know. But my brain asks the questions anyway, over and over, every single day.
At the salon I go through the motions. I'm professional.
My hands are steady and my cuts are clean and my clients leave satisfied.
I can separate the part of me that holds scissors from the part that's falling apart.
Mrs. Gallagher comes in for her regular appointment and talks about her grandson and I nod and smile and give her exactly the cut she wants.
Patty Bowers sits in my chair and tells me about another neighbor's scandal and I listen and make the right sounds at the right times.
A new client named Teresa Walsh comes in for a consultation on a color change and I walk her through options with the kind of patience that takes real effort to maintain but looks effortless from the outside.
I'm good at this. I've always been good at performing normalcy when things underneath are crumbling.
I learned it from years of working in a salon where your personal life doesn't get to show up in your work.
Client after client, appointment after appointment, smile and listen and cut and style and send them home happy.
Nobody pays to sit in your chair and feel your sadness.
But Cheryl notices. She always notices.
She doesn't say anything directly because she's too smart for the frontal approach.
But I catch her watching me between appointments.
She sees the way I zone out when I should be organizing my station.
She sees me check my phone three times in five minutes.
She notices that my smile takes half a second longer to arrive than it used to and that when it does arrive it doesn't quite reach my eyes.
One afternoon during a lull she walks past my station and sets a coffee down next to my mirror. It's from the good place downtown, not from the ancient Mr. Coffee in the break room that produces liquid barely distinguishable from hot brown water.
"What's this for?" I ask.
"You looked like you needed it."
"I'm okay, Cheryl."
"I know you are. That's your coffee anyway. Drink it and stop making that face."
"What face?"
"The face you make when you're pretending everything's fine and you think nobody can tell. You've been making it for about two weeks now."
Two weeks. She's been counting. That's Cheryl. Twenty years of watching women sit in chairs and tell half-truths about their lives has given her a radar for pain that borders on supernatural.
She walks away before I can respond. She doesn't push.
She doesn't ask what's wrong. She just makes sure I know she's paying attention and that whenever I'm ready to talk she'll be there to listen.
It's the most Cheryl thing in the world and it almost breaks me right there at my station with a client coming in fifteen minutes.
At home Blake talks about the future with the same casual optimism he's always had and it makes me want to put my fist through the wall.
He mentions houses he's seen listed online.
He talks about the residential development on the south side and how that would be a good area to live in if they ever build some smaller starter homes there.
He points at his phone screen one evening and shows me a listing for a two-bedroom ranch with a fenced yard about ten minutes from the salon.
"Look at this one," he says. "That kitchen is nice. And the backyard is big enough for a dog."
We've talked about getting a dog. We've talked about it since our first apartment. A golden retriever. Maybe a lab. Something that needs a yard, which means we need a house first, which means we need money in the fund, which means Blake needs to stop spending it on Hailey.
"It's nice," I say. I keep my voice flat and interested and normal.
"I know it's a little out of our range right now but if I pick up some overtime this fall and we stay disciplined we could be looking at places seriously by next spring."
Stay disciplined. He says it without a shred of irony. Stay disciplined while you're blowing money on dinners and bar tabs and motel rooms with the woman you've been sleeping with behind my back.
I nod. I agree that spring would be nice. I tell him the kitchen looks good. And underneath the table I am clenching my fist so hard that I can feel my nails cutting into my palm.
One evening Blake comes home from work and tells me he stayed late to finish a section on the framing job. He looks tired. He acts tired. He sits on the couch and puts his feet up and closes his eyes and says he's exhausted.
"You work too hard," I say. I'm standing in the kitchen and the words taste sour in my mouth.
"Somebody's got to pay the bills," he says.
I check the notebook in my purse later that night after he falls asleep.
This is the third time this month he's claimed to work late.
Two of those three nights he came home clean.
Tonight he came home dirty and tired and smelling like sawdust, which means he probably did work late tonight.
But the pattern is there. Some of the late nights are real.
Some of them aren't. He mixes truth and lies together so casually that I can't always tell which is which without checking.
That's what makes Blake so good at this.
He doesn't lie about everything. He lies about specific things and surrounds those lies with enough truth to make the whole picture look normal.
A real late night here. A fake late night there.
A real night at O'Shea's followed by a fake night at O'Shea's.
He keeps enough honesty in the rotation that doubting him feels unreasonable.
I used to admire how calm Blake was. How steady. How nothing ever seemed to rattle him or make him nervous. Now I understand that what I was admiring was his ability to deceive without stress. He's not calm because he's confident. He's calm because lying doesn't bother him.
The following weekend the friend group gets together at Sierra's apartment.
Everyone shows up within the usual twenty-minute window.
Ronnie and Nathan arrive first because Ronnie treats being on time the way most people treat a personal challenge.
Nathan comes with him because they share a ride most places.
Chase shows up next with a twelve-pack and no explanation for why he always brings exactly twelve beers to every gathering regardless of how many people are coming.
Then Blake and me. Alana texts that she's running late. And then Hailey.
Sierra's apartment is small so we're all crowded into her living room and kitchen area.
Blake leans against the counter with a beer.
I sit on the couch between Sierra and Alana, who showed up while I was in the bathroom.
Nathan is in the corner chair doing his usual thing, which is sitting quietly and observing the room with those dark eyes of his that always seem to be processing something nobody else has noticed yet.
Ronnie tells a story about something that happened at his job and everyone laughs.
Chase argues with Ronnie about whether the story is even true.
Sierra referees. Blake jumps in with his own version of a similar story from the Premiere jobsite.
Nathan contributes exactly one dry comment that lands perfectly and then goes back to his beer.
Then Hailey arrives.