Chapter 30
THIRTY
LENNON
Knowing August is out there—not even a hundred feet away across the back fence, close enough that if the wind shifted right I might be able to smell his cologne through the open window—is the only thing keeping me sane right now.
Not close enough to touch.
But close enough to feel like there still is another human being out there tethering me to the me that I was during those shining six weeks of freedom.
The migraines have never really gone away since I moved back in. Neither has the nausea, or the bone-deep weakness that makes getting from the bed to the bathroom feel like summiting a mountain.
I know this feeling well. I’ve known it since almost the beginning of my marriage, on and off.
The migraines would flatten me for a week and then let go just as suddenly as they came.
Clearly some innate, stubborn part of my body has always known enough to want to escape Jake, even when the rest of me refused to listen.
This time it isn’t going quiet. The flare-up is screaming and not quitting.
I get maybe an hour a day where I can manage the laptop, prop myself against the headboard, and message August.
It’s the one bright spot carved out of each gray, aching day, and I spend most of that hour convincing him I’m fine so he doesn’t do something we can’t undo.
He asks about carbon monoxide detectors, about symptom timelines, about whether it’s worse in the mornings or after. I think his anxiety turns clinical because clinical is the only shape he knows how to put fear into.
I stop telling him the worst of it after the second week. Not because I don’t trust him. It’s just because I know exactly what he’ll do if I tell him about the shit I feel, and I can’t let him ruin the rest of his life over me. Not after everything that’s already happened.
One morning, I finally drag myself into the shower. I’m back to having to use the little plastic shower chair because my legs won’t hold me standing. When I run the shampoo through my hair, a clump of it comes away in my fingers.
I scream.
My hair has never done that. Migraines don’t do that. Whatever’s wrong with my nervous system, whatever my body and my mind are supposedly doing to each other, it doesn’t explain a fistful of hair coming out in the shower like something out of a horror movie.
And that’s when the thought arrives, fully formed, ugly and enormous, in a voice that doesn’t even sound like mine. What if August is right about something poisoning me?
Could Jake be doing this to me?
I laugh. Actually laugh, sitting there dripping with that chunk of my own hair in a shower chair, because it’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever thought in my life.
Jake. Poisoning me. Yes, he’s cruel. Yes, he’s controlling, and cold, and he’s turned humiliating me into something like a hobby.
But poisoning me? That’s a different category of monster than the one I married.
I know this man. I have known him for nine years, slept beside him for nine years, packed his lunches and memorized his moods and learned every version of his voice there is.
I know him better than his own mother does, and she raised him.
I don’t tell August. He’ll panic, for one. And for two—I still feel insane for thinking it. Like accusing Jake of something that dramatic says more about how far gone I am than it does about him.
So that night, when Jake comes home and sets a plate in front of me, I don’t say anything about the hair. I tie it back so he won’t notice how much thinner it looks, push his precious pot roast around my plate until he leaves the room, and flush the whole thing down the toilet.
I do the same with the glass of tea. And the next morning, after his car finally pulls out of the driveway, I get up, brew my own pot of coffee, and pour his down the sink.
Then I set my phone up underneath the little tiered spice rack in the corner, angled so it can see the whole kitchen. I check the frame twice to make sure it catches the counter, the stove, all of it.
Then the paranoia hits. He bought me this phone himself the week he brought me back home, all smiles about how the old one was practically an antique.
What if it syncs straight to some cloud account he can open from his desk at work? It takes me almost twenty minutes, hands shaking, to find the setting and kill the sync.
Then I set the phone back underneath the rack to hide it, hurry to my room on legs that barely hold me, and am asleep before I even mean to be.
He wakes me that evening with soup. Jake doesn’t cook. I’m fairly sure his mother made it and dropped it off, which is somehow worse, the two of them out there fussing over how to keep me fed like I’m a dying pet.
He sits on the edge of the bed and spoons it into my mouth himself, murmuring there’s a good girl every time I swallow, and I look into the eyes of a man I used to love and think, quite calmly, Are you killing me?
Is that why you brought me back? Because a dead wife humiliates you so much less than one who left you?
The second he’s out of the room, I make it to the toilet and throw all of it up, shaking so hard I end up on the bathroom floor, cheek against the cold tile, too weak to get back up.
This is hell, I lie there thinking. This is what you get for reaching for the sun. How dare I think I’m allowed something as simple as joy with August.
This is what a woman gets for wanting things.
Or God, maybe this karma has been aiming my way from much longer ago than that. Maybe this is the cosmic bill coming due for Harper, the friend I didn’t defend when her world was crashing to pieces. Maybe I couldn’t have stopped it, but I could have stood beside her so she didn’t have to be alone.
Then again, I’m not alone now.
There’s a man not a hundred feet from that window with a heartbeat steady enough to knock this whole house down for me if I let him.
August answers every single time I message him through our Minecraft Realm. Immediately. Like he’s sitting there by the computer. In the dark of that long night, I recall our messages from earlier today, the only lights in the dark abyss of this tunnel.
[AUGUST: what’s wrong]
[LENNON: nothing. head’s too bad to talk today. just needed to hear from you without saying it out loud]
[AUGUST: I’m right here. not going anywhere. doesn’t matter if this takes five more weeks or five more years, I’ll wait as long as you need me to. What I feel for u is not just a five-week feeling. I’ll wait for u
I bawl when I read that. We never talked about our feelings for each other ever since that moment I totally freaked out on him for calling himself my boyfriend. I was such a bitch, and then everything fell apart, and I never got the chance to tell him that I—
[LENNON: you should be at work. you can’t keep doing this to yourself]
[AUGUST: I am at work]
[LENNON: liar]
[AUGUST: go rest. ping me anytime, whatever hour it is. I’ll always answer]
I lie on that floor until morning, and when Jake comes in with eggs the next morning, I don’t smile at him. I don’t look at him at all.
“Lennon. Don’t you want to give your husband a smile before he goes to work? I’ve got a big presentation today. I could use a little support from my wife.”
I stare at the wall.
“It’s about time you started tending to your wifely duties around here.”
A tear runs down my cheek, and I let it. There’s a cardinal on the feeder outside the window, bright fiery red, and I watch it instead of him.
“I’m getting real tired of you just lying around. And tired of cooking for you when you’re the one who’s supposed to be taking care of me.”
He keeps at it until he stands up too fast and knocks the plate of eggs clean off the bed.
“Well, now look what you did.”
He scoops them off the carpet with his bare hand and puts them back onto the plate, like that makes them food again.
“If you’d just eaten when I brought it in— Christ, now you’ve made me late. How’s that gonna look?”
He slams the door on his way out.
I flush the eggs, carpet lint and all, down the toilet, and look at the footage the second his car clears the driveway.
Nothing.
Just Jake fixing a plate like any other morning.
My shoulders sag with something that feels like disappointment, which is a genuinely deranged thing to feel disappointed about.
Did I really want my husband to be poisoning me? What the hell is wrong with me? The sad truth is that the alternative might be that I’m simply losing my mind on top of everything else my body is already doing to me.
Still, I keep it up for eight days. I dump everything he makes and eat in secret after he leaves. I check the footage every single morning like a woman checking lottery numbers she already knows haven’t hit.
Seven mornings of nothing. Each morning I feel more unhinged than the last, wondering if the migraines really are just migraines and grief and stress doing what grief and stress do to a body.
And I’ve built an entire fantasy out of some deep, ugly need to make Jake into a villain dramatic enough to justify how much I’ve already given up to leave him. No, that’s not true. I know he’s not a good man. For what he did to August alone. Everything just feels all twisted up in my head.
This morning is day eight.
My feet drag the whole way to the kitchen. I already know what I’m going to find because I’ve known it seven mornings running. Nothing. A tired woman filming her own empty kitchen, hoping for a monster and finding only a man making coffee.
I pick up the phone. I scrub through the footage on autopilot, barely watching, already composing the message I’ll send August about how I think I need to see an actual neurologist. Maybe this really is just my body falling apart the way it’s threatened to for years—
And then I gasp when I see him.
Jake, at the counter, glancing once toward the hallway to make sure it’s empty.
Jake, reaching into his jacket pocket.
Jake, tipping something fine and silvery out of a small paper fold into the fresh coffee grounds, stirring it in with two fingers before he sets the tin back exactly where it always sits and starts the pot like it’s any other Tuesday.
The phone slips out of my hand and hits the carpet, the screen still playing, and I sit there on the edge of the bed with my thinned hair and my shaking hands and understand, all at once, with horror too large to fit inside my chest, that I have been right about my husband exactly one time in nine years.
He really is that kind of monster.