Chapter 8
The rain did not let up. It settled into a persistent, heavy drone against the flat roof of the house, blurring the edges of the pine trees until the property felt like a submarine submerged in gray water.
By eleven o'clock, the breakfast dishes were cleared and Tucker had retreated to his study to take a conference call with a junior partner in Tokyo. The heavy oak door clicked shut, severing the low murmur of his voice from the rest of the house.
Felicity remained in the living room, a feather duster idle in her hand as she moved aimlessly between the side tables.
She wasn't actually cleaning; Karen had left the surfaces immaculate on Thursday.
She simply needed a physical task to anchor herself, a repetitive motion to keep her mind from drifting back upstairs to the zipper pocket of her cosmetic bag where the folded receipt was hiding.
Brianne was sitting on the charcoal linen sofa, her long legs tucked beneath her, casually flipping through a heavy architectural digest she had pulled from the coffee table.
She had changed out of her damp running gear into a pair of cream cashmere loungewear that somehow looked more elegant than most people's evening attire.
"I still can't get over the sightlines in this room," Brianne murmured, her eyes lifting from the magazine to trace the sharp, clean angle of the ceiling. "Tucker always said he wanted a house that felt like a gallery. He definitely got it."
"It has its moments," Felicity said, her voice perfectly even as she ran the soft feathers over the base of a ceramic lamp. "Especially in the autumn. The light changes completely."
"He worries about you out here, you know," Brianne said.
The statement was dropped so casually that it took Felicity a full second to register the weight of it.
She paused, the duster hovering over the walnut wood. She looked over her shoulder. Brianne was still looking at the ceiling, her profile a serene, untroubled cameo against the gray light of the window.
"Tucker worries about me?" Felicity asked, her pulse giving a single, hard thump against her ribs.
"Just a little," Brianne said, finally turning her head, her blue eyes settling on Felicity with a look of warm, unvarnished sympathy.
She closed the magazine and set it down.
"He mentioned on the train last week that you’ve been feeling a bit isolated.
And then last night, with the branches...
he just wants to make sure you're happy, Lissy.
He feels guilty that his hours keep him in the city so much. "
Felicity turned around completely, her fingers tightening around the plastic handle of the duster.
She forced the corners of her mouth upward into a polite, dismissive curve.
"I'm perfectly happy. I appreciate the concern, really, but Tucker tends to overstate things when he’s feeling guilty about his own schedule. I’m just adjusting to the quiet. "
"Of course you are," Brianne agreed softly, standing up from the sofa. She walked slowly across the wide expanse of the concrete floor, her cashmere socks completely silent, until she stopped in front of the massive, built-in bookcase that dominated the far wall.
The lowest shelf. The row of oversized art monographs. The Inconvenient Wife was wedged right behind the spine of a massive volume on Bauhaus architecture, entirely invisible from the front.
Brianne reached out, her pale index finger tracing the gold lettering on the spine of a biography of Churchill. "He also said you’ve been reading a lot of dark fiction lately. Thrillers. Domestic suspense. He thinks it might be feeding into your anxiety."
A cold, sharp wave of nausea rolled through Felicity's stomach.
Tucker had taken her private, humiliating moment of fear—the moment she had stood in the kitchen with the book, terrified by the specific echoes of their marriage—and he had packaged it into an anecdote for his childhood friend.
"He told you that?" Felicity asked, keeping her voice incredibly small, incredibly controlled, though the air in the room suddenly felt entirely devoid of oxygen.
"Just in passing," Brianne said gently. She pulled her finger away from the books and turned to face Felicity, her expression radiating nothing but sisterly concern. She closed the distance between them, reaching out to rest a warm hand on Felicity’s forearm.
"Lissy, look at me. You don't have to put on a brave face. It is incredibly hard to uproot your life and move to the middle of nowhere for your husband's career. It’s normal to feel unmoored. It’s normal to let your imagination run away with you when you're staring at the woods all day. "
It was the perfect execution of empathy. It was exactly what a supportive, emotionally intelligent friend was supposed to say.
But as Felicity looked into Brianne’s clear blue eyes, she felt a surge of irritation.
"I’m not letting my imagination run away with me," Felicity said, her voice dropping into a quiet, vibrating register. She didn't pull her arm away from Brianne’s touch, though every muscle in her body wanted to recoil. "It’s just a book I’m reading, Brianne.
Of course the book is unsettling, it’s a thriller. Tucker is overreacting."
"He loves you," Brianne murmured, giving Felicity’s arm a final, reassuring squeeze before stepping back. "He’s just a fixer. He sees a problem—his wife looking tired, his wife jumping at shadows—and he wants to litigate it until it goes away. You just have to tell him what you need."
"I will," Felicity said, offering a tight, closed-mouth smile. "I'll talk to him."
"Good." Brianne beamed, the heavy, concerned atmosphere instantly evaporating from her shoulders, replaced by her usual, effortless brightness. "Now, I promised Tucker I’d look at the caterer’s updated menu for the gala before I head back to the city. Where did he leave the ipad?"
"On the kitchen island," Felicity said.
"You're a lifesaver," Brianne said, turning and walking back through the archway, her cashmere loungewear swishing softly around her ankles.
Felicity remained standing in front of the bookcase. She waited until she heard the distinct tap of Brianne’s manicured fingers against the glass screen of the tablet in the next room.
Slowly, she crouched down. She reached behind the heavy, glossy spine of the Bauhaus book and pulled The Inconvenient Wife out from the shadows. The matte black cover felt slick and cold against her palm.
She opened the book to chapter five.
She didn't want to read it. Every self-preserving mechanism in her brain told her to throw the paperback into the fireplace and strike a match.
But the isolation Brianne had just so perfectly articulated had done its work.
Tucker wasn't a safe harbor; he was a reporter, carrying her fears out of the house and laying them on the table for dissection.
She dropped her eyes to the page.
The fictional protagonist, Fiona, was in her living room, arguing with her husband about a female colleague he spent too much time with. The husband was standing by a window, dismissing her concerns with a patronizing sigh.
Fiona looked at him, the text read, and realized for the first time that the danger wasn't that he was lying to her. The danger was that he genuinely believed she was losing her mind, and he was already beginning to prepare the audience for her collapse.
Felicity squeezed her eyes shut. The prose was no longer just an echo of her habits; it was an echo of her present reality.
She slipped the book back behind the art monographs, sliding it deep into the dark space against the wall.
She stood up, smoothing the front of her trousers, and took a long, stabilizing breath of the damp indoor air.
She would not jump at shadows. She would smile, she would play the perfect host, and the moment Brianne boarded the train back to the city, she was going to tear Tucker's home office apart until she found out exactly what he had purchased on Tuesday morning.