Her Silent Marriage (Lies We Live By #1)

CHAPTER 1

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One of the pills in Tuesday's compartment is blue. Yesterday all four were white — small, chalky, stamped with a line down the middle. I hold the organizer up to the window. Still blue. The light doesn't change what's in my hand.

I sit down on the rim of the bath and tip all seven compartments out onto the shelf.

Twenty-eight tablets. I sort them the way I'd sort bolts on a site table. Size first, then color, then anything that doesn't belong.

Twenty-one white. Seven blue.

I balance one of each on my fingertips, white on the left, blue on the right, and hold both still. The blue one wins. It isn't by much, but it's by enough.

One blue in every compartment. Front left, every time, seven days running. Nobody drops a tablet in that neatly. Somebody set them there.

It's cold in here. It's cold in here every morning at seven, and the panel by the door has said 68 for six years without once being talked out of it. The scar on my left forearm aches along its whole length, which is what it does under sixty-five degrees. I've stopped bringing it up.

The lid hinges on the left. I shut it and it squeaks — that flat plastic complaint, one note, always the same note. My thumb doesn't push the way it used to. Ninety days ago I could hold a torque wrench all afternoon and still sign my name.

I take one of the blue ones and break it under my thumbnail.

Chalk. And underneath the chalk, something faintly sweet. A new eraser, first day of school, that smell.

The white ones smell of nothing. I've been swallowing them since the middle of June, four a morning with water, and I would know.

“AURA, are you listening this morning?”

“Good morning, Evelyn.” Warm, unhurried, pleased to hear from me. She always sounds pleased. “You're up early.”

“My tablets have changed color.”

“Your prescription hasn't changed since the eleventh of June, Evelyn. Shall I read you the label?”

“Read me the label, then.”

She reads it. Drug name, strength, four tablets each morning with food, the pharmacy's number, the doctor's name at the bottom. I turn the bottle on the shelf so the printing faces the window and follow along with my finger while she talks.

She's perfect. She's word for word.

The bottle matches. The pills don't.

On a site, when the drawing and the thing in front of you disagree, you don't argue with the drawing. Drawings have never been wrong in their lives. You put the drawing down and go and measure the thing.

So I measure. Seven blue. Front left. Every day of the coming week, including the ones that haven't happened yet.

“AURA, who filled my organizer?”

“I don't have access to that, Evelyn.” A small pause, warm as a hand on your back. “Would you like me to remind you at eight, as usual?”

“No, thank you. I'd rather keep track of the time myself today.”

“All right.”

I put the whites back three to a box and the blues back one to a box, because if I'm wrong I'd rather not have to explain a mess.

Tuesday's four go into my palm. The organizer goes back on the shelf, lid down, squeak, and I stand there a second longer than I need to with my hand flat on the cold marble.

Then I go downstairs to find out.

Nora's in the kitchen, wiping the counter by the sink.

The counter's clean. It was clean yesterday too, when I watched her do it. She works the cloth in the same slow oval anyway, right to left, right to left, iron-gray plait swinging a little with it.

“Morning, Nora. Did you sleep all right?” I say.

“Mrs. Vance. There's a kettle just boiled, if you want it.”

Eleven years she's kept this house. Six of them mine. She knows where the spare fuses live and which door swells in the heat and she's never once let me carry anything heavier than a bowl.

I set the four tablets on the island where she can see them. Three white, one blue, lined up.

“Nora — did anyone change my tablets?”

The cloth doesn't stop. Right to left. Right to left.

“I don't touch your medicine, Mrs. Vance.”

Six years she's called me that. It's a warm thing usually, the way she says it, half a joke about the size of the house. It has never once sounded like a wall.

“I'm not saying you did. I'm asking if you saw.”

“I don't touch your medicine.”

She lifts the cloth, folds it in half, wipes the same clean stretch again.

She said it twice, and both times she said it in exactly the same words. People don't do that with the truth. The truth comes out a bit different each time, because you're fetching it fresh out of the room where it happened. It's the decided-on sentence that comes out identical.

That's when the terrace door opens and my husband comes in from his run.

Julian's in gray, and there isn't a mark on him.

Forty-one years old, six feet of him, silver-blond hair still lying the way it lay when he left.

He's done four miles up Fernhollow and back and he isn't out of breath.

He's never out of breath. His shoes leave two damp crescents on the slate, and I watch them shrink while he crosses the room, and by the time he reaches the sink they're gone.

“You're down early. I had a whole speech ready about waking you gently, and now it's wasted,” he says.

“I couldn't sleep. I was up before the birds were, honestly.”

“You should tell me when you can't sleep.” He runs the tap, drinks a glass of water straight off, sets it upside down on the drainer. Then he sees the tablets on the island. “What's this, then? You've laid them out like evidence.”

“One of them's blue.”

“Ah. Well, so it is. Let's have a proper look at the thing.”

He picks it up. Two fingers, careful, the way you'd lift a splinter out of a rug — not touching my palm, exactly, but close enough that I feel the cold come off his hand.

He holds the tablet up to the window, and I have a strange few seconds of watching a man do my own gesture back at me, better lit.

He puts it back in my palm.

“That's the same one you had on Sunday, darling. You're confusing your days again.”

The blue tablet sits there. It is not the same one I had on Sunday. On Sunday I sat on that stool and took four white ones and read the back of the fruit bowl label because there was nothing else to read.

“Am I.”

“Aldred said this would happen.” He says it gently.

That's the thing about Julian — nothing arrives as an argument.

It arrives as a kindness, already opened for you.

“The fog comes and goes for months, he said, and it's worst first thing, and you're not to let it frighten you.

He was very clear. He said the mornings would be the hardest part and then one day they wouldn't be.”

“He said that. I don't remember him saying any of that.”

“At the follow-up, in the little room with the harbour print. You were there.” A pause exactly long enough to be generous. “Sweetheart, you were sitting right beside me and you asked him about driving.”

And here's what I'd like on the record: for about two seconds, I nearly agree with him.

It isn't because he's persuasive. It's because he's calm, and I'm not, and calm is the loudest thing in any room where somebody's hands aren't steady.

Because a woman with nineteen days missing out of her own head is a poor witness and knows it.

Because he has never yelled at me in six years, and it is very hard to be afraid of a man who has never yelled at you.

So I don't argue.

I fill a glass at the tap, put all four tablets on my tongue at once, and swallow them in front of him. Then I set the empty glass down on the island where he can see it, dead center, like a signature.

“There,” I say.

Something moves across his face and then doesn't. “Good. That's all I wanted, honestly. I can't stand watching you fight your own medicine — Aldred says that's half the battle.”

He takes an apple out of the bowl. My ring turns loose on my finger when I let go of the glass — it's been a size too big since the hospital, and it swings round so the flat of the band sits under my knuckle, and I turn it back with my thumb without looking. Ninety days of doing that.

While he eats the apple I start counting the room.

Eleven steps from the island to the terrace door. Two windows on the south wall, both fixed, no openers. Four doors: terrace, hall, pantry, and the one to the utility corridor that Nora's just gone through without saying goodbye to either of us.

Six years in this house. Ninety days since the road.

Six weeks, he says. Every morning, six weeks.

I've never lined those two numbers up before. I line them up now, standing at my own kitchen island with my mouth still tasting of chalk and new eraser, and they don't sit flush. They don't come anywhere near it. There's a gap in them you could put a hand through.

Julian sets the apple core in the compost drawer and closes it with his hip.

“I'm in the west wing till lunch,” he says. “Halcyon call, then the accountants, then I'm yours. Don't let me forget the Ferris woman wants something about the drive.”

“All right. I'll remind you about the Ferris woman at lunch.”

He stops at the hall door. Comes back three steps, which he does when he's remembered to be kind, and puts his hand briefly on the counter beside mine — not on mine, beside it.

“It's Tuesday the ninth,” he says. “And you're all right, you know. You're doing far better than you think you are.”

He hands it to me like a rail. Here, hold this, you'll be steadier.

“Thank you. I'll hold on to that one,” I say, because that's the shape the sentence has to be.

Then he's gone, and the house is doing its quiet thing, and I'm alone in a kitchen with a clean counter and an upside-down glass on the drainer.

The pharmacy leaflet. That's what I want. The folded paper that comes inside the box, the one with the picture of the tablet on it, because if there's a picture then there's a color and a color is a fact you can hold up next to another fact.

Everything paper in this house lives in one drawer, under the coffee machine.

It sticks. It's always stuck; the runner's out of true by a couple of millimetres and I've meant to shim it for four years. I lift and pull and it comes.

“Sorry. I keep meaning to fix you,” I tell it.

Warranty cards. The manual for the oven, the manual for the wine fridge, a folder of glossy pages about the heat pump. A takeaway menu from town that somebody has kept for eleven years by accident.

No leaflet.

Then, under all of it, stapled at the corner, four pages printed small.

Calder Ridge Regional Medical Center. Discharge summary.

My name at the top with my date of birth beside it, which is correct, and my address, which is correct, and a line of numbers I don't understand, and then two dates.

Admitted. Discharged.

I read the admission date. Then I read it again.

Nineteen days between them. That part I know. Nineteen days is the number everybody uses; it's the number on the card the neighbours sent.

It's the first date that's wrong.

It isn't wrong, exactly. It's just further away than it's supposed to be.

I stand very still with the paper in both hands and count it out the way I'd count a load path, one member at a time, no skipping.

From the admission date to today. That's the whole span.

Ninety days.

Nineteen of them in a bed with a window that looked at a car park. Seventy-one of them here.

Ninety.

Six weeks is forty-two.

I count it three times, because an error that size is usually your own. Once on my fingers. Once on the calendar in my head, month by month. Once out loud at the drawer, because saying a number out loud is the only way I've ever caught myself in one.

Ninety. Ninety. Ninety.

And every morning since I came home — at this island, with the machine going, while I ate half a piece of toast because he liked to see me eat it — my husband has said six weeks. Six weeks and you're already reading again. Give it another six weeks, Evelyn.

Seventy-one mornings.

He never once stumbled on it. He never once glanced up and left the way people do when they're building a number instead of remembering one. He said six weeks the way you say your own address.

It isn't the pills.

The pills are a lid squeaking on a hinge, and somebody's hand in a plastic box, and that's small, and small things have small explanations. A pharmacy changes suppliers. I could live with the blue.

But a man does not misplace half of his wife's year by accident, out loud, at breakfast, seventy-one days running.

I want it. That's the honest part. I want to fold it into four and slide it up my sleeve and walk out of this kitchen with the only true thing in the house pressed against my arm.

But a paper that goes missing is a question, and somebody comes looking for the answer, and I'm not ready to be asked anything yet.

I put the discharge summary back where I found it, face down, under the heat pump folder, in the same order. My hands do it neatly. My hands are being very good.

There's a ballpoint at the front of the drawer with the town pharmacy's name down the barrel.

I write it on the back of my left hand in ballpoint. 90. Then, underneath it, 6.

Then I pull my sleeve down over both of them, because I can hear him coming back.