Chapter 2
The key stuck. It always had.
Erin put her shoulder into the door at the top of the stairs and it gave, and then she was standing in her own apartment for the first time with her son awake behind her.
"Whose house is this?"
"Ours," she said.
Wyatt walked in past her legs. He did what five-year-olds do, which is go straight to the middle of a room and turn around once, taking inventory.
"There's a bed in there."
"There's a bed in there for you. It's had your name on it for two years."
He went to look. She heard him get on it and off it and on it again, testing whether it was a real bed or a decoration, which in his life so far had been a fair question.
The apartment was two rooms and a kitchen over a bookstore on Main Street.
She'd bought it with money from the third book.
She had furnished it over four separate trips to Bangor, each of them logged in the ledger as a dentist appointment, and she had never once slept in it.
She used to come up on a Tuesday, sit in the chair by the window for an hour, and drive back.
People do that with a gun in a drawer. She had done it with a two-bedroom.
She got him settled. He was asleep before eight, which told her the morning had cost him more than he'd shown.
Then she sat down at the kitchen table with her phone and made the call she had been holding for five years.
Colleen Hendricks picked up on the second ring. She did not say how are you and she did not say I'm so sorry, and Erin loved her instantly and permanently for it.
"You're out?"
"I'm out. Since six this morning. He doesn't know yet."
"Address?"
Erin gave it. There was a pause with typing in it.
"He'll get the filing Thursday," Colleen said. "Between now and Thursday you say nothing to anyone in that family, including the mother, including the housekeeper, including anyone who calls you crying. If he wants to talk about the boy, he talks to me. Can you do that?"
"Yes."
"Most people say yes and then answer the phone at midnight."
"I'm not going to answer the phone."
Another pause, shorter. Colleen had been doing this a long time and she could hear the difference between a woman saying that and a woman meaning it.
"All right," she said. "I believe you. Now tell me what I'm working with. Start at the top and don't clean it up."
So Erin told her.
The wedding was on a Saturday in late October and it was, by every measure anyone in that world used, perfect.
Two hundred people. A tent with sides that came down when the weather turned, which it did, at four, right on schedule.
Erin wore a dress she had chosen herself out of the dozen that had been sent to the house, and she'd chosen the plainest one, and it photographed better than any of the others, which had annoyed a number of people.
She said the words and meant them.
That was the part she had never been able to explain to Shannon, who had asked, more than once, some version of how could you.
Erin had meant every word. That was the trick of it.
He was not lying at the altar and neither was she.
He said he'd take care of her and he did, in the way he understood the phrase.
She said she'd be his and she was, entirely, for five years, in front of two hundred people and about four hundred more after that.
Nobody had said love. It's not in the standard vows. She had checked.
Wyatt was born in June, at Penobscot Bay, at four in the morning after a night that had gone sideways twice.
There is a part of that Erin has never described to another living person and it is not the pain.
It is the twenty minutes afterward, when the room went quiet and there was a baby on her chest and Graham was sitting on the edge of the bed with his hand flat on the blanket next to her hip, not on her, next to her, and he was crying.
Not politely. Not the way men in that family did anything.
She had thought: there it is.
She had thought: he didn't know either, and now he does, and it's going to be all right.
She lay there with her son and let herself believe it for about a quarter of an hour, and she has never once, in the five years since, been able to be angry with herself for that. She was thirty-one and she had just given birth and the man had been crying. Any woman alive would have believed it.
Then he wiped his face with the back of his wrist and laughed at himself and said, "Okay. Okay. Picture," and held his phone out to her, because he wanted one of the two of them and his hands weren't steady enough.
She took it.
The screen was awake because he'd just used it. The camera was already open. And across the top of it the banner came down, white on gray, in the half second before she could get her thumb anywhere near it.
Blair Does he look like you or like her?
Erin looked at it.
The baby was on her chest. Her arm was under him. The phone was in her other hand and Graham was two feet away with his face still wet, waiting, and there was a nurse at the sink with the water running.
She did not make a sound.
She lifted the phone and framed it and took the picture. It's a good picture. It's in a silver frame in the front hall of the Point house, or it was as of yesterday, and in it Graham is looking at his son like a man who has just found out what he's for.
Then she handed the phone back and said, "You should call your mother."
He went out into the hall to do it.
And Erin lay in a hospital bed with a four-hour-old boy and did the arithmetic for the second time in her life.
Does he look like you or like her.
Not congratulations. Not I'm happy for you. Not even are you okay, which is what a decent ex sends, if a decent ex sends anything.
Or like her.
Which meant Blair Chadwick had known the due date. Which meant somebody had told her the due date, and it wasn't Erin, and there were maybe six people on earth who had it.
Which meant it had never stopped. Not the way Erin had assumed a thing stops when a man marries somebody else.
And here was the part that mattered, the part she would still be turning over five years later at a kitchen table in Rockland: the message had come in while the phone was in Graham's hand. Two feet from her. With the camera open.
He hadn't even flinched.
Not because he was brazen. Because he wasn't watching for it. Because that name had been coming across that screen for so long that it had stopped registering as an event.
That was the whole marriage, right there, in a hospital room, at twenty past four in the morning. Not a woman. A door standing open so long that nobody in the house noticed the draft anymore.
She sent Gail's husband to the hardware store in Camden four days later, for lightbulbs, and asked him to pick her up a ledger while he was there.
First entry, June, written in bed with one hand:
Msg from B.C. rec'd 4:22am, hosp. rm 3. "Does he look like you or like her?" G. did not react. B.C. had the date.
She did not underline anything. She did not add a single adjective. Five years later she would hand Colleen Hendricks four of those books and Colleen would read for forty minutes without speaking and then look up and say, "You wrote these to be read."
"I wrote them to be true."
"Same thing, in my line."
The rest of it Erin gave Colleen in about twenty minutes, flat, in order, the way you'd give a deposition.
The dinners where Blair was seated at the next table over and Erin was the only one at her own who seemed surprised.
The four years running of a Christmas party at Vanessa's where the Chadwicks were on the list and Erin had learned not to ask.
The trips to Boston that became two nights and then three.
The way Graham's phone lived face down on every surface in that house and always had, and how nobody could call that evidence of anything, and how it was the most honest object in the marriage.
And underneath all of it, the thing Colleen kept circling back to.
"He never touched her."
"No."
"You're certain."
"I'm certain."
"How?"
Erin looked at the dark window over the sink. Down on Main Street somebody was putting a delivery through the bookstore's back door.
"Because he'd have told me," she said. "That's not a compliment. He'd have told me because he can't hold anything. He'd have come home and sat me down and been honest and expensive about it, and then it would have been a thing we were working on, and I'd have had something to point at."
"And instead."
"Instead I've got a man who answers her texts inside a minute, four times a year, forever, and never once wrote the word stop.
Try taking that to anybody. Try saying it out loud at a dinner party.
My husband is faithful and I'm leaving." She heard her own voice drop and made herself take it back up. "Everyone will say I'm crazy."
"Some will," Colleen said. "Not me, and not a judge, and after Thursday not him either." Paper moved. "One more. Why now? You've had four years of ledgers. What was different about this week?"
Erin had been waiting for that question, and she found she couldn't answer it the way she'd rehearsed.
"Nothing," she said. "That's what was different. Nothing happened this week."
A man came at two to change the locks. He was there twenty minutes and charged her a hundred and forty dollars and asked no questions at all, which she suspected was most of what the hundred and forty was for.
After he left she sat down and did the rest of it in one pass.
Blocked the house line. Blocked Vanessa.
Blocked the Boston office and the car service and the woman who ran Graham's calendar, who had always been kind to her and who would be given a job to do by Thursday.
She did not block Adelaide. She thought about it for a while and did not do it, and could not have said why.
She did not block Graham.