8. Theo
— ? —
Theo
I know something is wrong before I see it.
There’s a crowd outside the elementary school: parents, teachers, several cars that haven’t moved from the pickup line in too long. The kind of cluster that forms around disaster, everyone pretending they’re not watching while watching.
I’m here to pick up Lily. Adrian asked - stuck out of town until evening and Brielle is at some appointment, the nanny called into a meeting with Lily’s teacher - and I said yes because I’ve never been able to say no where that child is concerned.
I park and walk toward the school, and that’s when I see it.
Brielle.
Her hand drawn back.
The crack of palm meeting cheek echoes across the parking lot like a gunshot.
Eve, the nanny, Nora, whoever she really is, takes the slap without flinching. Her head turns with the force of it, but she doesn’t step back. Doesn’t make a sound. Just stands there, one hand pressed to her reddening cheek, her eyes fixed on Brielle with an expression I can’t read.
“How dare you.” Brielle’s voice carries. She’s not trying to be quiet; she’s making a scene and she knows it. “How dare you presume to-”
“Mrs. Walker.” Eve’s voice is quiet. Calm. Terrifyingly calm. “Perhaps we should discuss this somewhere more private.”
“Private? You want private? After what you’ve been doing-”
I’m moving before I decide to. Crossing the parking lot in long strides, positioning myself between the two women before Brielle can draw her hand back again.
“What the hell is going on?”
“Theo.” Brielle’s face flickers: surprise, calculation, recovery. “This doesn’t concern you.”
“You just hit someone in front of the entire pickup line. I’d say it concerns whoever happens to be standing here.”
“She-” Brielle’s voice climbs and snaps at the top.
“The school called me out of my appointment. Called me, to discuss concerns about Lily’s home life.
Because she sat in that meeting and undermined me.
Told the teacher I’m not giving Lily enough, enough emotional support, like she has any right to-”
“I offered an observation,” Eve says quietly. “Mrs. Morrison asked why Lily has been having nightmares. I told her what I’ve seen.”
“What you’ve seen?” Brielle laughs, high and sharp. “You’ve been here six weeks. You don’t know anything about this family. You don’t know anything about-”
“I know she calls out for her mother in her sleep.” Eve’s voice hasn’t risen, but somehow it cuts right through Brielle’s hysteria. “I know she’s five years old and already learned that her feelings need to be small, quiet, and invisible. I know these things because I pay attention.”
Brielle goes white.
“Get in my car,” I tell Eve. “Now.”
“I can-”
“Now.”
She looks at me for a long moment, something flickering in her eyes that might be surprise or might be recognition. Then she nods, turns on her heel, and walks toward my car.
Brielle grabs my arm. “Theo, you need to understand-”
“I understand that you assaulted your employee in a school parking lot.” I pull my arm free.
“I understand that whatever issues you have with the nanny, this isn’t how adults handle them.
And I understand that Lily is probably inside watching through a window, learning exactly what kind of woman her stepmother is. ”
“That’s not-”
“I’m taking Eve home. You should go pick up your stepdaughter.”
I walk away before she can say anything else.
***
The car is too quiet.
Eve is in the passenger seat, her hand still pressed to her cheek, her eyes fixed on something in the middle distance. The red mark is already darkening toward purple. It’s going to bruise.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“That wasn’t fine. That was assault.”
“It’s not the worst thing she’s done to me.”
I don’t miss the implication.
I pull out of the parking lot and drive without direction, my knuckles white on the wheel, my mind racing through everything I’ve noticed in the past six weeks.
The laugh. The chin. The pause before she smiles. The way she holds her glass. The way she argued with Brielle, standing her ground, never raising her voice, never backing down.
Only one woman in my life ever went silent like that instead of loud.
“I need to ask you something,” I say.
“Then ask.”
“I stood at a funeral two years ago.” My voice holds. I don’t know who’s holding it. “The casket was empty, because they never found her… her body. They said the river took her.”
“Theo-”
“They never found proof. That’s the part nobody talks about. A wrecked car. A search they called off when the weather turned. A whole town deciding it was over because that was fucking easier than wondering.”
She doesn’t respond. Her hands are folded in her lap, perfectly still.
Too still. Nobody’s hands are that still.
“Two years.” I watch the road instead of her, because if I look at her I’ll lose the thread. “Two years of telling myself that dead is dead and having hope is cruel.”
“You should slow down.”
“She was my friend.” It comes out rough. “Before she was anyone’s wife. Before any of it. We grew up together. She’s the person I grew up with, and I lost her twice. Did you know that? Twice. Once at my own birthday party, when I introduced her to the wrong man. And once to the water.”
“Theo. Slow down.”
“I got to grieve the second one in public. Casseroles. Sympathy cards. Everyone patting my arm at the funeral of my friend.” The word tastes like the lie it always was.
“The first one I never got to grieve at all. There’s no card for that.
Nobody brings a casserole for I loved her and I handed her to somebody else myself. ”
The wipers drag across the glass. Once. Twice.
“And then you walked into that house,” I say. “And you laughed.”
Her breath changes. Barely. Enough.
“One laugh, and it destroyed two years of certainty. Brought it down like a wall.”
“Theo-”
“I’m not finished.” My throat closes and I push through it anyway.
“I know how I sound. Believe me. I’ve been listening to myself for six weeks and I know exactly how I sound.
But I loved her. God, I loved her, and I never said it, not once, and I stood at her grave and I couldn’t say goodbye. Do you know why?”
Silence. Rain starting against the windshield, soft, then not.
“Because something in me knew.” I finally look at her. “Something in me has always known.”
She’s staring straight ahead like the street has answers.
“You’re her,” I say. “Aren’t you?”
“No.” A beat too fast. “I’m sorry, Theo. I’m not her.”
Too fast. Too practiced. A word she’s had loaded for two years.
“Then prove I’m wrong.”
“How?”
She’s two feet away and I want to touch her so badly my hands ache on the wheel. If I’m wrong, I’m a man cornering his friend’s nanny in a parked car. If I’m right, I’m about to put my hands on my best friend’s wife. There is no version of this where I’m decent.
I stopped caring three exits ago.
“Push up your sleeve.”
Her whole body goes still.
“What?”
“She had a birthmark, on her inner forearm. Like little islands.” My voice frays on it.
“Her husband kissed it every morning. She told me that once, laughing, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. Every morning, at their kitchen counter. And I smiled and said how sweet, and went home and hated myself for wishing I was him.”
“That doesn’t-”
“Push up your sleeve.”
Her hand moves toward her cuff.
Stops.
“You’re not making sense.” Softer and careful. The voice you use on a man standing too close to an edge. “Grief does strange things to people, Theo. You miss her. You’re seeing what you want to-”
“I’m seeing you.” Louder than I mean it to be. I don’t take it back. “Six weeks. The way you move. The way you argue with your chin up. The way you looked at that little girl like your heart was coming apart every time she called another woman Mom.”
She’s shaking. A fine tremor, running all the way through her.
“I don’t know what you-”
“Two years ago, a woman I loved drove off a bridge because her husband broke her heart.” Slow. Every word out in the open where none of them can hide. “They said she drowned. They said the current took her body. There was no body, Eve. There was never a body.”
“People disappear.”
“And sometimes they come back.”
I pull the car over. A residential street somewhere, rain streaking the windows, the whole world gone to watercolor. I kill the engine, and the quiet lands on both of us at once.
“Sometimes they come back with new faces and new names. They take jobs in houses they used to own. They watch their own children call another woman Mommy, and they don’t scream, and I can’t even imagine what that costs. And they wait.”
“Wait for what?” Barely a whisper.
“I don’t know.” I turn to face her. “That’s what I’m asking. What are you waiting for?”
A car passes. Headlights sweep her face, one second, less, long enough to catch the tears she’s trying to hide.
“Push up your sleeve.” A plea now. There’s nothing left in me to demand with. “If I’m wrong, show me, and I’ll drive you home and we never speak of this again. I’ll just be the grieving idiot who lost his mind in a parked car. You can tell anyone you want.”
Nothing.
“But if I’m right…”
Rain drums the roof. Her hand moves to her cuff.
And stops.