13. Theo #2
“That night in the car, when you told me what you remembered - the flashlight, his voice - you said perfume. Her perfume, through the broken window.” My throat works.
“Nora, I knew that perfume. She hugged me at your funeral, and it soaked into my coat, and I couldn’t get it out for days.
I told myself it meant nothing. Grief makes people cling.
” I make myself say the rest. “It wasn’t nothing.
She was on that bank. I’ve had the proof hanging in my closet for two years and I didn’t know it was proof. ”
She’s quiet for a long moment. Her fingers spread flat over my heartbeat.
“That’s why you went rigid,” she whispers. “In the car. When I said it.”
“That’s why I went rigid.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“You’d just come back from the dead. I wasn’t going to hand you a coat and say here, smell your murder.” She makes a sound that’s half laugh, half something much worse, and I pull her closer. “I was going to find the rest first. I was going to be sure.”
“Theo.” She props herself up on one elbow, and even in the dark her eyes find mine. “Tell me about the two years.”
“You know about the two years. The grave. The-”
“Not the grave. The living.” Her voice is soft and merciless. “You’re thirty-six and beautiful and half this town has been throwing casseroles and daughters at you since the funeral. Tell me about the two years.”
There it is. I stare at the ceiling.
“There were two,” I admit. “Dates. Attempts. Whatever you want to call them.”
“And?”
“And the first one was lovely. Smart, kind, laughed at everything.” I feel her go tense against me, and God help me, I like it. “That was the problem. She laughed at everything. Wide open, easy, nothing held back.”
I turn my head and look at Nora - at the new face with the old soul staring out of it.
“You laugh like you’re deciding whether the joke deserves it.
There’s a pause. A judgment. A whole trial happens behind your eyes, and then - then you let it out, and it’s worth more because it was withheld.
” I shrug, helpless. “She laughed wrong. I called the waiter over and paid before the entrées came.”
“Theo.”
“The second one laughed right,” I say. “Close, anyway. Close enough that I sat there for an hour feeling like a man cheating on a ghost, and then I went home and stood in my kitchen and understood that I was never going to be finished. That some men get one.” My voice frays.
I let it. “I got one. She married my best friend and drove into a river, and I was going to spend the next fifty years having dinner with her pauses.”
Nora doesn’t say anything. She puts her head down on my chest, right over the heartbeat, and I feel something hot slide across my skin that neither of us mentions.
“Two years,” she says finally, muffled. “I was in a bed forty miles away learning to chew again, and you were paying checks before the entrées came.”
“Worst-run rescue in history,” I agree. “Neither of us knew the other was out there.”
“If you’d found me-” She stops. Starts again. “The face was gone, Theo. Everything was gone. If you’d walked into that hospital room, what would you even have-”
“The pause,” I say. “I’d have told you a joke and watched for the trial.”
She lifts her head. Looks at me for a long, long moment with two years of hospital ceilings in her eyes.
“Tell me a joke,” she whispers.
“A man walks into his own funeral-”
“Too soon.”
“-says, ‘I see the flowers are fake, like the marriage - ’”
And there it is: the pause, the trial, the verdict - and then she laughs, buries it against my shoulder so the main house can’t hear, her whole body shaking with it, and I hold the only sound I’ve ever needed and think: fifty years. I want fifty years of exactly this.
“You know it wasn’t even the laugh that gave you away first,” I murmur into her hair when the shaking stops. “It was the quiet. At the school, when Brielle hit you - you went silent instead of loud. Only one woman I ever knew did that.”
Her husband is a hundred yards away, some last cautious voice reminds me. This is stolen. All of it is stolen.
Then I’m a thief, I tell it, and pull the blanket over us both.
And then, from across the lawn, every light in the main house goes out at once.
We both go still.
Then, mid-scream, the voices stop. Not taper - stop, both at once, like a needle lifted off a record. A minute later Brielle’s bedroom light comes on, then dies. Nothing breaks. Nothing slams.
Two people have just stopped fighting in a house where fighting was the last thing they did together.
“It’s happening,” Nora whispers. “Whatever she told him-”
“She wouldn’t have told him the truth. She can’t. Not without incriminating herself.”
“Then what-”
I hold Nora tighter and watch the dark windows. The house she used to own, gone quiet all at once, like a held breath.
“Let them destroy each other,” I murmur. “That’s not your problem anymore.”
“It’s my daughter’s problem.”
“I know.” I press a kiss to her temple. “We’ll protect her. Together. Whatever happens.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. Then:
“Theo?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you.” The words wobble and she lets them. “For finding me. For believing me. For-”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“I do.” She shifts to look at me, her face barely visible in the darkness. “You’re the first person in two years who’s seen the real me. Not the nanny. Not the dead wife. Just… me.”
“That’s all I’ve ever seen.” I trace the line of her jaw - this face I’m still learning, attached to a soul I’ve loved for a decade. “Even when I thought you were gone. You were never really gone. Not to me.”
She kisses me again, softer this time.
Outside, the house stays dark.
The silence is somehow worse than the screaming ever was.