Chapter 3 #2
My hands are vibrating — not shaking anymore, vibrating, like a tuning fork struck against stone — and the first photo comes out blurred.
I delete it. Breathe. Hold the phone with both hands and shoot again.
The package, label facing out. Close-up of the name.
Close-up of the medication. The mortar and pestle, white residue visible in the flash.
Three angles each. I text every photo to my personal email account.
Then I pick up the bottle to carry it back to the study—
The garage door rumbles open.
Every nerve in my body fires at once. The birth control is in my hand. The mortar and pestle is on the counter next to the blender, completely out of position, and Mark is pulling into the garage right now, and I have maybe thirty seconds before that door opens.
I move faster than I’ve ever moved in my life.
The birth control goes back in the bottom drawer — behind the folders, same angle, same depth, I shove the drawer shut and the wood screams against the runners.
I run back to the kitchen, grab the mortar and pestle, wedge it behind the blender against the backsplash.
My hands are so slick with sweat it almost slides out of my grip.
I hear the car engine cut off. A door slam.
I grab the glass of water I was drinking when I got home, and slide onto a stool at the island.
I pick up my phone and open Instagram — something, anything, a screen to stare at — and I command my face to do something that resembles a human expression that is not I just found out my husband has been giving me birth control for three years.
The door from the garage opens.
“Hey, babe.” Mark drops his gym bag by the door. His hair is damp, his face flushed from racquetball. He crosses to me, and I can smell the soap and cedar cologne he puts on after the club showers. He leans down and kisses the top of my head.
Then he pulls back. Looks at me.
“How are you?”
“Fine.” Too fast. Too bright. I take a sip of water to cover it.
His eyes narrow — not suspicious, but the way a husband looks at a wife he’s been reading for nine years. “You sure? You look upset.”
And here is the strangest thing about survival: my brain, which five minutes ago was a screaming animal, becomes perfectly, terrifyingly still.
It reaches for the one truth that always works.
The thing that will explain my red eyes and my rigid shoulders and the wildness he can probably see in my face no matter how hard I try to kill it.
“I got my period,” I say. “Again.”
I watch it happen.
His face does the thing — the concerned frown, the soft eyes, the slight drop of his shoulders — and for the first time in my life, I can see the microsecond before the sympathy arranges itself. A flicker. Like a screen refreshing.
Relief.
“Oh, baby.” He puts his hand on my back. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. I’m just tired of it.”
“I know. I know you are.” He rubs a slow circle between my shoulder blades. “What do you need? You want me to order dinner? Open another bottle?”
“A foot rub would be nice.”
“Done.” He squeezes my shoulder, kisses my temple. “Go get on the couch. I’ll bring you a drink.”
I should say it now. Right now. I found the pills, Mark. I found the mortar and pestle. I know what you’ve been putting in my smoothie. The words are right there, loaded in my throat like a round in a chamber, and all I have to do is open my mouth.
But I still can’t believe it. We’re happy. We’re in love.
Aren’t we?
I look at him closely — this man crossing my kitchen to get me a glass, pulling the bourbon down from the cabinet because he knows which shelf and which brand and how much ginger I like — and the words won’t come.
Because the man I’m looking at loves me.
I know he loves me. I have nine years of evidence that he loves me, and I have one afternoon of evidence that he doesn’t, and my brain cannot make those two things exist at the same time.
Talk to him, something whispers. There might be an explanation you haven’t thought of.
There’s no explanation, something else answers. And you know it.
I walk to the couch. I pull the blanket over my legs. I don’t say a word.
He makes me a bourbon and ginger — my comfort drink, the one he knows I like when I’m sad.
He brings it to the living room and I’m curled under the throw blanket with my feet tucked up, and he sits down and lifts my feet into his lap and presses his thumbs into my arches and it feels so good I almost forgive him.
Almost.
Because his hands — these hands kneading the tension from my feet with practiced tenderness — are the same hands that hid birth control in his desk.
The same hands that tip the pills into the mortar.
The same hands that grind them to powder and scoop it into the blender and press the button and pour me a glass and hand it to me with a kiss and a green heart emoji and a lie so total it has its own architecture.
Are they, though?
I look at his face. He’s concentrating on a knot in my arch, his brow slightly furrowed, his thumb working the tight spot with a patience that seems so genuine it makes my chest crack.
Is this the face of a man who’s been duping his wife?
Is this handsome, attentive man who made my favorite drink and is rubbing my feet and remembered the movie I wanted to see — is he really trying to stop me from having a child?
Why on earth would he do that?
I don’t know. That’s the truth. I don’t know, and until I do — until I can think clearly enough to decide what this evidence means and what to do about it — I can’t confront him. Because if I’m wrong, I blow up my marriage over a lab result and a mortar and pestle. And if I’m right...
If I’m right, I need to be ready. Not crying and shaking and half-drunk on the couch. Ready.
“Want to watch something dumb?” he says. “There’s that new heist movie you wanted to see.”
“Sure.”
He puts it on. Some Ocean’s Eleven knockoff with too many explosions and a plot I couldn’t follow even if I wanted to, which I don’t, because I’m watching my husband.
The way he absently rubs my feet while he watches the screen.
The way he laughs at a joke and glances over to see if I’m laughing too.
The way he looks so normal, so completely and utterly like a man who loves his wife, that for a full ten minutes I almost convince myself I’m wrong.
Maybe the mortar and pestle was a gift we unpacked and I forgot about. Maybe the lab results really were contaminated and Dr. Martin will call tomorrow and say I’m so sorry, we mixed up your sample, you’re fine.
But then why the actual fuck does my husband have birth control pills in his office?
Then he glances at me and says, “You doing okay, baby?” — soft, tender, a man checking on his sad wife — and I see it again. That flicker behind the concern. The thing I never noticed before today because I wasn’t looking for it.
I can’t unsee it now.
He’s kind tonight. Attentive. Present. Tonight he’s here, fully here, and I understand now what my period buys me. My pain is his reassurance. My grief is his green light. Every month I bleed and cry, and every month he exhales and plays the devoted husband because his plan is working.
His tenderness is his relief.
I sit on the couch and drink my bourbon and let him rub my feet and smile when he smiles, and behind my face — behind the performance I am delivering with a skill I didn’t know I possessed — my fury is building. Not the keening kind from the kitchen. Something cold and sharp.
I’m already planning.
Mark falls asleep on the couch around eleven, his hand still on my ankle, the credits rolling. I look at his face — slack, peaceful, the face of a man who doesn’t know I know.
I pick up my phone. Open my contacts. Scroll to a name I haven’t called in years: Gerald Forsythe. Forsythe & Associates. Estate and Family Law.
My family’s attorney. The man who built the trust that funds the life my husband is stealing from me.
Not tonight. In the morning, when the bourbon has cleared and this fury has cooled into something useful.
I’m going to get to the bottom of this.