3. Audrey
— ? —
Audrey
Ruth hugs me too long at the door of her yellow house on Maple Street, holding on like she can feel the fractures I’m trying to hide.
“You sure you don’t want to come in for tea?” Her hands are on my shoulders now, her eyes doing that searching thing mothers-in-law do when they know something’s wrong but are too polite to say it. “You look tired, sweetheart. More than tired.”
“I’m fine, really.” The words come out automatic now. I’ve said them so many times this week they’ve lost all meaning. “Just need a quiet night.”
“Rowan’s not-” She stops herself, recalibrates. “Never mind. None of my business.”
She knows something’s wrong. Of course she does. Ruth knows everything.
“Lily’s excited about the sleepover,” I say, changing the subject. “She’s been talking about your snickerdoodles all week.”
“We’re going to make them together this time. She wants to crack the eggs herself.” Ruth smiles, but there’s still worry in her eyes. “She can stay as long as you need. Tomorrow too, if that helps.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
She hugs me again - too long, too tight - and then Lily appears in the doorway like a small, enthusiastic tornado.
“Grandma said I get to use the big mixer! The one that goes really fast!”
“Be careful with it,” I say, crouching down to her level. “That mixer is older than Mommy.”
“Everything is older than you.” She wraps her arms around my neck, squeezing hard. “You’re coming back tomorrow, right?”
“First thing in the morning.”
“Promise?”
“Cross my heart.”
She pulls back, satisfied, and runs into the house shouting something about chocolate chips. Ruth gives me one last look - gentle, knowing, a little too close to the truth - and then the door closes, and I’m standing alone on the porch of this yellow house where Rowan grew up.
I drive home with the windows down even though it’s cold, October in Maine, the kind of cold that bites. The leaves are blood-red and dying on every tree, carpeting the roads in crimson and gold. Everything is beautiful and everything is ending.
This is the test. If he comes home, if he sees me, if he still wants me - maybe I imagined everything. Maybe I’m paranoid. Maybe there’s an explanation I haven’t thought of, something that makes M with a heart emoji totally innocent.
I don’t believe myself. But I have to try.
The cottage is quiet when I get home. Too quiet, with Lily gone.
I start in the bathroom, digging through the cabinet until I find the candles - vanilla, eucalyptus, the fancy soy ones my sister gave us last Christmas that we’ve never lit.
I carry them to the bedroom in armfuls, arranging them on every surface.
The dresser. The windowsill. The nightstands on both sides of the bed.
Seventeen candles. I count them twice.
Then I dig through my dresser, pushing past sensible cotton and faded pajama sets until I find it: the black lace set I bought for our anniversary in August. Fifty-two dollars at that boutique downtown, more than I’d usually spend on underwear.
I’d imagined candlelight and wine and his hands peeling it off me.
He fell asleep on the couch that night. I found him at eleven, snoring in front of some documentary about arctic explorers, and I’d taken off the lace and put it in the drawer and never mentioned it.
Tonight will be different. Tonight I’ll make it impossible for him not to see me.
I light all seventeen candles. I put on the lingerie. I sit on the edge of our bed.
I wait.
Six o’clock comes and goes.
He said he’d be home by six. He texted me at four - Leaving the site early, see you soon - and I’d checked the time obsessively, counting down the hours.
Six-fifteen. The candles flicker, casting shadows on the walls. The lace feels ridiculous now, goosebumps rising on my exposed skin.
Six-thirty. I adjust my position, crossing and uncrossing my legs. Sit up straighter. Arrange my hair over one shoulder.
Six-forty-five. I’m shivering. The candles don’t generate enough heat, not for October, not for sitting nearly naked in a drafty old cottage.
Maybe he got stuck in traffic. Maybe there was an emergency at the site. Maybe-
At seven-fifteen, I hear his truck in the driveway.
My heart slams against my ribs so hard I taste copper. I smooth my hair one more time. Straighten my spine. Try to look like a woman who’s confident in her own skin, not a desperate wife staging a pathetic seduction.
The front door opens. Closes. Keys hit the bowl in the hallway.
“Audrey?” he calls out. “You home?”
I don’t answer. I want him to find me.
His footsteps in the hallway. Getting closer. I can hear the creak of the floorboards, the rhythm of his walk that I know better than my own heartbeat.
He’s on the phone.
“No, yeah, I can talk,” he says, and his voice has that warmth, that ease, that tone I haven’t heard directed at me in months. “Just got home. What’s up?”
He walks right past the bedroom door.
Doesn’t look in. Doesn’t see the candles, the lace, his wife sitting in the dark waiting to be chosen.
I’m right here. I’m right here. Look at me.
I hear his footsteps continue down the hall to the living room. The creak of the couch as he sits. His voice, low and laughing, carrying through the thin walls.
“That’s hilarious,” he says. A real laugh, the good one, the one that comes from his chest. “No, she said that? Seriously?”
He’s talking to her. I’m sitting in seventeen candles’ worth of soft light wearing fifty-two dollars’ worth of black lace, and my husband is in the living room talking to the woman who’s been stealing pieces of him for three months.
Ten minutes pass. I can hear his voice rising and falling - easy, comfortable, the rhythm of two people who actually want to talk to each other.
Fifteen minutes.
“I know,” he says at one point, soft and serious. “I know. It’s just... yeah. Complicated.”
Complicated. Is that what I am? A complication?
Twenty minutes. My legs are completely numb from the cold. The lace has shifted into uncomfortable angles. I’ve never felt more stupid in my entire life.
Thirty minutes.
“Okay,” he says finally, and there’s a tenderness in his voice that makes me want to scream. “Yeah. Me too. Talk soon.”
I watch a candle gutter and die. The vanilla one, closest to the window. The wick drowns in its own melted wax with a tiny hiss.
Then another goes out. Then a third.
At forty-three minutes, I stand up on legs that barely hold me. I move through the room like a ghost, blowing out every candle myself. One by one. Watching the smoke curl toward the ceiling, bitter and final.
I take off the lingerie.
My hands are steady now - cold and steady, like something inside me has frozen over. I fold the bra neatly, then the underwear. I carry them to the bathroom and drop them in the trash, burying them under used tissues so he won’t see.
In the dresser, I find his old Henley. The gray one, soft from a hundred washes. It still smells like cedar and mint, like him, and I pull it over my head because I’m pathetic, because I can’t help it, because loving someone who doesn’t see you is the loneliest thing in the world.
I get into bed. I turn my face to the wall.
He comes to bed at midnight.
I know because I’ve been staring at the clock for five hours, watching the minutes tick by in the dark. The mattress dips as he slides under the covers, careful and quiet, trying not to wake me.
“Hey,” he whispers. His hand finds my shoulder. “You asleep?”
I don’t answer.
“Must’ve gone to bed early.” He says it to himself, settling in, adjusting his pillow. “Ruth texted - said Lily’s asleep. Had a great time making cookies. Ate about a dozen before dinner, apparently.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then he rolls over, his back to mine.
“Night, Aud. Love you.”
I lie perfectly still.
He falls asleep in minutes. I know because his breathing changes, deepens, becomes that steady wall I’ve been lying next to for nine years.
He doesn’t ask where the wax came from - the hardened pools I’ll have to scrape off the dresser tomorrow. He doesn’t smell the smoke that’s still clinging to the air. He doesn’t notice the trash can in the bathroom with its incriminating lace.
He doesn’t see me. Even when I make myself impossible to miss.
This is my answer. This is the test, and this is the result.
I close my eyes and think about tomorrow. About the conversation I’m going to have to have - the words I’m going to have to find for something that has no good words.
Who’s M?
Simple. Direct. A grenade with the pin already pulled.
I’ll ask him in the morning. I’ll ask him, and everything will change, and nothing will ever be the same.
But for now, I lie in the dark beside a man who walked right past me to talk to someone else, and I let myself feel every crack in my heart widen into a chasm.
You didn’t even look. I was right there, and you didn’t even look.