Chapter 4 Before the Fire
Lesley
Heather arrived at seven the next morning with a duffel bag of my clothes, a toothbrush, a bag of ginger chews, and an expression that suggested she’d driven the three and a half hours from Denver at well over the speed limit.
“I let myself into your house with the spare key,” she said, dropping the bag on the end of the bed and wrapping her arms around me, careful of the cannula.
“I didn’t know what you’d want, so I brought leggings, a sweater, the good bra, and those socks with the avocados on them.
Tell me everything. No, don’t tell me everything. Tell me the baby’s okay first.”
“The baby’s okay.”
“Okay.” She sat down hard on the edge of the bed and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “Okay. Good. Now tell me everything.”
Heather Lawson had been my best friend since our freshman year at CU Boulder, when we were assigned to the same dorm room and discovered within an hour that we both hated our roommate matching requests and loved terrible reality television.
She was a pediatric nurse in Denver now, with a wife named Jo and a pair of rescue greyhounds, and she was the only person I’d ever met who could say something blunt enough to make me flinch and make me laugh in the same sentence.
I told her everything. The dress, the bar, the promise. The smoke. The window. Evelyn on the floor by the ice machine. The balcony and the ladder and the heartbeat. Hank at one in the morning, weeping into my hand, and what Priscilla had told him.
Heather listened without interrupting, which for Heather required a heroic amount of restraint.
“Do you believe him?” she asked when I’d finished.
“Yes.”
“Me too, probably. Hank’s a lot of things, but he’s not a liar.” She looked at me carefully. “So what happens now?”
“I don’t know yet.”
That was true, and it wasn’t. I knew something. I’d known it since the door swung closed inside me in the emergency room. I just didn’t have words for it yet.
They discharged me at eleven. My carbon monoxide levels had come back down to normal, the baby’s heart rate was steady, and Dr. Anand sent me off with instructions to rest, stay hydrated, and call my obstetrician in Denver on Monday to schedule a follow-up.
Hank was in the corridor when the nurse wheeled me out.
He’d showered somewhere and changed into jeans and a fleece that Randy must have lent him, because it was too short in the sleeves.
“I’ll drive you home,” he said.
“Heather’s driving me.”
He glanced at Heather, who gave him a pleasant smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Okay,” he said. “Then I’ll follow you down.”
“Don’t you have to meet the fire marshal?”
He hesitated. That hesitation told me everything.
“At noon,” he admitted. “And the insurance people. And Tom’s setting up a press statement, and there are still fifty guests who need rooms in town. But I can push it. I can have Neil handle...”
“Stay,” I said. “It’s your resort. It burned down. You need to be here.”
“Lesley.”
“I mean it. Go meet the fire marshal.”
He looked at me for a long moment, searching my face for a trap.
There wasn’t one. I genuinely meant it. There were things that couldn’t wait, and a half-burned resort with an ongoing fire investigation was one of them.
I had never been the kind of wife who demanded he drop everything, and I wasn’t going to start now.
“I’ll be home tonight,” he said. “By dinner. I’ll leave by three.”
“Okay.”
He leaned down and kissed my forehead, carefully, as though I might break. “I love you,” he said.
“I know,” I said. It was true. I did know.
Heather had brought her Subaru, which smelled like greyhound and coffee. She settled me into the passenger seat with a pillow she’d stolen from the hospital and a bottle of water, and we pulled out of the lot and onto the highway toward the pass.
For the first half hour, neither of us said much. The mountains were brilliant with new snow under a hard blue sky. Somewhere behind us, a thin gray smudge still hung above the ridge where The Summit stood.
Somewhere past Glenwood Springs, I took out my old phone, the one Heather had found in my desk drawer and charged on her drive up, and opened my work email.
Heather glanced over. “Absolutely not.”
“There’s a permit submission due Monday for the Larimer Street project,” I said. “The structural engineer still hasn’t sent the revised load calculations, and if nobody chases him, it’s going to slip, and then the whole schedule slips.”
“You were in a fire fourteen hours ago.”
“I know.” I was already typing. “Heather, if I don’t do something normal right now, I’m going to start screaming in your car, and you’ll have to pull over on the interstate, and it’ll be a whole thing.”
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she looked back at the road. “Five minutes,” she said. “Then the phone goes in the glove box.”
It took me four. I emailed the engineer, copied my boss, Gail, and our junior architect, Priya, and laid out exactly what we needed and by when.
I told Gail I’d been at the resort, that I was fine, and that I’d be working from home for a few days.
Then I put the phone in the glove box and closed it, and felt better than I had since I’d woken up in the suite to the alarm.
Heather didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said, “You’re the only person I know who’d do permit follow-ups to cope with nearly dying.”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“That’s the terrifying part,” she said.
“Can I say something?” Heather asked eventually.
“When have you ever asked permission?”
“Fair.” She kept her eyes on the road. “You said you believe him. And I believe him too. But you’ve got a look on your face I haven’t seen in a long time, and I don’t think it’s about Priscilla.”
I watched the snowbanks slide past.
“It’s about ten o’clock,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I figured.”
The thing people didn’t understand about my marriage, the thing I’d stopped trying to explain even to myself, was that there was never one terrible night.
Hank didn’t hit me. He didn’t scream at me.
He didn’t sleep with other women or gamble away our money or belittle me in front of his friends.
If anything, he was generous to a fault.
He bought me beautiful things, he told me he loved me every single day, and he looked at me across crowded rooms like I was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
He just wasn’t there.
It started small, the way these things always do.
Early in our marriage it was dinners. He’d promise to be home by seven and walk in at nine, full of apologies and good reasons.
A contractor had quit on the Telluride project.
Neil had needed him on a call with the bank.
His father had wanted help with something at the house.
I would reheat his plate and listen to the story and tell him it was fine, because it was fine, because I was a grown woman with my own career and my own friends and I didn’t need my husband to sit across from me at seven o’clock every night to feel loved.
I was a senior project manager at an architecture firm in Denver.
I spent my days wrangling engineers and city permit offices and clients who changed their minds three weeks before groundbreaking.
I was good at it. I was good at waiting for other people to catch up.
It turned out that was a dangerous skill to bring into a marriage.
The good years were real, though. I needed to remember that too, sitting in Heather’s car with the canyon walls closing in on either side.
For my thirtieth birthday, Hank had built me a drafting table in our garage out of reclaimed barn wood, working on it secretly for three weekends, and he’d gotten sawdust in his hair and a splinter in his thumb that went septic and he’d never once complained.
On Saturday mornings, early in our marriage, he’d make pancakes and try to shape them into the floor plans of famous buildings, and they always came out looking like blobs, and he’d insist each one was the Guggenheim.
He listened when I talked about my work.
Really listened. He’d ask about a building I was stuck on, and he’d push back, and we’d argue about it over dinner, and he’d tell me I was right more often than any man I’d ever dated.
When he was there, he was all the way there. That was what made the rest of it so hard to explain. The man I’d married could make me feel more seen than anyone else alive. He was also the man who, over and over, didn’t come home.
The first time I really fought with him about it was two years in.
My firm was hosting a dinner to celebrate my promotion.
Hank had promised to be there. He’d put it in his calendar himself.
At six thirty he texted to say Priscilla had called in a panic because her father had been rushed to the hospital, and she had nobody else, and he was going to sit with her for an hour and then come straight over.
He arrived at nine fifteen, after dessert, after the toasts, after my boss had given a speech about me that I’d listened to beside an empty chair.
I didn’t make a scene at the restaurant.
I waited until we were home, in the kitchen, and then I told him exactly how it had felt.
I told him I understood Priscilla’s father was sick, and I was sorry for her.
I also told him that she had a sister and a mother and a dozen other friends, and I had one husband, and he had chosen to be the person she called instead of the person I needed.
He’d been stricken. He’d apologized for an hour. The following week he’d taken me to Santa Barbara for four days with his phone locked in the hotel safe, and it had been glorious, and for months afterward he’d been home by seven so often that I stopped keeping track.
That was the pattern. I spoke up. He listened. He was genuinely, deeply sorry. He changed. And then, slowly, so slowly I could never point to the moment it happened, he drifted back.