Chapter 21 She Lied Once
Lesley
He was at my door nineteen minutes after I sent the text.
I knew because I’d watched the clock on the microwave the entire time.
I’d been standing in the kitchen in leggings and one of Hank’s old college sweatshirts that I’d never given back, the only thing I owned that still fit over my stomach, with a mug of decaf going cold in my hand.
I hadn’t touched it. At thirty-two weeks, I couldn’t stand in one place for long without my lower back beginning to ache, so I’d paced instead, from the kitchen to the window and back, while the baby rolled against my ribs as though she’d caught my mood.
Priscilla told me the truth this morning. It’s worse than I thought.
I’d read the message four times before answering it.
Worse than he’d thought. Two weeks ago, at my dining table, he’d shown me the lobby footage and told me that Priscilla couldn’t have seen what she claimed.
I’d spent those two weeks living with the possibility that she’d lied on purpose, and I’d told myself I was ready for whatever came next.
When the knock came, I found out I wasn’t.
He looked worse than he had after the fire.
That was my first thought, and it frightened me.
At the hospital in Aspen he’d been filthy and terrified, but he’d been moving, full of the particular energy Hank always had in a crisis.
The man in my doorway had none of that. His face was gray.
His eyes were red at the rims. He was wearing a Saturday flannel shirt buttoned wrong, off by one hole all the way down, and I don’t think he knew.
“Hi,” he said.
“Come in.”
He came in and stood in the middle of my living room as though he’d forgotten how to sit down. I pointed at the sofa. He sat on the edge of it. I lowered myself into the armchair across from him, which took a moment and a hand on the armrest, and waited.
“Do you want me to just tell you?” he asked. “Or do you want to ask questions?”
“Just tell me. All of it. Exactly the way she told you.”
So he did.
He told it the way I imagined he’d once briefed investors, in order, without adjectives, as though the facts were fragile and might break if he handled them too roughly.
Priscilla on the terrace after he’d gone back inside, upset because he’d kept checking his watch.
The alarm. The smoke in the terrace corridor.
Her fall. The table edge. The phone in his jacket buzzing against her.
“She took it out,” he said. “She thought it might be me calling to find her. It wasn’t. The screen said your name.”
I didn’t move.
“It rang twice. She didn’t answer. Then your text came in, and she read it on the lock screen.” His voice didn’t change, but his hands had tightened on his knees. ”Main stairs full of smoke. I’m on 3 east. Where are you?”
I knew those words. I’d typed them with shaking fingers in a hallway filling with smoke. I’d watched them sit under the word Delivered and waited for it to change.
“She put the phone back in the pocket,” Hank said.
“About a minute later I came through the smoke heading for the east wing stairs. She knew where I was going. She’d just read where you were.
And she knew that if she told me, I’d go up and leave her there on the floor.
So she told me you’d already been rescued.
She said the firefighters had brought you down. ”
“She knew,” I said.
“She knew.”
“She knew I was still inside. She knew exactly where I was. She had it in writing.”
“Yes.”
“And she looked at you and told you I was safe.”
“Yes.” He swallowed. “When I asked if she was sure, she said yes. She told me this morning that she looked me in the eye when she said it.”
I got up. I had to. It took a hand on the armrest and a hand on my back, and it wasn’t graceful, but I needed to be on my feet. I walked to the window and stood there with my arms crossed over the top of my stomach, looking out at the rooftops and the pale spring sky, and I couldn’t see any of it.
I was back in that hallway. The haze at the ceiling.
The man in boxer shorts shouting into his phone.
The smoke rolling up the grand staircase.
Me, typing to my husband. The phone in my hand, the word Delivered, the long seconds in which I’d stood there and let myself be angry because anger was easier than fear.
And three floors below me, in a corridor full of smoke, Priscilla Hart had been holding his phone and reading those words.
“She read it,” I said to the window. My voice sounded strange, far away and very flat.
“I stood there waiting for it to say Read, and it never did, and all that time somebody had read it. She knew I was trapped. She knew I was pregnant. She’s known it since the minute it happened, and she sent me a text the next day apologizing for the confusion. ”
“Les...”
“She let me think it was a mistake. She let you think it was a mistake. For five months.” I turned around.
“She’d have let me die in there, Hank. She didn’t know I’d find the balcony.
She didn’t know I’d get Evelyn and the others into that room.
For all she knew, the next time anyone saw me I’d have been on a stretcher under a sheet. ”
He didn’t argue. He didn’t try to soften it. He sat on my sofa and took it, because it was true.
“She said she didn’t want you to die,” he said quietly, after a moment.
“I’m not saying it to defend her. I’m telling you because you asked for all of it.
She said she was eighteen again, in that car on Highway 74, and she couldn’t stand to be left alone.
She said she told herself you’d find a way out. That you always find a way.”
I laughed. It came out ugly. “Of course she did.”
The baby kicked hard under my ribs, once, twice, a series of sharp jabs, as though she were furious too. I pressed my palm against the spot and felt her push back against my hand.
“Lesley always finds a way,” I said. “Lesley’s so capable. Lesley can handle it. It’s everybody’s favorite thing to say about me, isn’t it? Nancy said it. You said it. Now it turns out it’s what Priscilla told herself while she was deciding whether I got to live.”
Hank flinched as if I’d struck him.
I made myself breathe. In, slowly, the way Courtney had taught me. Out. I wasn’t in the hallway. I was in my own living room, in the condo I’d bought at twenty-six, with the sun coming in through the tall windows and my daughter kicking under my hand.
“I want to know some things,” I said, when I could. “Does she know where I live?”
“No. I asked Rachel this morning. Rachel’s never given her the address, and I never have.”
“Is she going to try to contact me?”
“Not through me. I told her this morning she and I are finished. No calls, no messages, nothing, permanently. I’ve resigned from the foundation board.
If she ever wants to reach you, it goes through Rachel, and Rachel knows you might say no.
” He hesitated. “Rachel’s getting her into intensive treatment. For whatever that’s worth to you.”
“It’s worth nothing to me right now,” I said. “Maybe someday. Not now.”
“That’s fair.”
He hesitated. “Rachel asked me to tell you something. She said she’s sorry it took her so long. She heard Priscilla say something in the emergency room in November, and she told herself it was the painkillers, because she didn’t want it to be true.”
I nodded. “Okay,” I said. It was all I had to give Rachel Bennett that morning, and Hank didn’t ask me for more.
“Is there anything legal? Anything I can do?”
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I don’t think lying to someone in a fire is a crime. It might be something civil. You’d have to ask Marisa.”
“I will.” I made a note of it in my head, on the list I kept there.
Call Marisa on Monday. Tell Courtney on Tuesday.
Decide later, when I could think, whether I wanted Priscilla Hart to face any consequence at all, or whether I wanted her out of my life so completely that I never had to hear her name again.
I lowered myself back into the armchair. My back ached. My hands were shaking, and I pressed them flat against my knees to stop them.
Hank was watching me. He looked like he wanted to come across the room. He didn’t.
“Les,” he said. “Can I say one thing?”
“Go ahead.”
“I need you to know that I never chose her over you. That night. Not for one second.” His voice cracked. “I thought you were outside. I thought you were safe on that lawn. If I’d known you were still in that building, I’d have walked through the fire. I’d have left her there. I’d have left anyone.”
“I know,” I said.
“I just...”
“Hank. I know.” I looked at him steadily. “I knew in the hospital. I told you so that night. I told you again in the bedroom with my suitcase packed, and again at that table two weeks ago. I have never once believed you left me in that building on purpose.”
“I know you said that.”
“Then why are you telling me again?”
He opened his mouth. Then he closed it. I watched something move behind his eyes, slowly, like a man searching a dark room for a switch he knew was there.
“Because some part of me thought this would change it,” he said at last. “I think I’ve been carrying it around for two weeks.
Since the footage. Maybe since November.
This idea that if I could just prove what really happened that night, if I could show you exactly how it went, then everything would...
” He stopped. “I don’t know what I thought. ”
“You thought it would fix us.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
I looked at him for a long time. This man I’d loved for eight years, sitting on my sofa in a shirt buttoned wrong, finally holding the proof he’d wanted.
Priscilla had lied. He’d been deceived. The worst moment of our marriage, the image I’d carried out of that stairwell, had been built on a deliberate lie told by someone else. He hadn’t abandoned me. Not that night.
And I felt nothing change. Nothing at all.
“Can I ask you some questions?” I said.
“Anything.”