15. Elise
— ? —
Elise
The water starts rising around noon.
What begins as a trickle under the front door becomes a steady seep, dark water spreading across the hardwood like something alive. Through the windows I watch the creek swell past its banks and turn the yard into a shallow lake with things floating in it.
“We need to move everything upstairs.” Rowan is already going, grabbing boxes of photographs out of the study. “Furniture can be replaced. These can’t.”
For the next three hours the three of us work in something approaching coordination.
It’s strange, falling into old patterns with Simon.
We move around each other like people who’ve forgotten the steps but remember the rhythm, him carrying boxes, me directing where they go, our movements synchronized by years of shared domestic routine.
I catch myself handing him things before he asks.
Muscle memory. That’s all it is.
Rowan watches us with an expression I can’t quite read. Not jealousy. Something more complicated, like he’s watching a play he doesn’t have the program for.
By three the water is ankle-deep across the whole lower floor. We’ve saved what we could, the photographs, the books, the smaller furniture that could be carried. Everything else takes its chances.
We retreat upstairs, damp and exhausted, and collapse in the small sitting area between the bedrooms.
“Insurance will cover it,” Simon says. “The policy has flood protection.”
“Some things aren’t covered by insurance.” Rowan is staring at the ceiling. “Grandma’s things.”
“We saved the photographs.”
“We saved some of the photographs.”
They aren’t arguing, exactly. Two men too tired to fight and too wounded to agree. I’m sitting on the floor between them like a demilitarized zone in a war neither will admit to.
“How long until it goes down?”
“Depends on the rain.” Rowan checks his phone. “Another day of heavy storms. Then maybe a day for the water.”
“So we’re stuck here.”
“We’re stuck here.”
Silence, thick with everything nobody’s saying.
I catch Simon watching me. Not with last night’s rage or this morning’s desperation. Something else. Something calculating.
He’s building toward his next move. I can feel it.
“I’m going to make dinner,” I announce, needing to be somewhere else. “Or lunch. Whatever meal this is.”
“I’ll help.” Rowan starts to get up.
“No.” It comes out sharper than I mean. “I just need a few minutes.”
He settles back, concern all over him. “Okay.”
The stairs are cold. The water is past my calves by the time I reach the kitchen, shockingly cold, and I stand in it gathering tins off the high pantry shelves with my mind entirely elsewhere.
Simon isn’t giving up. The apology for the punch was strategic, just enough contrition to look reasonable, not enough to take responsibility for anything that matters.
I know this pattern. I’ve lived inside it for years.
The question is what he tries next.
***
Dinner is tense and quiet.
We eat tinned soup heated on a camp stove Rowan found in the garage, sitting on the floor of the upstairs hallway because all the furniture is either underwater or stacked with rescued belongings.
Simon makes small talk. The weather, the insurance adjuster, the structural damage we might be facing. Pleasant, even.
It sets my teeth on edge. This is Simon at his most dangerous. Not raging. Calm, and playing something I can’t see the shape of yet.
“I’ve been thinking,” he says eventually, setting down his bowl. “About what you said this morning.”
I tense. “What about it?”
“About deserving better. About me breaking something that can’t be fixed.” He meets my eyes, expression carefully neutral. “I don’t think that’s true.”
“Simon…”
“I think anything can be fixed if both people are willing to work at it.” He leans forward. “I know I have a lot to make up for. But what we had before everything went wrong was real, and I don’t believe you can walk away from that like it meant nothing.”
“I’m not saying it meant nothing. I’m saying it wasn’t enough to survive what you did.”
“But what if it could be? Counseling. Working through it properly. Rebuilding.” His voice is earnest now, persuasive, and I recognize the register, because it’s the one he uses on his mother. “I’m not asking you to forgive me overnight. I’m asking for a chance to earn your trust back.”
I glance at Rowan. He’s watching Simon with careful neutrality, but the tension is all through his shoulders.
“Simon, what I feel for Rowan…”
“Is a reaction to trauma.” Simon’s voice is gentle. Understanding. “You found out about the affair and he was there and he made you feel wanted. I understand it. But that’s not love, Elise. That’s a rebound, and rebounds don’t last.”
“You don’t get to tell me what I feel.”
“I’m not telling you what you feel. I’m trying to help you see it clearly.” He reaches out like he might touch my hand and thinks better of it. “Rowan is my brother. I know him better than you do. His track record with women is…”
“Is none of your business,” Rowan says, and his voice has gone hard. “And neither is what Elise does with her life.”
“I’m trying to have a conversation with my wife.”
“You’re trying to manage her, same as you always do.”
“That’s not…”
“It’s exactly what you’re doing. Reframing a year-long affair as a mistake.
Dismissing what she feels as a rebound. Positioning yourself as the reasonable one who only wants to work things out.
” Rowan’s jaw is tight. “I’ve watched you do this our entire lives.
Find the angle. Work the room. Make everyone believe you’re the good guy. ”
“I’m not the good guy here. I know that. I’m just trying to…”
“Save your marriage by convincing her that her own feelings aren’t real.” Rowan shakes his head. “That’s not fighting for someone. That’s managing them.”
“She deserves to make her own choices…”
“Then let her make them.” Rowan’s voice comes up. “Stop trying to steer the outcome. Stop treating her like something to be won. For once in your life, accept that somebody is choosing something other than you.”
It lands. Simon flinches, and something goes out of his careful composure.
“You don’t know anything about my marriage,” he says quietly.
“I know you destroyed it. I know exactly what you had, and I know exactly what you traded it for.” Rowan stands. “And no amount of counseling is going to change the fact that she deserves someone who actually looks at her.”
He goes into his room. The door shuts.
Simon and I sit in the aftermath.
“He’s not wrong,” I say finally.
Simon’s head comes up. “What?”
“About you managing me. Convincing me my feelings aren’t real.” I meet his eyes. “That’s what you did for the whole affair, isn’t it? Made me doubt myself. Made me feel paranoid for noticing what was in front of me.”
“That’s not… I wasn’t…”
“You were. You did.” My voice is quiet and completely certain. “And you’re doing it again right now. Telling me what I feel for your brother is trauma. A rebound. Something that’ll fade when I come to my senses.”
“I’m trying to help you see…”
“I see perfectly clearly.” I stand up and look down at him. “I see a man who has never once accepted that he might not get what he wants. Who’s so used to talking his way out of things that he can’t imagine a situation where the right words don’t fix it.”
“Elise…”
“Good night, Simon.”
I go to my room and close the door.
And if I hear him sitting in the hallway for a long time afterward, I pretend not to.
***
The water stops rising sometime after midnight.
We know because Simon goes down twice to check, wading to the fourth step with a flashlight and coming back up to report the level like a man reading a gauge. The second time he says it’s holding, and goes to bed.
A house with a foot of water in it makes noises at two in the morning that I’ve never heard a house make.
I’m out in the sitting area because I can’t sleep, and because down the hall is the room Simon is in, and this small square of carpet between two armchairs is the only neutral ground left in a building that’s getting smaller by the hour.
Rowan comes out at some point and sits in the other chair.
Neither of us says anything for a while.
The flashlight is on the floor between us, tipped over, throwing a stripe of light across the carpet and up the wall.
Everything smells like river. I keep tipping my head back at the black window, looking for stars through cloud that has no intention of breaking.
“He’ll be up at six to check it again,” Rowan says eventually.
“He checked four times before bed.”
“He’ll check again.”
I look at him in the dark.
“Come here.”
“Elise.”
“I’ve been in this house three weeks and I haven’t had ten consecutive minutes that didn’t have one ear on a door.” My voice comes out lower than I intend. “He’s asleep. The water’s stopped. Come here.”
He looks at me for about two seconds.
Then his chair is empty and he’s pulling me up out of mine, and my back is against the wall between the two bedroom doors, and his mouth is on my throat and his hand is already dragging my shirt up.
It isn’t careful. That’s the part I’ll think about afterward. Weeks of being careful and we spend all of it in about a minute flat, my hands at his belt, his knee between my thighs, both of us making considerably more noise than anyone should in a house with one other person in it.
Then I hear the door.
Not footsteps, because there aren’t any. Just the sound of a door coming open on a bad hinge, four feet to my left.
Simon is standing in his doorway with the flashlight in his hand.
Nobody moves.
The light is pointed at the floor, which is worse, because it means he isn’t searching for us. He’s just looking. My shirt is up around my ribs and Rowan’s belt is open, and the worst part is that there’s no secret left to protect. He already knew. He’s just never had to see it.
Rowan steps back and puts himself between us, which is the wrong instinct and also the only one available.
“Simon.”
“Don’t.” His voice is completely flat. Sober, which I hadn’t accounted for. “Don’t say anything.”
I pull my shirt down.
“How long?” he says.
“Simon…”
“I knew,” he says. “I had the wrapper. I did the arithmetic. I’ve known for days.” He isn’t shouting. That’s what’s making my skin crawl. He’s been loud every other time this week and he isn’t now.
“Turns out knowing and seeing are two different things.”
Neither of us says anything.
“Right,” he says.
He looks at the two of us for another second and something happens in his face that I’ve never seen there and won’t be able to describe afterward. Not rage. Rage I know. This goes further down than that.
Then he steps back into his room and shuts the door.
The lock turns.
Rowan is breathing hard beside me. “Elise…”
“Don’t.”
I stand in the dark with the flashlight throwing its stripe up the wall and my shirt still crooked, and I listen.
Through the door, very quietly, Simon is talking to someone on the phone.
I can’t hear the words. I don’t need to. There are exactly two people that man calls when his life goes wrong and one of them is currently blocked in my phone.
I stand in the hallway and listen to my husband tell his mother.
***
The next morning brings more rain and company.
I’m at the window watching the water lap the cabin walls when headlights sweep across the property.
“Rowan.” I call down the hall. “Someone’s coming.”
He appears beside me, still rumpled, and squints through the rain.
“You have got to be kidding me.”
“Who is it?”
“That’s the neighbor’s truck.” His voice is flat. “And that’s my mother climbing out of it.”
Patricia Maine steps down from Ed’s mud-spattered pickup in designer rain boots and an expression of grim determination. Whatever it took to get her up that washed-out road, she’s here. She wades toward the cabin like a general crossing enemy territory, her scarf whipping in the wind.
“This should be interesting,” I say.
“That’s one word for it.”
Rowan goes down to meet her. I stay at the window and watch Patricia pick her way through the flood with her posture never wavering despite the water swirling around her calves.
Simon appears in the hallway.
He doesn’t look at me. He’s showered and shaved and he’s wearing a clean shirt, which at nine in the morning in a flooded house tells me everything about what kind of day he intends this to be.
“You called her at two in the morning,” I say.
“I did.”
“You told her.”
“I told her.” He straightens his collar. “You’ll notice I’m not pretending otherwise.”
“What did you tell her, exactly?”
He looks at me then, and it’s the calm from last night again, the thing underneath the rage.
“The truth,” he says. “For once in this family, somebody’s going to say the actual truth out loud.”
Downstairs the front door opens. We hear Patricia’s voice rising about the water damage, and Rowan’s underneath it, calm and measured and giving nothing away.
Then footsteps on the stairs.
Patricia Maine arrives on the second floor, dripping and furious.
“Well,” she says, looking between the two of us. “Isn’t this a mess?”