Chapter 25
Henry cannot be seen.
Her ponytail brushes against her back, steady, metronomic. She’s not moving particularly fast, occasionally speeding up or slowing down, and he has to adjust his own pace to match hers.
Of course, he was hoping it would be the right time to talk to her.
He sat in the living room and waited until her front door swung open.
She paused on the porch to lock her front door behind her—not everyone in this neighborhood does; people really are too trusting—then started down her driveway.
But there was something in her expression, something forbidding.
Hostile, even. Not today, Henry thought. He knows her so well.
He must tread so carefully; he’s chosen poorly in the past. But he’s determined that things go differently this time.
He studies the back of her, the swing of her hips. He looks for signs of widening, excess flesh, thinking of the sign outside the doctor’s office: Dr. Frances Singh he’d apologize even though it never was an accident.
He tried to talk to her nearly every class, but he was always met with tight lips, frigid terseness, her body angled away from him.
She lived on the third floor of a dorm across the quad from Henry’s dorm, and all he had to do was sit on a bench in the darkness for a few weekends to notice the pattern, the way she’d stumble home drunkenly, traveling at least a few dozen yards by herself because her friends lived in a different building.
It was nearly two in the morning, the sky so black, the April air too warm for Henry’s dark hoodie, its strings cinched tight around his face. Esther’s laugh rang out, and she and her friends embraced sloppily on the sidewalk.
“Be safe,” called out one of the friends before they parted ways.
They left Esther all by herself on the sidewalk, too far from the reach of the security cameras that were perched in the eaves of every school building.
There were four friends. They should have stood there and watched Esther to make sure she’d made her way to her building, that she’d climbed the stairs, that she’d gotten inside safely.
Or they should have walked her up to the door.
That’s what good friends would have done.
Henry watched the friends disappear into their own dorm before he moved soundlessly across the path. Esther tripped on a raised stone, and Henry grabbed her. Arms around her chest, palm rising to cover her mouth, to stifle her scream. Her terror ignited him.
Now, although he’s been so quiet, the wife’s head turns, and Henry’s steps falter.
His heartbeat seems to pause. But it’s a false alarm.
She’s just glancing toward a neighbor who’s walking down her driveway, a Pomeranian straining at its leash.
The wife waves to the woman, then looks forward again and picks up her pace.
But he’s not so lucky with the dog. The dog sees him approaching and lunges, yapping exuberantly.
The older woman lifts a hand. “Sorry,” she calls. “She hates men.”
Henry waves a hand as if to say No problem.
But he doesn’t speak. His heart hammers, and his eyes are on the wife.
She spares only the briefest glance over her shoulder.
She’s walking more quickly now, and he’s risked enough.
To say he’s disappointed is an understatement, but he turns anyway and heads toward home.
He must remind himself that this project is a marathon.
That his plan is still developing and that all good things take time. That she is worth waiting for.
When he reaches his house and steps in the front door, he senses her.
His mother likes to talk about the way her grandson’s gaze follows Laurel wherever she goes.
The baby’s head turns, and he watches Laurel like she’s the whole world.
She says that the baby can smell his mom, he can smell the milk.
It’s like that with Henry’s mom, yet it’s nothing like that.
It’s a shark detecting the tiniest drop of blood.
Their eyes meet, and the corners of her lips turn down automatically, as though she knows exactly what he was doing.
She’s sitting in the living room, on the sofa by the front window, a dog-eared paperback resting on her lap.
He isn’t sure that he’s ever seen her sitting there.
In fact, it’s where he sits when he’s reading during the day. It’s where he watches the wife.
He waits for her to speak, to soften, to offer him a kindness, a tenderness, to show him that her love, her maternal instincts, still burn for him, not just for his sister.
Her lips are pressed whitely, and she smiles the smallest and most tentative of smiles.
But she just looks at him, her eyes dark and unsure, and says nothing.
She has nothing to say, and it really is true that silence can sometimes feel like the loudest thing in the world.