Chapter 56
The detectives have been gone for hours, or perhaps minutes, perhaps days.
Kate still has not eaten and is sitting on the floor of the walk-in closet she and Ben used to share, legs bent and splayed to the side.
Ben’s dirty dress shirt is on her lap, and she is admittedly doing very poorly and probably, as the detectives suggested, should not be alone.
She lifts the shirt to her face and smells the collar, which holds the scent of Ben’s aftershave, then the body of the shirt, which smells like his deodorant and so faintly of his sweat, and she will hold this shirt forever.
She will sit here forever, pressing this shirt against her skin and inhaling, remembering what he looked like when he walked in the door on Friday evening wearing it.
“Hey,” she said to him, and he dropped his backpack onto the floor and said it back. Then they ordered Thai food for delivery and watched three episodes of their latest docuseries on Max. If Kate had known that was the last night she’d have with her husband, she would have done things differently.
There was the clichéd suggestion that a person should live every day as though it was her last. But such a suggestion ignores life’s necessary mundanities and unavoidable irritations.
It ignores the fact that sometimes, one’s husband will seem insufferable.
Their stilted Friday night together, their argument on Saturday afternoon—that was marriage.
And theirs was a good one, overall. Not without cracks, but something solid, something on which she could lean.
Not anymore. Ben is dead. All that remains are memories and things. And the fact that if Kate had agreed to go down to DC for dinner with their friends, like Ben had wanted, maybe he would still be here.
Kate hears something then, and fear slices through her and pools in her gut.
But it’s nothing being shattered, nor is it the sharp knocks of the detectives at her front door.
The sound is tinny, dull, metronomic—just her phone, vibrating, spinning itself dizzy on whatever surface she left it resting on.
She doesn’t know who’s calling, and she doesn’t care. There’s no one she wants to talk to.
After the police left her house, they didn’t climb into a sedan and drive away.
They walked along the sidewalk, toward the house to the right of Kate’s.
Later, she noticed them crossing the street.
She noticed other officers, uniformed, departing marked vehicles.
She assumes they’re still here, in her neighborhood.
She wonders whether they have interviewed Henry yet—the strange man across the street.
She thinks of the way he so often appeared when she was leaving for a walk.
On Friday, he was there when she returned, with an icy drink in his hand.
She could tell that he thought it was a kind gesture.
And that he was so oblivious to how frightening it was, how it made him seem like a hunter, a watcher, makes her wonder if he’s not just a strange young man who loves to read, who still lives with his parents, who may not have a job, who never did tell her whether he does.
He may be something far more dangerous. Something she should have raised with the police.
She’ll do it. Next time they come, she’ll tell them about him. She should have told them last night, his unsettling and persistent approach so proximate to Ben’s death, but she isn’t thinking clearly.
Nor has she told them about her manuscript. Her manuscript about a wife who murders her husband.
But Troy wasn’t stabbed. And it’s fiction.
She wants to scream this at no one. At the same time, she doesn’t want to think about her manuscript ever again.
Despite everything, she feels a tiny cooling sense of relief, understanding that now she will scrap it.
She will never finish that book. How could she, after what’s happened?
It has betrayed her, her book. Her own words.
It was supposed to be fiction. Now look what she’s done.
Kate likes it in the closet. It’s windowless and mostly dark, light off, only a faint glow trickling in from the windows in the bathroom. Not too much, because the sky outside is still gray, rain still falling. Kate can hear it pelting the skylight in her bathroom.
She decides to put on Ben’s shirt. It’s silky against her bare forearms. She lowers herself down to the hard floor, grabbing a sweater, hers, that had fallen from a shelf, to tuck beneath her head.
She buries her feet into a sweatshirt, Ben’s, then curls her knees into her chest. She closes her eyes, and although she knows that she should be scared and alert and prepared, she feels safe.
Safer than she has since the moment she discovered Ben on their patio, the seeping wounds in his chest. She doesn’t know that after the detectives left, she failed to lock her front door.
She doesn’t know that, on Monday morning, this is how Henry will find her.