Chapter 2 #2
“No.” Jess looked at Ryder again, and he gave her nothing. “He said people would be angry until they understood he was going to take responsibility.”
“Did he tell you what happened in our bed last night?” The question hurt her, and I couldn’t protect her from facts Ryder had created. “Did you text him afterward? Did you wait for him to finish with me before you decided what time to come?”
“I didn’t know about last night.” Her voice dropped. “He told me he slept in another room.”
I turned to Ryder. He hadn’t slept anywhere else in our house, not once. Even after our worst arguments he took the far edge of our bed and waited for me to decide whether anger forbade touch. “You made me the wife who wouldn’t accept you had left, while you were sleeping beside me every night.”
The kitchen timer began ringing behind us and neither of us moved to shut it off. It rang until it quit on its own.
“How far?” I asked, needing to know how much of my marriage had belonged to a lie.
Jess swallowed and glanced toward Ryder. “About eight weeks.” She watched him while she said it, and the number belonged to both of them.
I counted backward despite every rule I had about manufacturing pain out of numbers.
Eight weeks reached back through the June morning Ryder drove me to the specialist in Terre Haute and sat in the waiting room with my folder open on his knee.
It reached back through the June night we ate takeout on the flat part of the clubhouse roof because, he said, it was the only place on the property with no sightline from the road.
It went past both of those into an ordinary week in the middle of May I couldn’t tell from the weeks on either side of it, and that was where he had started.
“Is it yours?” The question humiliated me before he had even answered it.
Ryder turned until his right ear faced me. Even now my body had gone to that side on its own. I stepped away from him so hard my shoulder struck the frame. “Yes.”
“You had a test?” I needed one fact that didn’t depend on Jess’s frightened account.
“Eden.” He said my name as though five familiar letters should be enough to make me stop.
“Did you have a fucking test?” My voice carried across the yard, and the prospect near the fence turned before Ryder looked at him.
Leah came through the clubhouse door with her head raised toward our porch.
Ryder pointed once, and the prospect intercepted her before she crossed the road.
He could contain the audience while causing my humiliation himself.
“Or is she the only other woman you were sleeping with?”
He let both questions lie there. Only one of them ever got an answer.
Jess bent over the water bottle. “I didn’t know about you.” She held it like she wished I hadn’t offered her anything.
“I know.” I wished I didn’t. She had come here expecting a wife who understood her own marriage was ending.
Ryder had given her that picture of me, and the tears on her face said she had believed it.
If I called her a liar, demanded she leave, or tore the porch apart around her, I became the woman making a pregnant girl pay for what my husband had done.
He knew I would keep my cruelty aimed at the right person even while he broke me. “I’m not asking you.”
Ryder’s eyes moved over my face, dropped to the hand I had pressed against my upper stomach before I knew I’d put it there, and came back. He knew my breathing before I did. He could hear the faint pull at the end of an inhale when everyone else thought I was only upset. “Jess is the only one.”
“How generous.” I gripped the doorframe and forced air through my nose, trying to contain the panic before it joined the heat and turned into something I couldn’t steer.
My rescue inhaler sat on the kitchen counter beside the medication pouch I had packed for the fundraiser.
The bright zipper was visible from the porch, past Ryder’s shoulder, through the door he was standing in. “When were you going to tell me?”
“Today.” He gave the answer with no hesitation. “It needed to happen today.”
“Why? Did the baby become yours this morning?” I hated that my voice made it sound like a plea for a better explanation.
“She can’t stay where she is.” Ryder looked at Jess instead of telling me where she had been living.
Jess made a small sound and turned her face away. He had told me nothing about who threatened her or how she had walked into a secured compound, and he had already put her safety between us. I had spent years believing that instinct belonged to me.
“Then help her,” I said. “You help everybody. You didn’t have to fuck her to do it.”
“It wasn’t only that.” He wouldn’t name what he had wanted from her.
“Tell me what it was.” I couldn’t pull in enough air to finish the demand with the anger it deserved.
My chest worked harder, dragging each breath past the place where panic had begun closing it down.
I knew what to do. Stop talking. Get out of the heat.
Sit upright. Use the rescue medication. Every step had been drilled into me by people who loved me, and every one of them required me to get through a door that had my husband standing in it.
“The marriage has been over for me,” Ryder said. Jess looked down. He made himself keep watching me. “I didn’t say it because I knew what leaving would do to you. That was wrong. I should’ve ended it before Jess.”
I thought of his mouth between my legs, the white queen beside my inhaler, his hand moving along my back while I planned dinner at Leah’s.
He hadn’t touched me like a man trapped in a dead marriage.
He had taken everything I offered and let me fall asleep believing it pleased him. “How long have you been pretending?”
“Long enough that last night shouldn’t have happened.” Ryder’s hands stayed down, one thumb hooked in his belt. He gave the night the blame and kept none of it.
The cruelty was in the part he didn’t say. Last night had happened because I wanted him, and he had known he belonged to somebody carrying his child. I pressed harder against the frame when my knees weakened. He took half a step toward me and stopped himself.
“Don’t.” I could barely force it past the wheeze rising in my throat. “Don’t come near me now.”
He didn’t. He also didn’t move out of the doorway.
For years he had asked before putting a hand on me during an attack, had carried the inhaler in his pocket without pressing it into my grip, had learned that helping me didn’t mean taking over.
He knew exactly where the pouch was, because he was the one who had put it on the counter. He filled the door and looked at me.
Jess rose from the chair, the unopened water falling against the cushion. “She can’t breathe.”
“I know,” Ryder said, and he said it facing Jess.
I had never heard anything as ugly as those two words.
He knew, and keeping her story alive mattered more than the strip of kitchen floor between me and the medication.
Whatever part of him had sat through emergency rooms, slept upright when coughing kept me awake, and trusted me to name what I needed hadn’t disappeared. He was choosing not to use it.
“Go inside,” Jess told me, crying openly now. “Please. I can leave.”
“No.” Ryder answered her, not me. He stepped out of the doorway and onto the porch, taking the place beside her that had belonged to him beside me for five years, and the entrance stood open behind him. “This has to be finished.”
“What does?” I drew breath in pieces, enough to keep talking and not enough to stop the fear. “Your confession? Her move? Do I pack your clothes, or is she taking my side of the closet?”
The kitchen was a short distance away. I had crossed it carrying fifty-pound flour sacks, danced across it with him when our song came through the old radio, walked it half asleep to find him after nightmares he refused to name. Now the floor looked impossible. “Is she your responsibility?”
Ryder turned his full face toward me. “Jess and the baby are my responsibility.”
“And what am I?” I watched his face for the husband who had promised I was safe with him and found a man assembling another answer.
His eyes closed for a moment. When they opened, he had chosen it. “Someone I should’ve let go sooner.”
Jess covered her mouth. I heard the sentence twice, once out of him and once inside my own skull, and the second time it came with a date attached.
Sooner. My husband had stood in our kitchen last week and chosen, again, not to let me go yet.
Every good thing he had done since whenever sooner began had been a stay of execution.
He had carried my medication across four states in his saddlebag.
He had checked hotel rooms for dust and learned to set the inhaler in my hand without closing my fingers around it.
In his accounting all of it had been the price of not having ended it, and I had thanked him for every piece.
Out loud. In bed. In front of our friends.
I couldn’t get air around that. I gripped the porch rail and hated that the first fight after discovering my husband’s pregnant mistress had become another moment when asthma decided how many words I was allowed.
Ryder moved farther aside. For one stupid second I thought he was leaving her and coming with me.
“Get your medication,” he said, his shoulder nearly touching hers while he gave me the doorway.
I crossed between them and went into the house alone.
The counter was only a few yards away, and every step cost air I couldn’t spare.
Behind me Jess started crying again, and Ryder said something too low for me to hear.
He had given his better ear and the place beside him to the woman carrying his child.