Chapter 6
Chapter Six
NAOMI
He was still asleep when my alarm went off at six, and I didn't wake him.
I showered, then dressed for the office, gray trousers and the flat boots I could stand in all day. Downstairs, I made my own coffee in the blue mug, waiting a minute before I added the milk. It tasted like something I'd made myself.
At 7:15 I called the Germantown building from the car.
I knew Eddie Kowal. Two years ago my firm had redesigned the courtyard planters at that property, the brick ones along the sidewalk that the tenants kept stubbing cigarettes out in.
Eddie had followed me around for a week telling me about his granddaughter's soccer team.
He'd given me his cell number in case I ever needed "a guy for anything. "
"Mrs. Bennett!" He sounded delighted. "You're up early."
"Sorry to bother you, Eddie. I heard you had a rough night."
"Me?" There was a morning show on behind him, people laughing. "I slept like a baby. What'd you hear?"
I closed my eyes. My fingers were cold on the steering wheel even with the heat running.
"I must've mixed up the buildings," I said. "Graham said something about a pipe."
"Not here. Not at my place. Quiet as church." He paused. "Everything okay?"
"Everything's fine. Tell Kayla good luck this weekend."
"Kaylee."
"Kaylee. Sorry."
After I hung up, I sat in the office parking lot with my hands in my lap until Tess pulled in beside me and waved through the window with a bagel in her mouth.
Tess Ruiz had been my business partner for seven years and my closest friend for longer.
We'd met in grad school as the only two women in a studio full of men who wanted to design museums. She took one look at my face through the glass and pulled the bagel out of her mouth.
I shook my head. Later, I mouthed.
Inside, I opened a drawing of a pocket park in Fishtown and sat in front of it for forty minutes without moving a line.
At noon Graham texted. Sorry about last night. Crazy. Dinner tonight? I'll pick something up.
Sure, I wrote.
He got home at 6:30 with a bag of Thai food and purple shadows under his eyes. He set out the containers on the island and opened them, pushing the drunken noodles toward me because he knew I liked them.
I didn't sit down.
"How's Germantown?" I said.
He was pulling apart a pair of chopsticks, and he stopped for maybe half a second.
"Dry," he said. "Eventually. It was a mess."
"I called Eddie this morning."
The chopsticks came apart with a small crack.
"Why would you call Eddie?"
"Because I wanted to know if he was okay. You said the first floor flooded."
He laid the chopsticks side by side on the counter, lining them up exactly.
"Naomi."
"He said he slept like a baby. He said there was no pipe."
Graham rubbed a hand down his face and held it there over his mouth. When he finally took it away, he looked like someone who'd been waiting for a car accident and had just heard the brakes.
"Who is L?" I asked.
"It's Lila."
He said it right away. I'd expected another lie. I'd spent all day rehearsing what I'd say when he told me it was Luis from accounting or some broker named Leo.
"Lila has my number," I said. "She's in my phone as Lila. With a picture of her at the shore holding a crab."
"She got a new phone. A new number. She asked me to save it that way."
"Why?"
"Because she asked me to."
"Why did my sister call you at twelve-forty in the morning?"
"She had a scare." He was choosing his words like he was stepping around broken glass. "Somebody was at her door. She was frightened. I talked to her."
"You drove to her."
He didn't answer.
"You got out of our bed," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. "You told me a pipe broke. You drove to my sister's. You came home at three-thirty."
"Yes."
"Where's Daniel when somebody's at her door at midnight?"
For one second he looked like he wanted to tell me so badly his jaw was working around it.
"Naomi. I can't."
"You can't what?"
"I can't explain this right now. She's going through something. It's serious. She's family."
"She's my family."
"I know that."
"Then why is my sister calling you? Why does my own sister confide in my husband instead of me?"
"Maybe you should ask her that."
He said it fast and hard, like he'd been holding it in his teeth.
Nobody said anything. The refrigerator hummed, and somewhere down the hill a dog barked at nothing.
Graham shut his eyes. "I'm sorry. That was a shitty thing to say."
"Was it true?"
"I don't know." When he opened his eyes, they were red-rimmed. "I'm sorry. I'm exhausted. I didn't mean it how it sounded."
"How did you mean it?"
"I meant—" He looked up at the ceiling. "I meant it's hers. It isn't mine to tell. If she wants you to know, she'll tell you."
"And if she doesn't?"
"Then it's still hers."
I held the edge of the island. The granite was cold. I thought about the tape in the drawer, the deadbolt, the cortado, the voice across an empty room asking Li, where do you want the kitchen box.
"You lied to me," I said. "In our bed. Last night. After."
"I know."
"You lied on Thursday too. You weren't in King of Prussia."
I watched him realize how much I knew, then try to work out how I knew it.
"No," he said quietly. "I wasn't."
"Were you on Pine Street?"
He swallowed. "Naomi, please don't do this."
"I'm not doing anything. I'm standing in my kitchen asking my husband where he's been."
"I'm asking you to trust me."
"I did," I said. "That's how you got away with it this long."
He flinched. It didn't make me feel any better.
He picked his keys up off the counter.
"Where are you going?"
"For a drive. I need to clear my head before I say something else I can't take back." At the mudroom door he stopped with his hand on the frame. "I'm not doing anything wrong. I need you to hear that. I'm not doing what you think I'm doing."
"Then what are you doing?"
He looked at me for a long time. Then he left.
The Thai food sat open on the island, steaming, then not steaming, until I put the lids back on the containers and put them in the fridge.
I took out my phone and scrolled to Lila. Her picture came up, the one I'd taken four summers ago at Stone Harbor. She was squinting into the sun and holding a blue crab by its back fin at arm's length, laughing because it had tried to pinch her.
I pressed call. It rang six times before her voicemail picked up.
Hi, it's Lila, you know what to do.
I didn't leave a message. I stood there in the kitchen understanding one very specific thing: my husband had a phone number for my sister, and I didn't.