Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Annie
By the time Reed comes upstairs, I've got a suitcase gaping open on the bed and not a clue what I'm supposed to put in it.
A sweater lands halfway in, halfway out.
Two pairs of jeans go in next. I toss in a bra, then yank it back out because the underwire bites.
My hand finds a silk blouse, hesitates, lets it go, then grabs it again and shoves it in just to be done with it.
I'm not leaving for good. I'm not staying, either. Those are the only two things my brain can manage, and both of them sound like lies.
The dark-red gown is still where I left it, puddled on the bathroom floor.
Most of the makeup is gone, but there's still black smudged under my eyes.
Hairpins are scattered all over the marble counter.
My scalp throbs from where I yanked the raven mask off, and every time I move my head, some hidden pin digs in.
I go back for my chargers. Then my meds. Then my laptop. After that, I just stand there in the middle of the room, clutching my camera bag to my chest, staring at the floor and trying to remember if I packed socks.
The bedroom door opens. Reed stands in the doorway, no tie, shirt wrinkled, looking like he hasn't slept in days. He sees the suitcase.
"What are you doing?"
My fingers tighten around the camera strap. "Leaving for a while."
"Annie." He steps in, then stops himself. "I need you to listen to me about the kiss."
Of course he starts there.
"It was Lexi," he says. "But I didn't know it was Lexi. I swear to God, I thought she was you. The gown was almost identical. The mask. Her hair. I knew something was wrong almost immediately, and I pulled back the second I realized."
I stand beside the bed and let him say it.
He keeps going, voice rougher now. "I would never have touched her if I'd known."
"I believe you."
The words drop between us, soft and heavy.
Reed blinks. "You do?"
"Yes."
His face changes, caught between relief and confusion.
"The kiss was horrible," I say. "Walking in and seeing my husband with his mouth on another woman was horrible. Seeing it was Lexi was worse."
"Annie, I didn't know."
"I know you didn’t." I fold a T-shirt badly, then unfold it because my hands won't cooperate. "But Lexi isn't some woman at a party. She's the woman everyone around you has spent years treating like the real Mrs. Reed Dillon.”
His jaw tightens.
"She grew up with you. Catherine likes her.
She knows the houses, the family stories, and every old rule nobody ever bothered to teach me.
She's always right there with another emergency, another inside joke, another remember when.
" My breath catches, just short of a sob and I stop myself.
Not now. "People have joked for years that you should have married her. "
"That doesn't mean anything to me."
"It means something when she dresses like me and waits for you in a dark corridor."
He flinches. Good. I need something to hit.
"It means something when I have to stand there and watch the woman everyone thinks belongs here take my place so perfectly that you don't even realize when it's not me you're kissing."
"I thought she was you," he says again, softer.
"I believe you."
"Then why are you packing?"
I look up. The unspoken thing sits between us, the question he has been dreading all night.
"Who did you tell?"
He goes pale. My chest tightens, that sick feeling rolling through me. My body knows before he says a word, same as it's known all night.
"Maybe I'm wrong," I say quickly. Too quickly.
"Maybe someone found something. Maybe somebody dug through old records online.
Maybe they saw us leaving a clinic. Maybe a receptionist talked.
Maybe Catherine hired someone. Maybe medical records got compromised.
Maybe some photographer recognized us in Charlotte. "
"Annie."
"No. Give me one. Give me anything else."
He says nothing. The silence fills the room before he takes another step, and my hands fall still on the suitcase.
"Who did you tell?"
His eyes close for half a second. When they open, they look wet. "Glen."
The room tips, just a little. I grab the edge of the mattress.
"Months ago," he says. "After the last miscarriage. I was drunk. I was..." He drags one hand down his face. "I was falling apart."
"What did you tell him?"
"Too much."
"What did you tell him, Reed?"
He swallows. "That we'd lost the baby. That we'd been doing IVF. That we'd been trying for years. The doctors. The treatments."
My stomach turns. "The miscarriages?"
"Yes."
"How many?"
He doesn't answer fast enough.
"How many?"
"All of them."
Something in me goes quiet. I look past him, out at the tall windows going pale around the edges, at the curtains Catherine picked because they were proper. Proper, proper, proper. Even grief is supposed to mind its manners in this house.
"Did you tell him about the sex?"
His face breaks. "Annie."
"Did you tell your brother that our sex life had turned into schedules, windows, and my temperature before dawn?"
"I said I missed us. I didn't mean to make it sound..."
"Clinical?" My voice is flat. "Humiliating? Like I was some job you kept failing at?"
"I was hurting."
"So was I."
"I know."
"No, you don't." I step away from the bed. Standing still makes my chest feel tight. "You told someone everything about us. Not just that we lost babies. Not just that we were sad. You gave away the needles, the bloodwork, the schedules, the way the sex no doubt exhausted you."
His mouth opens, then closes.
"And then you came home to me. You slept beside me. You let me keep thinking that was ours. And you didn’t bother to tell me that I could walk into a room where it might be used against me like a weapon.”
He flinches at that. ”I thought it stayed with Glen."
"Did Tara hear?"
He goes still. I stare at him.
"Did Tara hear?"
"I heard her upstairs," he says. "That night."
"And did you ever plan to tell me?"
The pause is worse than the answer. "No."
Heat crawls up my neck, hot and stinging. "Why?"
"Because I was ashamed. Because nothing seemed to come of it. Because telling you would only hurt you."
"You convinced yourself keeping quiet was protecting me."
"Annie, I'm not trying to excuse it."
"You just did."
He takes that like a slap, and maybe it should feel good, but it doesn't. Nothing feels good.
"You gave Glen my body," I whisper. "You gave him my failures. And it traveled. Tara told somebody, and now your mother knows enough to corner me in a hallway and tell me Lexi could give you children."
Reed's head comes up. "She said what?"
I go back to the suitcase and shove toiletries into the side pocket. Toothbrush, face wash, a bottle of aspirin that rattles against the zipper.
"Annie."
"She told me loving you might mean letting you have the life you were meant to have."
"My mother had no right."
"Your mother had a weapon because you loaded it for her."
That shuts him up. For a minute, all I hear is my own breathing and the scrape of zipper teeth under my thumb. Then everything else starts to come loose.
"She's been doing this for years."
Reed looks at me carefully. "Doing what?"
"The comments. Children. Heirs. The Stanhope line. What a shame if everything passed sideways through the family. How some women are built for motherhood. How some women wait too long. How much you always loved children."
His face goes blank with shock. "She said those things to you?"
"Not with you in the room."
"Mother can be difficult, but she wouldn't intentionally say that if she knew what we'd been through."
"Do you hear yourself?" My voice cracks. "She makes sure you don't hear. That’s the point."
He takes a step, stopping when I look at him.
"And Lexi." I grab another sweater because having something in my hands keeps me grounded.
"Always Lexi needing your opinion. Lexi needing your help.
Lexi at every family dinner like she was issued with the silver.
Lexi and Catherine starting stories I couldn't enter if I tried.
Remember when, remember when, remember when, until my own marriage felt like it started halfway through a book everybody else had already read. "
"Her family has always been close to ours. It never meant anything."
“Do you hear yourself defending all this while I’m trying to tell you how I feel?”
His mouth shuts.
"I put up with all of it because you loved me.
Because you picked me. Because you married me and came home to me, so every little humiliation felt too small to matter.
" I press my hands to my eyes until the pinpricks show up.
"Do you know what it's like to walk into a room full of people who know where you came from the second you open your mouth? "
"Annie, you never had to change yourself for me."
“Maybe not for you, but if I wanted to stay here comfortably, I had to. And I’d always felt lucky that you chose me, so I did. I guess that’s on me.”
His face twists.
"I learned which words sounded too Appalachian in these rooms. I quit using the sayings that made people look at each other. I softened my vowels before I even realized I was doing it. I learned to hear myself the way your mother would before I spoke."
"Jesus."
"I figured out which stories from my childhood made people uncomfortable. How to talk about foster care like it was just some bad semester abroad. How to make my mother being murdered sound like something that wouldn't stain the tablecloth."
“Annie, don't."
"Don't what? Don’t tell you the truth?"
He looks sick.
"Little Orphan Annie," I say.
His brow furrows. "What?"
"That's what your mother calls me when she thinks I can't hear."
"No."
"Yes."
"My mother doesn't think that."
A dry, harsh sound escapes my chest. "Oh, if you only knew."
"What else has she said?”
I shake my head and zip the suitcase halfway, then wrestle the zipper over a sleeve caught in the teeth. "No."
"Annie, tell me."
"No. I'm not turning tonight into an itemized argument so you can decide which cuts were deep enough to matter."
"I wouldn't do that."
"You already have.”
He steps toward me again, and I step back. He stops.
For a second, I see the man from the darkroom. Rolled sleeves. Warm hands. The one who listened to my ghost stories and made jokes about the horror movies we watched together. The ache sits heavy in my chest.
"I need to go home."
"This is your home.”
“No." I look around the bedroom. Antique chairs, perfect lamps, windows facing land that had names before I was born. “I wanted it to be, but truth is, I’m an infection in this house. It took nearly six years, but the body finally found the fever to burn me out.”
“Annie, that’s not true.”
“It is, Reed. And I suspect if you look at it truthfully, you’ll know it.”
His throat moves. "Where are you going?"
"Bear Claw Junction."
"How long?"
"I don't know."
The next question costs him. I can see it in the way he braces. "Are you leaving me?"
My hand stops on the suitcase handle. "I don't know that either."
His eyes close.
"I know I can't stay here," I say. "I can't sleep in this house. I can't wake up next to you. I can't keep standing in rooms where people look at my losses like they're evidence in a case about whether I deserve you."
"We can go somewhere else together."
"No."
"Annie."
"I need to be away from you, too."
He swallows. I don’t want to hurt him, but I’m hurting too badly to be anything but honest right now.
"I'm sorry," he says. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
I turn back to the bathroom before his voice can get through. Another hairpin slips from behind my ear and clicks against the marble.
"Maybe Catherine is right," I say, quieter.
"Don't."
"Maybe you should stop spending your life waiting for my body to do something it apparently can't do."
"Annie, stop."
"Maybe you should have married the woman everybody picked out for you in the first place. Maybe you need someone who isn't broken."
"Don't call yourself broken."
I face him. "Don't tell me what I'm allowed to feel about my own body tonight."
He goes pale.
"I don't want Lexi," he says. "I want you."
"Tonight isn't about saying the right thing."
“I’m not trying to say the right thing. I’m telling you the truth.”
“I needed the truth before I stepped into an ocean full of sharks.”
Morning starts up without asking. The windows are gray. Somewhere outside, a bird tries out one thin, shaky note. Reed hears it too.
"You collapsed a few hours ago. Please don't drive right now."
"Morning's already coming. No point in waiting.”
"Let me drive you."
"No."
"Let me follow."
"No."
His hands curl at his sides. "Then call when you get there."
I drag the suitcase off the bed before he can touch it. "I'll let you know I got there safe."
It's not the promise he wants. It's the only one I've got.
The house is dead quiet as I wheel the suitcase through.
No music. No champagne laughter. No rustle of silk or polite applause.
Just polished floors, old portraits, and flowers drooping in urns from a party that outlasted me nearly fainting on the floor.
Reed follows a few steps behind, keeping his distance.
At the front door, I pause because for nearly six years, I've left this house expecting to come back. Dinner parties. Shoots. Trips to Aunt Lanie's. Errands in town. Always back to Reed. Always back to the room with his shirts in the closet and my camera batteries charging beside his watch.
Now the door opens onto air sharp enough to sting. I load the suitcase myself.
Reed stands, following, but not too close to spook me.
I look at him. The man I love, standing in the driveway of a house that's worn me down for years. His eyes are red. His mouth trembles once before he sets his jaw.
"I love you," he says.
I don't say it back, not because it isn't true.
Then I get in the car.
The tires crunch over gravel as I pull away. In the mirror, Reed stays right where I left him, one hand at his side, the other pressed flat to his chest. Stanhope shrinks behind me, all stone, dark windows, and old money, its roofline black against the first pale wash of dawn.
Catherine's voice rattles around in my head. Lexi's red dress flickers at the edge of my memory. Reed says Glen in a voice that cuts right through me.
I grip the wheel tighter. By the time I hit the lower drive, my throat aches from holding it all in. My mouth shapes the words I've swallowed for years, the old cadence slipping back where nobody can hear but me.
Ain’t nobody down there gonna ask me to sound like something else.
The gates open. I drive toward Bear Claw Junction before sunrise, away from Stanhope and toward the hills that never once made me earn the right to belong.