Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Reed
The house feels too quiet after Annie leaves.
Stanhope is never completely quiet. There are knocks from the old pipes and the wind beats against the long windows.
The staff move quietly behind closed doors, removing all traces of my mother's masquerade before the stains harden or the flowers drop their petals onto the polished marble.
Yet, when compared with the music, the laughter, and the noises made by the masks, the silk, and the champagne glasses, the quiet seems wrong.
In the west sitting room, a half-empty champagne glass sits abandoned beneath my great-grandmother's portrait.
A black ribbon lies curled on the hearth like something shed.
Out in the main hall, the flowers are already drooping, their heavy white petals browning under the cloying stench of dying lilies and candle smoke.
Annie is gone.
The thought comes to me and my mind pushes it aside just as it does with any issue that's too big to face directly.
I could go to Tennessee. I could get in the car right now, or arrange a flight, and be there in a few hours.
I can tell Annie again about the kiss when she's had her sleep.
I can talk to my mother. I can ensure Lexi never steps foot inside this house again.
And then I see Annie’s face again. Standing in the bedroom, without any make-up, her hair only partly down with the hairpins scattered over the counter as she threw the clothes into a suitcase since she couldn't bear one more night here.
”Are you leaving me?”
”I don't know.”
I clench my phone so tightly that it’s a wonder the screen doesn’t crack.
Dillons look down at me in photographs framed in oil, gilt, and silver.
There are men in riding coats, women wearing pearls, and children stiffly posed next to dogs and horses.
My father is seen shaking hands with a governor and my mother is in white at a charity luncheon.
There’s a photo of me at sixteen in a blazer that I hated beside a horse that liked me about as much as I liked him, which isn’t saying much.
There’s another of me in a football uniform at prep school with my arm around Glen’s.
At least my smile looks real in that one.
Annie is here, too, in a technical sense. Our wedding photograph is hung, though looking at it now, it appears to have been placed there as an afterthought. Still, I focus on her face, beautiful, smiling, and no doubt, just in love as I was. I never doubted that.
Still don’t.
What’s missing is anything that would tell me who Annie is beyond Mrs. Reed Dillon. There are no prints of hers on the wall, despite Annie being a talented photographer. No cemetery in Bear Claw Junction. No fog rolling off the mountains. No abandoned buildings being eaten by kudzu.
I always used to consider it a question of taste; my mother preferred landscapes with a background history.
Annie laughed it off, saying the house didn't need one more dead person displayed among the others, even if that person was simply a ghost. I laughed at that and, in the darkroom, kissed the back of her neck, telling myself that she knew how much I admired her.
Annie said she did everything to mold herself into a person that would be accepted here. The thought that she never felt like she belonged hurts more than I can deal with right now.
I might admit that I didn’t know. That’s what I’d like to do.
I had no knowledge of anyone calling her Little Orphan Annie.
I didn’t know that Catherine waited until I was out of the room to make comments about Annie’s inability to carry to term.
I wasn’t aware that Lexi’s constant presence had turned into a statement on how Annie didn’t really belong.
But then I recall Annie’s laugh when I mentioned that my mother didn’t have any ill will toward her.
“Oh, if you only knew.”
The defense collapses in on itself.
I pull out my phone and call Glen.
He picks up the phone on the fourth ring, and his voice is heavy with both sleep and alarm. "Reed?”
"Who did you tell?"
Silence.
"What?"
“Who did you tell?" My voice sounds dangerous. I can’t ever recall sounding so infuriated, especially with my brother. "About the miscarriages, the treatments, the IVF, and Annie's fertility history. Who?"
Glen blows out a heavy breath. "Jesus, Reed."
"Answer me."
“You’re the one who told me, Reed.”
"That was between us."
“You turned up at my house half drunk, spewing all that. I’m sure Tara heard at least some of it. You weren’t exactly quiet.”
"So you told her the rest?"
"She's my wife."
I shut my eyes, pressing my thumbs into the sockets until I see stars.
“Well, either you or Tara told someone outside that house.”
"Glen."
“She may have mentioned it to Mom, but I’m not sure. No one beyond family, though. I’d bet on that.”
“No one beyond family," I repeat.
"Reed, come on. I’m sure Mom was worried about you. People knew you and Annie had been under strain. Nobody was mocking her.”
I note Glen saying Mom was worried about me. Not Annie.
"Mom told Annie tonight that maybe loving me meant letting me have children with Lexi.”
“Fucking hell,” Glen says. “Mom’s always been on one about Annie.”
“What?”
Glen sighs. “Forget it.”
"Glen."
“You’re telling me you don’t know how she acts differently around Annie compared to anyone else? Even Tara’s mentioned it.”
I push past that. If I look at it too closely, the twisting in my gut will start up again.
“If that’s true then why give Mom the knife to twist in Annie’s back.”
"You told me first," he snaps, anger cracking through the shame in his voice. "You don't get to put this all on me."
For a second, all I hear is my own breathing. He's right, and I hate him for it. Then I hate myself more.
Glen says my name in a quieter tone, but I hang up before he has a chance to feel sorry in a way that I'd have to deal with. The screen in my hand then goes dark.
The black glass shows my reflection: pale, bearded, and still wearing the shirt I was wearing when my wife packed up her suitcase and drove away from me before dawn.
I sit on the lowest stair and open the browser on my phone.
Hollow Country. I know my wife's work. I know the cemetery past Lanie's house.
I know the road where we parked once during a thunderstorm because it was spooky and romantic and I wanted to hear what she sounded like when I touched her with the thunder cracking outside.
I know how Annie likes broken windows, crooked porches, and old cemeteries.
But when the gallery page loads, I realize how little I know.
There are titles I don't recognize: Saints at the Tree Line, The Last Porch Light, Widow's Road, October, Crane House Study No. 3.
I start by clicking that one.
The house on the screen is one I don’t recognize. Mountain fog embraces it like the weather gave it stage direction. The porch sags. Vines crawl everywhere.
I stare until the phone dims in my hand. She made this while living under my roof. She named it. Printed it. Sold editions of it. And I couldn't have told anyone the title.
The next photograph is an abandoned church, white paint peeled to gray, door hanging open.
Then a cemetery with one white pine bent over the stones.
Another print shows a roadside shrine under bare winter branches.
I can imagine Annie feeling sad as she took the picture, but refusing to let the feeling stop her from documenting it.
My wife has built an entire world inside her camera, and Stanhope has given her a storeroom behind the back stairs.
I tap through the purchase options: framed, museum glass, largest size, every available edition. The numbers climb. I barely see them. Money is clean, fast, and comes installed with the software of being a Dillon. It goes where I send it and becomes proof that I've done something.
Annie's work should be here. That part is true. She should walk through the main hall and see herself on these walls. Also true. I want her to come home and know I’ve seen all of this. I want her to know that I’ll paint her name on the walls if that’s what I need to do.
That's where the thought turns.
I picture her stopping beneath the gallery wall. Her hand going to her mouth. Tears in her eyes. Maybe she says my name the way she used to say it in the dark, soft and a little disbelieving. Maybe by tomorrow night.
The shame comes a beat late, but it comes. She’s gone, and here I am fantasizing about being her hero for doing the bare minimum.
Still, I keep going. I email the gallery about sold-out pieces.
I ask about artist proofs, archived editions, private collections, and anything available for acquisition.
Expedited shipping. Immediate framing. No budget limit.
The reply comes quicker than expected. Not that it surprises me.
Men with my last name get quick replies at five in the morning.
By the time the final confirmation hits my inbox, I've bought every listed print in the Hollow Country series.
The phone rests in my palm. Nothing changes.
The house stays silent. Annie doesn't call asking what I’ve done.
The bed upstairs remains empty, one pillow still carrying the dent from where she slept the night before.
Before she had to stand in a room and pretend to be okay because I hadn’t warned her that there were potentially predators standing in the shadow ready to tear her to pieces.
I stand.
If I stay here, I'll go room by room making orders that feel like repentance. I'll have portraits moved before breakfast. I'll call my mother and say things that should have been said years ago. I’ll inform all the staff that Lexi Cavanaugh isn’t to be permitted on the premises ever again.
I can do all of that and Annie will still be back in Tennessee. Hurting.
I book the earliest flight I can make, then a rental car out of Knoxville. Driving all the way would give me too many hours to think and too much time to arrive furious instead of useful.
Useful. Because I’ve been doing a great job at that.
I go upstairs and pack. Not much. Shirts, jeans, a jacket, a phone charger. The old Henley Annie likes, the one she used to take because the worn cotton was soft against her skin and she said she liked that it smelled like me.
At the dresser, I catch sight of the framed photograph Annie keeps there.
College, both of us too young and sunburned after a football game, her cheek pressed to my shoulder, my arm locked around her waist because I loved touching her.
She turned me into a Neanderthal. I wanted to mark her as mine so no one else could claim her because I knew how damned amazing she was.
She didn’t need a pedigree. That would have honestly ruined what she was. Beautiful, amazing, authentic.
My phone lights up with the travel confirmation. Beneath it sits the gallery receipt. Beneath that, a notes file where I've started a list without realizing it.
Glen.
Tara.
Catherine.
Lexi.
Portraits.
Darkroom.
Tennessee.
Apologize properly.
Bring her home.
I stare at the last line until the words blur. Bring her home. Have her back in our bed before night falls. Be able to touch her and tell her that she’s the only one I want. Not Lexi. Not some other person chosen for the pedigree or some biological imperative my mother is betting on.
Dawn presses gray against the windows when I carry my bag downstairs.
In the main hall, the ancestral portraits wait in their perfect rows.
The largest family grouping dominates the wall above the table where someone abandoned that black ribbon.
For one sharp second, I imagine Annie's photographs there instead.
Fog. Rot. Mountain dark. Her eye claiming the room that never made space for her.
The idea gives me a hard flash of relief. Then I check my phone.
Nothing from Annie.
I stand under the painted faces of my family with a suitcase in my hand, a receipt for every photograph my wife has made public, and a flight to Tennessee leaving in three hours.
All my life, when something went wrong, I made something happen.
Annie just left because nobody here listened closely enough to what was already happening to her.
I put the phone in my pocket and walk out into the cold morning anyway.