The Wife He Chose to Lock Out

Chapter 1

The summer people were gone by the second week of October. After that the road out to the point belonged to the crows and the oil truck, and Winterbourne sat at the end of it with its shutters open and its lights on, the only house awake for a mile in either direction.

Imogen liked November here. She always had.

The water went the color of a nickel and stayed that way until March, and the tourists took their questions about the house with them when they left.

Nobody asked her in November whether it was true about the Vanderbilts.

Nobody asked what a place like this cost.

She came down the back stairs at six with her hair still up from work and found the kitchen smelling like garlic and the two of them at the island.

"There she is," Cormac said.

He was in the chair with his back to the stove, sleeves pushed up, a glass of something red he wasn't drinking.

Fiona sat across from him with her laptop open and a legal pad beside it, three pens lined up at the top of the page in a row so straight it looked deliberate.

She had been in the guest wing for six weeks.

The pens had been lined up like that for six weeks.

"Don't get up," Imogen said, because Fiona had started to.

"I wasn't going to."

"Good."

It came out fine. It sounded fine. Eight years of sounding fine.

She got a glass down and filled it at the tap and stood with her back to the sink, which is where she always stood, and listened to her husband and his executive assistant finish a sentence neither of them had started.

"—if Bayard signs Thursday," Fiona said.

"He'll sign Thursday."

"He said that about the eleventh."

"He'll sign Thursday."

Fiona wrote something down. Cormac watched her write it. The deal was five weeks from closing and had been the only subject in the house since the last week of September, and Imogen had gotten good at not asking about it, the way you get good at not touching a bruise.

"How was the meeting?" she said.

"Fine," Cormac said.

"Good."

She drank her water. Outside the window the light was gone off the water entirely, which happened at ten past four now and still surprised her every year.

They ate at seven. Fiona said she wasn't hungry and then ate, standing, and took her plate to the sink herself and rinsed it, which Imogen had told her four separate times she didn't have to do.

There was a housekeeper three days a week.

Fiona rinsed her plate anyway. It was, Imogen thought, a way of saying I am not a guest here, and she had never been able to decide whether that was a kindness or the opposite.

Afterward Cormac carried the dishes and Imogen wiped down the counter and they talked about the house, the way they did now. The storm windows. The gutter on the north side. Whether to have the boiler looked at before Christmas or wait.

"I'll call Tuesday," he said.

"You said that in September."

"I did say that in September."

He put his hand flat on her back as he went by with the platter, and left it there for a second, and Imogen felt the old easy warmth go through her, and hated that it still worked, and did not move away.

At nine she went up. At twenty past she came out of the bathroom to get her book off the hall table, and stopped, because they were at the bottom of the stairs.

She couldn't see them. She could hear them.

"—no, but the thing is he knows," Fiona said. "That's what I keep telling you. He's known since the summer."

"He doesn't know."

"Cormac."

And her husband laughed.

It was not a loud laugh. It was the short one, down in his chest, the one he did when somebody had caught him out and he was going to admit it. Imogen had heard that laugh maybe nine times in eight years. She had gotten two of them.

"All right," he said. "All right. He knows."

"Thank you."

"You're insufferable."

"I'm right."

"You're both."

Imogen stood in the upstairs hall in her robe with her hand on the table and did not pick up the book.

She had asked him about Bayard at dinner. He'd said fine.

That was the whole of it. Nobody was touching anybody.

If she went down those stairs right now she would find two people three feet apart with a laptop between them, and Fiona would stand up, and Imogen would say don't, and everyone would go to bed.

There was nothing to walk in on. There had never been anything to walk in on, not once, not in four years, and Imogen knew that with a certainty she could have sworn to in court.

He just told Fiona things.

That was all. He told Fiona what the day had actually been like, and he told his wife it was fine, and somewhere around year four that had stopped being a thing she noticed and started being the weather.

She went to bed.

She heard him come up at eleven. She heard him say goodnight in the hall, to Fiona, first — night — and then the bedroom door, and then his side of the mattress going down, and then his hand finding her hip under the blanket the way it had every night for eight years.

"You awake?"

"No," she said.

"Okay."

And he was asleep in four minutes, because he always was, and she lay there in the dark doing the arithmetic she had promised herself she would stop doing.

Five more weeks. Then the deal closed, and Fiona went back to Providence, and the guest wing was a guest wing again, and whatever this was would be over because it would have nowhere left to live.

She could do five weeks. She had done four years.

She woke at two because she was thirsty.

That was all. There was nothing in it. She lay there for a minute deciding whether she wanted water enough to get out of a warm bed, and then she did, and she took her phone off the nightstand because she always took her phone, and went down the back stairs in her bare feet without turning on a light.

The kitchen was cold. The floor was colder. She ran the tap until it went cold too and filled a glass and stood with her back to the sink, where she always stood, and looked at nothing.

That was when she heard the glass.

It was not a crash. That was the thing she would think about later, for months — that it didn't sound like anything. It sounded like somebody setting a heavy tray down too hard, somewhere off to the left, in the room they called the morning room and never used.

Then it sounded like it again.

Then a man said something, quietly, and another man answered him.

The alarm went off at seven minutes past two.

Ninety seconds.

Imogen knew the number. She had been standing in the hall four years ago with a coffee in her hand when Astrid Sable walked the two of them through it — ninety seconds from trip to seal, that's the standard, that's what everybody specs — and Cormac had said fine, and signed, and Imogen had thought about the word seal for a second and then thought about the storm windows instead.

Ninety seconds was a long time. That's what Astrid had said. It feels short when you hear it. It's long when you're in it.

The alarm was a low pulse, not a shriek, three tones and a gap and three tones again, everywhere in the house at once. Above it, distantly, the sound of two men deciding whether to run.

They did not run.

Imogen put the glass down on the counter. She did it carefully, and knew even as she did it that it was insane.

Then she went for the stairs.

Not the back stairs. The back stairs came up into the hall outside the guest wing and the guest wing was the wrong end of the house. The safe room was off the master landing, eighteen inches of steel behind a panel of painted pine that Astrid had never once let them call a secret door.

Front stairs, then. Across the kitchen, through the butler's pantry, out into the front hall, up.

She got four steps.

A man came out of the morning room into the front hall.

She saw him for about half a second, sideways, in the dark, as she pulled back into the pantry doorway — a big shape, a jacket, something long in one hand. He stopped. He had not seen her, and if she moved now he would.

The alarm pulsed. Three tones and a gap.

She counted. She didn't decide to. Her mouth was doing it without her, the way it had done at fourteen when she put her hand through a lantern pane and stood in the dark counting while the blood ran off her thumb, because counting was a thing to do when there was nothing to do.

Eleven. Twelve.

The man moved off toward the dining room. She heard the second one answer him from the library.

Sixteen. Seventeen.

She went.

Not up the front stairs — he was between her and the front stairs. Back. Back through the pantry, around, the back stairs after all, two at a time with her hand skidding on the rail, up into the dark of the second-floor hall.

Twenty-nine. Thirty.

The guest wing door stood open.

She saw that and she was already past it, already turning left into the long hall that ran the width of the house toward the master landing, bare feet on a runner her mother-in-law would have hated if she'd had one, and she was going to make it.

That was what she thought. Thirty seconds gone and sixty to go and forty feet of hallway, and she was going to make it, and in about four seconds she was going to see her husband's face and he was going to see hers and the worst night of their lives would be something they told people about at dinner.

Thirty-six.

She came around the corner onto the landing.

The panel was open. The light inside the safe room was on — that flat white service light Astrid had insisted on — and it was throwing a long rectangle out onto the landing floor, and the rectangle was getting narrower.

Fiona was already inside. Imogen saw her clearly for the length of a breath: barefoot, in the gray robe from the guest bath, one hand up and braced on the doorframe, her face turned back out into the hall.

Cormac was half in and half out. He had his back to the landing.

He had his hand flat on Fiona's back, low, between her shoulder blades, moving her in — the exact place he had put it on Imogen's back in the kitchen five hours ago going past with the platter — and he was saying something down into the room, and his face was turned the wrong way.

Not toward the hall. Not toward the stairs. Not toward the dark end of the house where his wife would be coming from if his wife were coming.

In.

He was looking in.

Thirty-nine.

"Cormac," Imogen said.

She did not shout it. That was the thing she would come back to and come back to and come back to, at four in the morning, for the rest of her life.

Two men were in her house and she was eleven feet from the only room built to hold her and she said her husband's name at the volume you would use in a restaurant, because there were strangers downstairs, and because some part of her that had been trained before she could read still believed the worst thing that could happen in this house was a scene.

Forty.

His shoulder moved. Something in it — a hitch, a half-turn, the beginning of a man looking around.

And Fiona said, from inside the room, perfectly clearly, in the flat competent voice she used on the phone with Bayard's people:

"She's already in."

Forty-one.

The door came across.

It did not slam. Eighteen inches of steel on a hydraulic arm does not slam; it travels, smooth and unhurried, the way an elevator door travels, and the white rectangle on the floor narrowed to a stripe and the stripe narrowed to a line and the line went out.

Then there was the sound of the bolts.

There were six of them. They went in sequence, top to bottom, and it took about two seconds, and it was the loudest thing Imogen had ever heard in her life and it was not loud at all.

She stood on the landing in her bare feet.

Below her, in her house, a man said something to another man, and both of them went quiet, and then one of them started up the front stairs.

She would think about the forty-one seconds for a year.

She would not think, much, about the four hours.

The four hours were a place she went and did not come back from in the ordinary way; they were weather, they were a thing that had happened to her body.

But the forty-one seconds she could hold in her hand and turn over, and she did, every day, the way you work at a tooth.

He had put his hand on Fiona's back.

He had been looking in.

He had been told his wife was already inside, and the woman who told him was standing eleven feet from the hall his wife would have come down, and he had taken her word for it.

He had not called out. He had not put his head out and said Imogen.

Forty-one seconds into ninety, in a house he had bought and gutted and paid to make safe, he had accepted somebody else's account of where his wife was and he had let the door close.

That was all. That was the entire event.

She stood on the landing and understood, with the same clean certainty she'd had two hours earlier lying in the dark — nobody is touching anybody, there is nothing to walk in on — that she had been wrong about which thing she should have been afraid of.

Nobody was touching anybody.

He just told Fiona things. And when it came down to ninety seconds and one door, Fiona was the one who got told, and Fiona was the one who got answered, and Fiona was the one whose word about the world he took as the world.

The man on the front stairs reached the top.

Imogen moved.