Chapter Three—Lorna #3
“I know that.” His answer is quieter, but he doesn’t take it back. Somehow that hurts more than another argument.
For months, I’ve been telling myself he doesn’t understand the evidence because he’s busy, Fenton filters everything, and Chris only sees pieces instead of the whole pattern. I kept finding reasons for him.
He doesn’t need them. Chris thinks he understands perfectly.
I push myself out of the chair and walk toward the dresser. Three steps make the room sway, so I stop and brace myself against the edge until it settles. “You think I’m imagining this.”
“I think you’re connecting things that may not be connected.
” His voice follows me across the hotel room, weary now instead of angry.
“I think you retired from a career that took you all over the world, I started traveling even more, and you ended up spending too much time alone. Then a few genuinely strange things happened, and you got scared.”
I stare at the pale print above the dresser without seeing it.
He continues. “Once you were scared, everything started looking threatening. A package. Flowers. Somebody recognizing you. A message online. Fenton pointed out that the calls get worse when I’m gone, and I couldn’t ignore that anymore.”
My stomach twists. “The calls don’t get worse. The stalking gets worse.”
“Lorna.”
“No.” I turn back toward the bed, anger giving me enough strength to move. “Don’t say my name like I’m a child throwing a tantrum.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. You’ve been doing it this entire conversation. You say something horrible, then you soften your voice so it sounds reasonable.”
His patience finally breaks. “Because I’m trying not to fight with you when you’ve got a head injury.”
“I’ve got a head injury because someone attacked me.”
“You don’t know that.” The words come out sharper than anything he’s said tonight.
We both get quiet.
I stop beside the bed with one hand on the mattress. My shoulder hurts. My throat hurts. Tears are drying too tight on my cheeks, and I can hear my own pulse in my ears.
Chris swears quietly. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No. I mean we don’t know what happened yet.
The alarm was armed. There’s no forced entry.
The police themselves questioned the injuries.
You hit your head and lost consciousness.
” He pauses, and when he continues, his anger has burned down into something worse.
Resignation. “I don’t know what you want me to do with that except wait for facts. ”
“I told you the facts.”
“You told me what you remember.”
My knees weaken enough that I sit on the edge of the bed without meaning to. The phone stays pressed against my ear while I stare at nothing.
Not you told me what happened.
What I remember.
A version produced by the frightened, lonely wife he thinks I have become. I rub at my cheek with the heel of my hand. “Do you think I hurt myself?”
“No.”
“Do you think I put the rose there?”
His tone is distant. “I don’t know how the rose got there.”
“Do you think I’m lying?”
His answer comes immediately. “No.”
That should matter, but it doesn’t.
I stare at the dark television, where my reflection is faint enough to look like a stranger’s. “Then explain it to me without hiding behind words like stressed or perception. What do you actually think happened?”
Chris doesn’t answer for several seconds. I hear him move, then something scrape against a hard surface on his end. When he finally speaks, he sounds as worn out as I feel.
“I think you’ve been scared for months. You’ve been alone too much with nothing to do, and you’ve convinced yourself there’s one person behind every strange thing that’s happened. I think tonight you were already frightened before anything happened, and you wanted me to come home early.”
My mouth opens, but nothing comes out.
He keeps going. Maybe because I’ve demanded honesty. Maybe because he’s too tired to keep protecting me from it.
“I think the lights went out. Something happened that made you panic. You fell or hit the wall and lost consciousness. When you woke up, you interpreted everything through what you’ve already been afraid of.”
The room seems farther away. I have to set the phone on speaker because my wrist suddenly can’t support its weight. It rests on the bedspread beside me while Chris’s voice fills the beige room.
“I don’t think you’re making anything up, Lorna. I don’t think you’re doing this for attention on purpose. I think you’re genuinely terrified, and that’s exactly why I think you need help.”
My eyes fill again, but I don’t wipe them.
There is no stalker in his version. There’s a lonely, bored, frightened wife whose real career ended three years ago and whose little online business doesn’t fill enough hours. A wife who misses her husband, notices when he’s gone, and has somehow turned that emptiness into danger.
Fenton didn’t have to convince Chris I’m dishonest. He only had to convince him I’m unreliable.
I pick up the phone again. “You think I imagined someone choking me.”
Chris makes a frustrated sound. “I don’t know what happened during the period you can’t account for.”
“I remember the choking.”
“You remember being unable to breathe after hitting your head.”
“No.” Anger gives my voice strength again. “I remember his arm around my neck. I remember trying to get my fingers under it. I remember kicking him. He smelled a bit like sandalwood.”
“I know that’s what you think.”
The tears spill over, but I laugh once because crying isn’t enough for how badly that sentence hurts. “You believe I think it happened.”
“I’m not saying your brain invented an entire attack.”
I snort. “What are you saying then?”
Chris is silent.
I wait, breathing through the ache in my throat.
Finally, he says, “I need you to consider the possibility that what you remember isn’t exactly what happened.”
My last hope of getting through to him gives way. Not loudly. There’s no dramatic snap. I simply stop trying to make him understand.
I look at the bruises around my wrists and remember the hand over my mouth. Rubber between my teeth. My bare feet sliding across hardwood. The impact against the wall. The pressure closing around my neck until the light disappeared.
My husband thinks those are symptoms.
I spent eighteen months documenting a threat because I was afraid nobody would believe me without proof. I never imagined the person I’d need to prove it to would be Chris.
“How long?” I ask.
He doesn’t understand. “How long what?”
“How long have you thought I needed a psychiatrist?”
His silence answers first. “A few months,” he admits.
I close my eyes. A few months.
While I photographed deliveries. While I logged messages. While I stopped walking to Pilates alone. While I checked the hall camera before I opened my own front door. While I called my husband and got his assistant.
Chris watched my life get smaller and decided fear was causing it. He never seriously considered that fear might be the rational response.
“I have to go.”
His exhaustion disappears instantly. “Lorna, don’t hang up.”
“I can’t talk to you anymore tonight.” I never want to speak to him again right now.
“I’m trying to help you.”
I laugh bitterly. “Our definitions of help are wildly different.”
He doesn’t answer.
I wipe my face and stand more carefully this time. The hotel key card is on the desk near the door. My wedding ring catches the lamp when I lift my hand.
“You let Fenton explain me to you.” My voice is unsteady, but I don’t care anymore. “I told you he was getting between us before any of this started. Then I told you someone was stalking me, and instead of looking at what I gave you, you asked him what he thought was wrong with me.”
The anger returns sharply to his tone. “That’s not how it happened.”
“Liar.” I say it softly, but I hope it cuts through him. “You stopped being my husband months ago. I just didn’t realize until now. I became another problem for Fenton to handle, not the woman you once loved.”
“I do love you.”
“Not enough.”
“Don’t tell me that. I’ve put up with this for months.”
“It’s no longer your problem.”
“Lorna, please.”
My throat closes around the next words, so I take a second before forcing them out. “I woke up on the floor tonight and had to check whether I’d been raped. I called my husband because I needed him, and you’ve spent this conversation explaining why I can’t trust myself.”
Chris says my name again, but his voice cracks slightly this time.
I can’t let that reach me.
“Goodbye, Chris.” I hang up.
He calls back almost immediately. His name fills the screen while I stand beside the dresser staring at it. I don’t answer. When the ringing stops only to start again, I turn off the ringer.
Eighteen months after Fenton started working for Chris, I sat across from my husband at our dining table and told him I couldn’t keep reaching him through another person. I’d called four times that week, and Fenton had answered every one.
“He’s not working for us,” I’d said. “He’s working around me.”
Chris had set down his fork. “What happened?”
“I called you four times this week.”
He’d sounded unconcerned. “I’ve been in meetings.”
“I know.”
“That’s why Fenton screens.”
I remember pushing roasted potatoes around my plate because we’d already had variations of the conversation twice. “I know that too. I’m telling you I can’t reach my husband.”
His expression softened. “You can reach me.”
“Through him.”
“Only when I’m unavailable.”
I had tried to keep my voice level, not wanting an argument. “That’s becoming most of the time.”
Chris looked down at his plate before meeting my gaze again. “What do you want me to change?”
At the time, I’d been relieved by the question. He was asking what I needed. I hadn’t yet learned that asking and understanding weren’t always the same thing. “I want my calls to come directly to you.”
He lifted his glass to drink first. “I can’t always answer.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“Then what difference does it make whether they go to voicemail or Fenton?”