Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Idon't answer him, and Henry lets it go.
That’s the thing about Henry I keep forgetting when he isn't around. He asks the question everyone else keeps circling, then turns his eyes back to the road and lets the silence do the work.
And somehow, because he doesn't push, I want to tell him.
“He’s just being overly protective,” I say finally.
"It's not Oregon. It's the diagnosis. Kane told him that if I went back to work too fast, if I started forcing memories before my mind was ready, I could fracture whatever's holding me together.
" I hear how practiced it sounds. "David took that like scripture because it gives him peace of mind.”
I look out at the road.
"He's frightened for me. That's all it is."
"That's a generous read," Henry says.
"It's the true one."
"All right."
He leaves it. The rain comes on harder, and the wipers find a rhythm at last.
The world outside the glass is reduced to two cones of light. Ahead of us, the red taillights of a car that left the club before us blur through the rain.
"Can I say something you might not like?" Henry says.
"You're going to anyway."
"Your friend, Julia," he says, watching the road. "I stood on that terrace and watched her leave on the arm of a man who put bruises on her. I haven’t been here long, but I recognize control when I see it. And I couldn’t help but think, there goes a woman who's been taught the worst thing she can do is make a scene.
" He pauses, just long enough for it to land.
"Then I wondered, did he teach her that?
And who else on this road has taught a woman that same lesson in a different way? "
“We are not the same."
"I'm not saying you are. David may never have raised a hand to you." He slows as we pass a house, his eyes glancing toward it as if something caught his attention. "But there's more than one way to teach a woman not to trust what she saw. That's all I meant. I'll shut up now."
I let him shut up and look out at the rain.
I don't say what comes up in me. He has just described my marriage back to me in a sentence and made it sound dangerous.
Somewhere on the black stretch past Julia's house, his phone lights up in the console. Whatever's on the screen moves across his face for half a second before the calm comes back.
I think nothing of it. The whole night has run like this, one strange thing after another, each of them too small to hold on to by itself.
He pulls in at my gate and the security lights come up. My house glows like a stage set behind the relentless rain.
For a moment, we sit there staring out.
"I'll walk you in," he says, opening his door.
“No, Henry. You'll drown."
"I'll walk you in, Mallory."
And he does, up the flagstones with his jacket held over the two of us.
He’s close, his arm not quite around me.
I key in the code he taught me. It chirps and lets us into my dark hall.
Inside, the house is quiet and warm. It is just the two of us out of the storm, and I feel how easy it would be to step into a different life, his life, and never step back.
I step away from it. I turn on a light.
"Thank you," I say. "For getting me home."
"Anytime." He's already stepping back out under the eave, out of my house, giving me room.
"And Mallory." He pauses on the step with the rain coming down behind him.
"Whatever David says about him and Julia when he gets in, and he will come in with something, just listen to how he tells it.
Not what he says. Just how." He smiles. "Goodnight. "
Then he's gone, swallowed by the dark and the rain. I hear his car door close, then his tires on the gravel. I stand in the doorway and watch the taillights disappear up the road through the trees. I lock the door. I don't go up to bed.
Instead, I stay up and wait for David.
David comes in just after eleven.
I hear the car first, then the front door, then him in the hall. He hangs his wet coat and sets his keys in the dish. He moves quietly because he assumes I'm asleep. I say his name from the sofa, and he startles.
"You're still up?" he asks, turning on a lamp.
"Just dozing."
He crosses and sits on the edge of the coffee table, facing me. He takes my hand and sighs.
"I'm so sorry, Mal," he says. "About tonight. Your birthday was ruined."
“It’s not your fault.”
"It was, partly. I let him get to me. I should have laughed it off but I didn’t.” He looks down at our hands. "I don't laugh things off well anymore. I used to be good at it."
“Is this because of what he said?” I get the sense there’s more. I can see it in his demeanor.
He shakes his head. “No. You know that was bullshit. Julia and I. That was never a thing. It’s his excuse for being a shitty boyfriend.”
"I know," I say. And I do the thing Henry told me to do without deciding to. I listen to how he says it, not what. I hate that Henry's voice is in my head, weighing my husband's words.
He’s quiet for a while. The rain fills the silence. “No, it’s more than that," he says finally.
“What is it?”
He tries to smile, and it splits his lip again, a bright bead of blood he doesn't wipe. "Helen called me at the club. Right before everything with Chris. That's what was bothering me. It's probably what made me react to him. It was just one more thing I didn't need."
"What did she want?"
He lets out a tired breath.
"There's been a complaint. Anonymous. Sent to the board." He lets go of my hand and drags his palm over his face. "It's about the man from the break-in. The one who went down the steps. The one who died."
I go still.
"There was nothing suspicious about it, Mal. He'd taken a bad hit to the head, and the bleed was severe. His body was already in terrible shape. He was never going to wake up."
I place a hand on his leg. David covers it with his.
"It's awful, but it happens. But somebody wrote to the board and said I was in the building the night he died, outside my scheduled hours, with no official reason to be there. My badge shows I was there. And given that the man had broken into our house, they think the timing should be looked at.
"The timing?"
He hears what I'm not saying.
“Listen, it's probably nothing. Complaints get filed all the time.
They get looked at, they go away." He says it like he's trying to make himself believe it.
"But having it happen now couldn't be worse.
Not with the Division Chief post weeks away and a committee looking for a reason to pick someone else. "
“But you didn’t do anything.”
“I know, but it doesn't have to be true, Mal. It just has to be there while they're deciding."
“So…you were at the hospital the night he died?"
He nods. "I was in the building. Yes."
"For work?"
"No."
"Then...why?"
He looks away. It's small, barely anything, a glance toward the window as rain batters the black glass. But I see it.
"David."
He squeezes the bridge of his nose.
"Someone called me. A friend. It was personal."
"Who?"
He rubs at his mouth and winces when his fingers find the split lip.
"Someone from Portland. It’s nothing to do with the patient who died."
"That's not what I asked."
"No," he says quietly. "It isn't. Look, you wouldn't know them. Just someone from the past.”
And there it is. The gap where the truth should be.
I could push. But pushing means admitting how I know where he was, and I'm not ready to show him that.
Julia's warnings are in me, sitting close.
Still, a friend from Portland is only a friend from Portland.
I can't make it more than that without showing a card I'm not ready to play.
"But...you told me you were picking up things for the party," I say.
His face goes still. I hadn't meant to say it. Not like that, not yet.
"I was on my way," he says. "Then I got a phone call. They wanted to meet me. The conversation ran on longer than I thought it would."
"So that explains why you never answered your phone. I tried to call you."
He doesn't answer that.
"And now someone says you were there the night that man died, with no reason to be," I say.
He nods again. "With no official reason."
"They think you killed him, don't they?"
"No," he says, too quickly. "They don't think that."
But we both hear the lie in it. The complaint doesn't have to say murder. It only has to point.
I don't say anything more. I sit there with David's hand around mine, and I don't tell him that I watched a green dot cross the water that night and stop at that hospital. I don't say that I've been carrying that fact ever since.
I'm getting better at keeping things from him.