Page 70 of Such a Good Wife

I screwed up, more than I’d even thought. I put us in this position—he’d never even have had a reason to be at Luke’s house if it weren’t for me—but he did something worse. Accident or not, self-defense or not, he covered it up and now there is no going back. We need each other. I sit next to him on the floor. I touch his knee, and he looks at me with a mix of tenderness and surprise as if he never thought I’d touch him again, his sin now worse than mine.

“We can get through this,” I say, touching his face and leaning my forehead into his.

“It was an accident,” he repeats, and the depth of his pain is too vast for me to come near, so I let him cry. We both cry. We stay on the floor for hours, in the dark, finishing the bottle and talking through every option, worst-case scenarios, how to keep the kids safe no matter what.

Then, just before dawn, we fall into bed, drunk and empty, to meet sleep for a few hours before waking up to our new, dismantled lives.

***

30

HONESTY, FROM HERE on out, we both promise. But I don’t have the heart to tell him about the ring until a little time has passed. Collin stays home from work on the next day, and we try to keep a regular routine for the kids. I plan to take Claire to the park and run some errands, and Collin needs to catch up on paperwork, but instead we go back to bed after the kids leave for school. Sunlight streams through the east-facing window and we hold each other. We don’t talk.

I think about how much DNA Collin must have left. The authorities would have tested the glasses he and Luke were drinking from as well as Luke’s body, and the DNA would be found. But, like me, Collin has never been arrested, that I know of, so there won’t be a match when they run the unknown DNA through the system. Right now Collin isn’t on their radar. I just need to make sure they don’t ask any more questions about me. I still have the dirt on Valerie and Joe. It’s still valuable.

I told Collin about the phone, the blackmail, the money she’s insisting on, and I told the truth about what Lacy and I were doing and what we found. He didn’t ask how I got the money to pay her what I had already. I offered that I sold some old handbags and hadn’t figured out how to get her more money yet. There was too much going on for him to press the subject. I’ll tell him at some point, but not now.

“Text Valerie the screenshots,” Collin said the other night, as we sat on the kitchen floor in the small hours of the morning. “Tell her you’re not giving her any more fucking money and that not only is she guilty of blackmail, but she was sleeping with someone else while she was still married, that doesn’t look good for her. That, coupled with that text about meeting Joe before the charity event puts a big hole in her alibi. Tell her to leave you the hell alone.”

We were lying on the kitchen floor by then, hammered, my body draped over his, and so I texted her all of it, right there.

Now, hiding from the morning light, under the covers, my phone buzzes on the nightstand. I keep my head covered as I feel around with one hand and pull my phone in. She replied.

“What?” Collin asks, a pillow pressed over his head.

“Fuck.”

Valerie has responded. No text, just the video that blooms open on my screen and shows me tiptoeing away from Luke’s place. She’s not going away without a fight. Collin peers over my shoulder and sees a snippet of the video before I click it off and sit up, outraged. I throw my phone into the downy comforter and suppress a scream. Collin lies on his back and stares at the ceiling. After a few minutes, I lie back next to him, not knowing what else to do, and we stare at the ceiling together, side by side in our own separate pain.

“There’s that house in Panama,” Collin says, breaking the silence after several minutes.

“What?” I ask.

“The one we vacationed in, said maybe we’d buy it, retire there one day.”

“The kids.” I roll over into the fetal position and face him. “Ben’s school is doing wonders and Rachel is at the worst age to rip her out of the only school she’s known.”

“I know all of that, but they can adapt. This is survival.”

“How would we do that?”

“We sell the house, we—”

“Claire can’t make that trip.”

He can’t argue against that defense—her well-being. It’s not that I wouldn’t love to run away to an idyllic beach community and start over, but it’s not the solution. At least not yet.

“She could if we absolutely had to. She—”

“And you don’t know that you can get work there. We could be screwed,” I add.

He rises from the bed, goes quietly into the bathroom and turns the shower on without another word.

We spend the next few days exchanging remorseful, miserable looks. Part of me hates him for what he’s done, but I’m the one who put him in the situation. My part was not an accident; it was calculated and planned. His was a moment, a hot flare of anger, an understandable reaction to taunting by Luke, then a mutual fight that ended in a push that was too hard. I put it all in motion. The days pass in a slow fog. We sit close together on the couch in the evenings and let Ben choose the movies to watch while Rachel taps mindlessly on her iPad in the recliner. We share popcorn, and Collin squeezes my hand tightly. Every incoming text makes us jump. We fall hazily into a light tease of sleep at night but can’t surrender to its pull. We move around each other on autopilot, but the haze of anxiety is palpable, and we’ve exhausted talking about the situation. Mostly, we just wait for a knock on the door to take one of us away.

After another week goes by, we start to let ourselves relax ever so slightly and think, just maybe, Joe and Davis had been satisfied with my story.

Then, one evening as cooler weather creeps in, just before dinner, I take a break from cooking and sit in the kitchen window seat, staring at a puckered ring of frost outside the window, drinking a glass of wine and waiting for the rice to cook. I see a police car making its way slowly down our road again. For a very brief moment I’m so lost in my own consuming thoughts that I forget, and I think nothing of it, the way I would before we were criminals, but it only takes a second for me to stand up anxiously and murmur a prayer that it’s just an everyday patrol of the area. But then it pulls into our drive and Detectives Davis and Brooks exit their respective squad car doors and walk up to my door. Which one of us are they here for?

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