Page 86 of The Wife

I clenched my eyes shut, not wanting to process the implications of what he was telling me.

“I’m so sorry, Angela. She was making you out to be an awful wife, and it just came out. I don’t know what I was thinking. But I owe you the truth. Kerry’s still out there somewhere, and she knows.”

My whole body began to shake. I didn’t want to think about where Kerry was now. The apartment’s air conditioning was struggling against the heat outside, but I felt as if I were standing in a freezer. I pulled the blankets up to my neck and forced myself to regain control.

“You didn’t tell her about Spencer? Only about me?”

I would never have told Jason the truth about Spencer except for the problems I had carrying a baby after we got married. My condition wasn’t temporary. It was structural, according to the doctors—an anomaly in the uterus. Not insurmountable, but how could I explain my difficulties bringing a child to term under the most privileged medical conditions on the literal planet, when I had supposedly given birth in captivity as a crime victim? He didn’t understand why I wouldn’t keep trying.

So I had to tell Jason. A year after Charlie kidnapped me, Sarah showed up. Spencer was born the following year. When we had to leave the house after the police came, Charlie decided that two girls and a baby was too specific a description. He killed Sarah, and kept me and Spencer.

Most of what I told the police was true, I explained, except Sarah was the one who got pregnant, not me. But she was younger, and always a little bit off, and I had taken care of the baby at least as much as she had. That was Charlie’s logic, at least.

When the rescue team descended on Niagara Falls, my only goal was to protect Spencer and keep him with me. I said he was mine. That’s why Mom said she’d sue everyone on-site if they tried to examine us physically. Spencer didn’t have my blood, but I was the only family he had left.

“I swear on my life,” Jason promised now, “I will take the truth about our son to the grave. But to have spoken even a word about your past to her was a terrible betrayal. It wasn’t my story to tell.”

I nodded, imagining their conversation—Kerry running me down, trying to convince Jason to marry her. Jason explaining that there were things about me she didn’t understand.

But he had stopped short of telling her everything.

“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now, I guess.” The cavalier words were overcompensation for the emotions I was fighting to control. “Maybe she has one ounce of decency and will keep it to herself.”

“I’d do anything to turn back the clock and change all this,” he said.

He had no idea how much I wanted that, too.

The room became quiet, and I stood up to get dressed. “I meant what I said before,” he said softly. “I would have never left you.”

Maybe not, I thought, but that’s not what you told Kerry.

When I left his building, I crossed Eighth Street. Inside the mobile store I bought a prepaid phone, the kind a European tourist might buy on a visit to New York City. In some circles, it would be called a burner. I was going to need it. I had made my decision weeks ago. I would never be Jason’s wife again, which meant I needed a longer-term plan.

55

Three Days Later

I remember when I used to think of the reserved cars at the front of the Cannonball as the equivalent of a private jet, the way the rich folks arrived to the Hamptons in the summer. A couple times a week, an express train ran between Manhattan and the Hamptons, shaving the ride down to about two hours. The big splurge was a booked seat during peak season, at double the price, with bar service and no anxiety about having to find room on a train carrying twice the number of people intended.

Now, our $51 tickets felt like slumming. The Audi had been sold, along with the carriage house, so driving was no longer an option. Last summer we had gotten into the habit of using the helicopter service to save time, because in Jason’s world, time was money. Now we were the kind of people who rode the train, springing for the reserved seats.

“You sure your mom’s okay with me staying there? Susanna offered me a guest room.”

I was too busy waving down a taxi in the crowd to have this discussion with him again.

“We’ve talked about this a hundred times. If I could get away with staying with Susanna instead of Mom’s, I would totally do that, but Mom would kill me. And Spencer wants you at home with us.”

The plan was for Jason and me to take the twin beds in my childhood room, because Spencer asked to sleep in the living room, where I knew he’d stay up all night watching YouTube. This was going to be our first weekend as a family under one roof in more than a month.

“Angela?”

The cabdriver was looking at me in the rearview mirror.

“Hey, yeah. Sorry, I can’t see you from back here.”

I leaned over the bench seat to get a better view of the driver. The man was probably about my age, but didn’t look great. Something about him seemed familiar.

“It’s Steve.”

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