Page 10 of The Widow's Husband's Secret Lie
After Marnie is gone,I lean against the door, my entire body shaking. Poppy, who made herself scarce during my conversation with Marnie, joins me in the foyer, her astonished expression mirroring the way I’m feeling. Her mouth is open so wide it looks like her jaw might unhinge.
“You’re not actually thinking about going to that lunatic’s house, are you?” Poppy asks.
“The photos looked real…”
“So what?” she retorts. “Alice, they can fake anything these days. Videos, voices… You can’t trust a couple of photographs.”
“Right. That’s why I need to go there and see for myself.”
“Please don’t go, Alice. Just sit down for a minute and think this over. I’ll make you another cup of tea.”
“I don’t need to think it over.”
“I have a really bad feeling about this.” She shivers, even though the temperature in this room is a perfect seventy-four degrees. We have the ability to make every room in this house a specific different temperature, using only an app on my phone. “I’m scared that woman could be dangerous. And you keep telling me you’re being followed…”
“But not by a woman.”
“It’s still very creepy.”
She’s right. If somebody is following me, their reasons for doing so must be unsavory. Whoever has been following me around wants to hurt me.
But at the same time, now that Marnie has dropped this bombshell on me, I can’t think of anything else. I need to know if Grant really was leading a secret life with another family.
“I’m sorry, Poppy,” I say to her. “I have to go to her house. I have to know if what she was telling me is true.”
10
The address Marniegave me is only a twenty-minute drive away. Even though it’s geographically close, as I drive through the streets of her neighborhood, I immediately recognize that I have entered a different social class. This is not the kind of neighborhood that I live in, where houses have heated toilets and skylights and newly renovated kitchens and temperature control using phone apps. This is a neighborhood where you don’t want to venture out after dark.
I locate Marnie’s house using my GPS, and when I pull up in front of the two-story cottage, I can’t help but think how much shabbier her house is than mine. If she is the mother of Grant’s children, why does she have a house that looks like it’s crumbling at the foundations, while I have a house that contains something called a smart refrigerator?
I step out of my Lexus, which is a great deal nicer than the old, dented Kia parked in the driveway. As I start up the walkway to the front door, once again, I get the feeling somebody is watching me. This time, it’s so strong that it stops me in my tracks.
I turn around. The street is quiet right now. There’s a man down the block who is mowing his lawn, but other than that, nobody is there. Certainly, nobody is watching me.
And then I see a slight rustling in the bushes on the periphery of the lawn. I watch them, certain that my husband will emerge from the shrubbery at any moment, possibly in zombie form. But I stand there for at least sixty seconds, and there is no further movement. Nobody is coming out of the bushes to talk to me or eat my brains. Nobody is there at all.
Maybe it was the wind.
I turn around and continue my journey to the front door. I press my finger against the doorbell, but I don’t hear any sound. It must be broken. So instead, I bang my fist against the door.
I hear bursts of crying in several different pitches. There is a large amount of shuffling behind the door, and several seconds later, Marnie pulls it open, still wearing that same floral-print dress but this time with a milk stain on the front. A baby of about one year old is balanced on one of her hips.
When Marnie sees me, her face breaks into a tired smile. “Alice!” she cries. “You came.”
“Yes….”
I don’t know what to make of this. Is this child on Marnie’s hip really Grant’s offspring? Admittedly, he does resemble my husband, but it’s hard to find features of a thirty-seven-year-old man on the face of an infant. I still don’t know what to believe.
“I know this must be weird for you,” she acknowledges. “It’s weird for me too. I had no idea there was another woman in Grant’s life. But we both know that Grant would not have wanted his family to starve.”
It takes all I have to keep myself from blurting out, “But I thought I was his only family.”
Grant was an only child, and his parents died long before we met. It was one of the reasons he so badly wanted us to have achild of our own. He had no family, and he desperately wanted to start one with me. I had no idea that he already had a head start with somebody else.
“Please,” Marnie says. “Won’t you come in?”
I obediently follow her into the living room. I expected to see another child playing in there, but that’s not what I see. There are, in fact, so many children in this room that I’m having trouble counting them all. There is a teenage girl on the sofa who has a sour expression on her face as she scrolls on her phone. There’s one child who appears to be writingAyahon the wall. There’s a child of about four years old who is wearing only a pair of underwear and eating a bowl of chocolate ice cream from his lap while he sits on an armchair.
