Page 24 of The Widow's Husband's Secret Lie
I escort Brant to my front door. He smiles at me one last time, and even though he’s identical in appearance to my husband, at that moment, he somehow seems handsomer than Grant used to be. He lingers at the door, not leaving my home just yet. He stands there, his gaze fixed on mine.
“Alice,” he says.
“Brant,” I say.
And then before I know what’s even happening, he leans in and presses his lips against mine. He kisses me in a way that Grant had not kissed me for a very long time. He kisses me until my legs go weak, and he has to hold me to keep me from sinking to my knees. It reminds me of that first kiss with Grant outside the French restaurant, where all the molecules of my body were exploding at once. I missed that feeling.
When he finally pulls away, we are both gasping for air. “I’ll see you at eight,” he promises.
I watch Brant disappear down the walkway to my home. Presumably, he’s going to drive away in that green sedan, the same one he was following me in earlier.
Brant was the one following me. He said he was doing it because he was looking out for me, but when I think about it now, that explanation doesn’t quite gel. If he wanted to look out for me, why wouldn’t he have simply come to my front door and introduced himself?
Yet my gut is telling me that I can trust Brant Lockwood.
Since I’m not going over to Marnie’s house right now, I rescue the casseroles from my car and return them to my overstuffed fridge. The casseroles get me thinking about Poppy and how worried she’s been about me the last couple of days, so I decide to head over to her house to spill the beans about what just happened. Poppy is my best friend, and she has a great way of looking at things. I’ll tell her everything that Brant said to me—her reaction will tell me if she thinks I can trust him.
Poppy has been my next-door neighbor for the last five years. She lives in a colonial-style house just to the right of my property. Unlike my sprawling new home, hers is simple and rectangular and symmetric with a steep side-gable roof. Usually, she comes to my house rather than vice versa. As I am stepping through her walkway, which is slightly overgrown with weedsfrom her garden, it occurs to me that I have not been to her house in quite a while.
The front door of Poppy’s home is right in the center of the property, with a number of small multipaneled windows surrounding it. I press my finger against the doorbell, waiting for my friend to let me in.
It takes several seconds. Finally, I hear shuffling behind the door. But when it swings open, Poppy is not the one standing before me. It’s an elderly woman with snow-white hair pulled into a bun behind her head. She is stooped over, with a cane in her gnarled hand.
She looks up at me with a questioning expression on her face. “Can I help you, dear?”
“Oh,” I say. “I was just… Is Poppy home?”
“Poppy?”
“Poppy Durden,” I say. “She lives here.”
The elderly woman frowns up at me, and the next words out of her mouth chill me to the bone. “Nobody by that name lives here.”
24
Nobodyby that name lives here.
I gawk at the old woman. Clearly, she is just old and confused—perhaps an elderly aunt who is visiting Poppy for the week. “What are you talking about? Poppy has lived here for the last five years! She’s my best friend!”
The woman twists the cane in her hand thoughtfully. “There was someone by that name who used to live here.”
I don’t know what she’s talking about. Did Poppy suddenly decide to move without telling me? “Where did she go?”
“She died,” the old woman tells me. “There was a terrible fire, and the woman named Poppy perished. But… that was thirty years ago.”
My mouth is suddenly almost too dry to speak, and I have to force out my next words. “Are… are you sure?”
“Oh yes. I have lived here for years.”
My entire universe has gone on tilt. I back away from the door, almost stumbling over the two steps to the front entrance. I don’t know what’s going on. All I know is I’ve got to get the hell out of here before my legs give out.
I hurry back to my own home as quickly as I can. I shut the door behind me, and I stand in the foyer, trying to catch my breath.
What just happened over there? Poppy has been my best friend ever since I moved here to live with Grant. And now this woman is telling me she doesn’t live there—hasneverlived there. That the only Poppy who ever lived in that house was killed in a fire thirty years ago.
Did I imagine my best friend? Admittedly, it seems incredibly unlikely that I could somehow imagine an entire friendship with another human being who didn’t even exist. It feels like if my brain were capable of doing something like that, I wouldn’t be able to function in the real world. I mean, that isreallyout there.
Yet parts of it fit. Poppy has always been there for me when I needed her, always atexactlythe right moment. She always told me the right things at the right time—always exactly what I needed to hear. Perhaps Poppy was my brain’s way of coping with Grant tormenting me about that dress. Lord knows I needed it.
