Page 7 of The Echo Wife
I recognized the maneuver. It was directly out of my mother’s playbook.
Martine asked me if I would consider getting a cup of tea with her. I paused long enough that she asked if I was still on the line. “Yes. I’m here.” I cleared my throat. “Why do you want to get tea with me, Martine?”
Martine laughed, a light, tinkling laugh, one designed to make people feel fun at parties. That was also my mother’s. “Oh, I’m so sorry if I’ve worried you at all, Evelyn. I just wanted to get tea so we could get to know each other a little. I know that things with Nathan aren’t ideal, but I don’t want there to be any troubled water between us. Don’t you think it would be better if we could be friends?”
I choked back a laugh. “Friends?”
“I would love to get to know you,” Martine said, as though this were a perfectly reasonable request. I was the woman who had been married to Nathan, the woman whose life Martine’s existence had blown to pieces, and she wanted to get to know me. Of course she did. Why wouldn’t she?
She asked again, and this time, a note of pleading entered her voice. “Just tea. An hour. That’s all. Please?”
I didn’t ask for his opinion, but of course Seyed told me not to do it.
“I have to. I said I would.”
“Don’t get coffee with this lady, it’s weird. You know this is weird, right?”
You haveno ideahow weird this is,I thought. “She asked me to get tea, not coffee. And I have to go.”
Seyed looked up from the felt he was gluing to a clipboard. “Why do you owe her anything? It’s not likeyou’rethe homewrecker here.”
“She’s—it’s complicated, Sy. And besides, I already said I’d go.”
“When are you doing this objectively insane thing?”
“Tomorrow morning. So I’ll need you to handle the fluid sampling.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You mean I’m covering your workload while you do the thing you know you shouldn’t do.”
“Yes,” I said. “Please.”
“Great.” He walked the clipboard back to the tank it belonged to, returned it, and grabbed an un-felted clipboard from the next tank over. “Perfect. Because I didn’t have enough to do.”
He was irritated with me, and rightly so. I debated telling him everything—telling him why I couldn’t saynoto Martine, what I owed to her, why I needed to see her. But it was too much already, him knowing who Martine was. Him knowing Nathan had been unfaithful.
The idea of telling Seyed who Martine really was caused my entire mind to recoil. “I’ll be in by ten,” I said.
“Have you ever seen this woman in person before?” he asked. “What if she’s, like, a murderer?”
I grimaced at the memory of my knuckles on the red-painted front door of Nathan’s second, secret house. The knob turning. Martine’s face, smiling out at me, eyes blank and polite in the few seconds before recognition struck us both. “I’ve seen her before,” I said. “She’s very sane.”
Seyed shook his head, cutting a strip of felt. “I still don’t think you should do this to yourself,” he said softly. “Not that my opinion matters.”
That last part wasn’t a barb—it was an apology. He knew he was intruding, knew he was speaking out of turn. And he also knew that his opinion did matter, mattered when no one else’s did. He was allowed to question me. He was allowed to offer opinions. He was allowed to speak during oversight meetings, even when my funding was at risk, even when the meeting was really a battle for survival.
I respected Seyed. He could keep up with me. He was one of the only people who was allowed to have an opinion at all.
“I know I shouldn’t do it, Sy,” I replied, watching him apply glue to the back of the clipboard. “But I’m going to anyway.”
I couldn’t turn my back on Martine.
I couldn’t escape her, any more than I could escape myself.
CHAPTER
FIVE
The tea shop Martine had chosen was cute. It was small, with mismatched furniture and clumsy velvet couches and a hand-chalked menu behind the counter. Tea-filled jars lined the shelves behind the register. The place smelled like steam and wood polish. There was a bulletin board covered in handwritten fliers for babysitting, yoga classes, free furniture.
