Page 40 of The Husband Hour
“Really? Why not?” He was clearly surprised. It probably was a rare event for a girl to turn him down.
“Don’t you remember the first time you saw me? It was upstairs at my house. You were just leaving my sister’s room.”
“That wasn’t the first time I saw you,” he said. “I’d noticed you. And I’ve thought about you.”
“Why?” she asked, barely breathing.
“Not sure,” he said. “But I want to figure it out.”
She knew she shouldn’t say the thing that was on her mind, the one thing that would ruin the moment, but she couldn’t stop herself.
“You hooked up with my sister.”
“Lauren,” he said, looking up at the sky and then back at her. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way. But if you rule out any guy who’s ever hooked up with Stephanie, you’re going to have a very limited playing field. You might have to transfer to Wissahickon School District.”
Her first instinct was to defend Stephanie, to say that was insulting and outrageous. But the truth of the matter was, she knew he was right. It was one of the things about Stephanie that was really starting to bother her. That, and the fact that her mother was somehow oblivious to all the nights when Stephanie sneaked out.
Before she could figure out what to say, he took her hand. Startled, she looked up at him and he bent down and kissed her. After the initial shock, she leaned into him, worried if she was doing it right. He pulled her closer, and the smell of him, the feel of his mouth opening to hers, his arms around her, silenced the endless barrage of questions and doubt that played like a constant loop in her mind. There was only that moment, and it was a moment that divided her life into before and after.
Chapter Nineteen
Some people only see what they want to see.”
Matt paused the video, then replayed Stephanie’s words from the audio file alone. He closed his eyes in the dark room. What was he missing?
Frustrated, he stood up and paced away from the desk. He knew this was part of the process; every film was a puzzle that had to be painstakingly assembled.
He opened the closet and felt around in the dark for the backpack on the floor. He pulled out a stack of blank index cards and a Sharpie. His stomach rumbled; he couldn’t remember if he’d had lunch and it would be a long time before he gave any thought to dinner. He turned on his bedside lamp and spread the index cards out on the floor. He scrolled through a few photos on his phone until he found the shot of his storyboard from the office. He’d taken it before he left New York just for reference, thinking it would be enough to get him through a week in Longport. Now, feeling the film slipping away from him, he wrote on an index card, Opening Image: Rory soaring toward the net, Kings vs. Flyers. On the second card, Entrance to LM, motto, coach VO.
When he finished writing his notes on the fifty or so index cards, the board was re-created on the floor next to the bed. He’d make a quick trip to the convenience store, the one called Wawa, for Scotch tape to get them all up on the wall. And while he was out, he might as well stop into Robert’s for a liquid dinner.
And if he ran into Stephanie Adelman? Well, that would just be a bonus.
Lauren waited until her parents had gone into their bedroom for the night before climbing the stairs to the attic.
She had tried telling herself to just go to sleep, not to give in to the pull of the memories. But there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. She had been so disciplined the past four years, never thinking about the boxes, never even tempted to look inside. Her mother accused her of not moving forward with her life, but truly, she had. Never looking back was her progress. At first, she felt like an alcoholic struggling not to take a drink; every day the effort not to wallow in her grief and her memories was as fresh and agonizing as if it were the first. But gradually, her tunnel vision, her focus on only the day in front of her, became easier, and eventually it was second nature.
But the time for tunnel vision was over. With Matt poking around in the past, it was impossible not to think about the truth. About the story buried in these boxes.
Lauren wrestled with the packing tape and heard something solid sliding along the bottom of the box, something small but weighty. Emboldened by the silence of the house, and by having come this far dipping a toe into the past, she reached inside and pulled out the first thing she touched. It was a paper napkin; Lauren handled it as carefully as if she were capturing a butterfly. Holding her breath, she smoothed it out on the floor. And Rory’s words, in stark black ink, a note intended for his older brother, Emerson, greeted her like a kiss: She’s my girlfriend. She stays.
How could a simple note last longer than their marriage? Longer than Rory himself?
In the beginning, after the night on the beach, things had grown slowly between them. She’d never planned for their relationship to be a big secret. But with everyone away for the summer—or, at the very least, not congregating every day at school—it was easy to fly under the radar.
Lauren and Rory had a routine. They went to a movie or ate lunch at Boston Style Pizza. They talked about everything—her family, his family. Rory had been a surprise, born when Kay Kincaid turned forty. His father, a Vietnam veteran and a police officer, died of a heart attack when Rory was four. His older brother, Emerson, fifteen years his senior, was an instructor at West Point. Rory said, more than once, that Emerson was the closest thing to a father that he had, aside from his coaches. It was Emerson who had drilled into his mind the imperative to excel. Rory told her, “I don’t think I’d be happy if I wasn’t good at something. Great at something.”
The week Emerson visited that summer, she didn’t get to see Rory at all. It hurt her feelings that he didn’t want to introduce her, but Rory told her it was for her own good. “He can be tough,” Rory said. “He wouldn’t approve of me being serious about a girl. I should be focusing on school and hockey right now.”
All she’d heard was serious about a girl…
And besides, she wasn’t exactly rushing to make things public in her own household. It shouldn’t matter about Stephanie—it couldn’t. That was so long ago. And it had been nothing, really. Still, she kept quiet. She snuck around. And with her parents working at the store long hours every day and Stephanie at their grandparents’ beach house for the summer, it was easy to be invisible.
But then school started.
The first hockey game of the new school year fell on a Thursday in late October. It was home ice, and Lauren, with her newly earned driver’s license, drove herself and a few friends to the game. Rory’s mother and Emerson in the stands, and being invisible to them felt terrible.
The Skatium was unusually crowded that night. The hockey team had gotten so close to states the previous year that there was a surge in community interest in them. And it didn’t hurt that a month or so ago, the Philadelphia Inquirer had published an article about the best local high-school athletes. They ran a photo of Rory from the final game of last year. He was crouched in position for a face-off, his expression intensely focused. It was a gorgeous picture, even in the grainy black-and-white of newsprint. She bought three copies of the paper and put them on a shelf in the back of her closet.
