Page 167 of Cul-de-sac

In the end, she decides as she closes her eyes in sleep, hope is all we have.

—

Lisa turns over in bed and opens her eyes, not sure what she’s doing up. She squints at the clock radio on the bedside table. Not quite three in the morning. “Are you kidding me?” she mutters, flipping onto her other side, trying to will herself back to sleep. But after twenty minutes, she’s more awake than ever, unable to rid her mind of her son’s strangely obstreperous behavior.“I choose Heidi,”he’d told her.

Fat chance of that,Lisa scoffs. She knows her son. He’s just lonely, and likely more than a little horny. He doesn’t miss having Heidi in his life so much as he misses having her in his bed. Come morning, he’ll have come to his senses. He’ll realize that girls like Heidi are a dime a dozen and that he deserves better. He’ll apologize for ordering her out of the house she paid for, tell her he understands that, by making those threats to cut him off financially, she was merely forcing him to acknowledge his reality.

And then they’ll move on.

Without Heidi.

It’s taken Lisa longer than she thought it would to get rid of the girl—she’d proved surprisingly tenacious—but now that it was done once and for all, they could get on with their lives. She’d arrange for Aiden to see a good divorce attorney, maybe even offer Heidi a small settlement in order to get rid of her as quickly and painlessly as possible. She has no doubt that once Heidi realizes Aiden is serious about ending the marriage, she’ll opt out of motherhood as well. A pretty girl like her will have much less trouble finding another sucker to marry if she comes without a screaming infant attached.

After another ten minutes of lying in bed wide awake, Lisa decides she might as well go downstairs and watch TV. That always seems to put her right to sleep. She gets out of bed, throws on a robe over her nightgown, and walks toward the stairs.

The light is on in Aiden’s bedroom.

So he’s having trouble sleeping as well,she thinks, so upset is he at the shabby way he treated her earlier. Might as well go in there and comfort him, assure him that all is forgiven. “Aiden,” she says, stopping in the doorway.

Except he isn’t there.

“Aiden?”

She knows he’s gone even before she checks the closet and finds all his clothes missing. She opens the dresser drawers. But the only things she finds are the guns he’s left behind.

—

Craig opens his eyes to find Maggie, her bare feet protruding from the bottoms of her cotton pajamas, standing in the doorway. “What?” he says, his breath catching in his lungs as he swings his legs off the family room sofa and sits up. “Has something happened? Is anything wrong?”

“I can’t sleep,” Maggie says.

Craig exhales with relief and pats the cushion beside him. “Come sit.”

Maggie walks slowly to the couch and drops down beside him. “Did I wake you?”

He shakes his head. “Not really. I’ve kind of been drifting in and out. What’s up?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you want to talk?”

“Not really.”

“Do you want to watch TV?”

“No.”

“You just want to sit here for a while?”

“That sounds nice.”

Craig smiles. “Sounds nice to me, too.”

—

Dani feels his presence looming over her even before she opens her eyes.

“What the hell is going on here?” Nick demands from the side of Tyler’s bed.

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