Page 74 of The Villa

I don’t answer, the words stuck in my throat, because if I say anything, I’m going to agree with her, and that is going to make me feel even crazier than I do right now.

Chess shakes her head, her bracelets jangling as she tucks her hair behind her ears. “I kept thinking you two would work it out. That it would just be this weird blip, and we could all forget it ever happened. Sometimes I told myself that it hadn’t happened, that I’d just… dreamed it or something. Or that it was this weird intrusive thought, like, ‘Wow, wouldn’t it be fucked up if you’d slept with Matt?’ That’s what I wanted it to be, Emmy. I wanted that so much.”

When she looks at me, her eyes are so sincere, so pleading, that I know she’s telling the truth. And it kills me that I want to believe her so much.

That I want to forgive her.

“And then, a few weeks before he left you, he called me late at night. He was drunk, I think, or… or upset, or something. And he started talking about how he’d only slept with me because you wouldn’t have kids with him. That if you’d only wanted to have babies when he did, he would’ve been faithful forever. That he’d actually thought about replacing your birth control pills with placebos or some shit, and I understood that as fucked up as sleeping with him had been, it had happened for a reason.”

She reaches her hands out to me, but I don’t take them.

“Em, I had to get that close to him to see what he really was. If I hadn’t slept with him, he never would’ve told me all of that. He was bad for you, Em. All he ever wanted to do was to control you. And I couldn’t tell you because of what I’d done, but I thought, I could at least try to make it up to you. And then, once I figured out what he was doing to you, I knew something had to give.”

“What do you mean?”

She takes a deep breath then, and leans forward, placing her hands on her knees. “Em, he was killing you.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

My eyes are watery, and my skin goes cold as I stare at her. “He was what?”

“You know I’m right,” she says, coming to her feet. “You know how sick you were, how sick you suddenly got out of nowhere? Whose fault do you think that was?”

I’m shaking my head now, backing away. Matt is a lot of things, but a killer?

“Chess. There’s no way Matt was poisoning me.”

Chess stares at me, and there’s that expression on her face again, that look that’s half love, half pity.

And then she laughs. “Em, you’ve been writing those murder books for way too long. I didn’t say he waspoisoningyou. I said he waskillingyou. When did you start getting sick? Honestly, think back. When was the first time you remember feeling that bad?”

My mouth is dry, my thoughts spinning, but I can pinpoint the date exactly. It was Valentine’s Day, of all fuckingthings. Matt had made his big announcement to my parents the previous November, and he’d expected us to be pregnant by February. The thing was, I hadn’t stopped taking my pills. I hadn’t felt ready yet, had started working on that thriller idea, and figured I’d eventually get on board with the whole baby thing later, maybe by the summer.

But that night, while we were getting ready to go out to dinner, I’d been rummaging in a drawer in the bathroom and he’d seen the pills. Seen the date printed out on the prescription sticker that proved I’d just had them filled a week before.

We’d fought about it, really fought, the biggest argument we’d ever had. He said I’d lied to him, that he’d actually been expecting me to tell him I was pregnant at dinner that night, and here I was, knowing there was no chance.

And I’d argued that I was working, that I had never really told him that I was ready, he’d just assumed becausehewanted it, I did, too.

That Valentine’s Day ended with Matt sleeping in the guest room, and the next morning, I’d apologized. I was never really sure why, only that it seemed easier than fighting with him, and I’d agreed to stop taking the pills.

But later that afternoon, I’d been hit by the first dizzy spell, a wave of nausea climbing up my throat, and I hadn’t felt like myself again until he’d moved out the next spring.

“The body always knows,” Chess says now. “Chapter Six ofThe Powered Path. ‘The world warns us about putting toxins in our body, and assumes toxic people can only hurt our souls. But there are people just as poisonous to us as any chemical.’”

“That’s bullshit,” I croak, but Chess shakes her head.

“How can you say that after what you went through? How many doctors looked at you and told you nothing wasphysically wrong? How many medicines did exactly fuck all for you? Your bodyknew. It was warning you.”

She moves closer. “He was the wrong man for you, Emmy. And you were on the wrong path. Your body was trying to tell you.”

I almost want to laugh as I slide back down onto the sofa. But could Chess be right? Was it all in my head after all, just like all those doctors said?

The ENT who told me it could be my inner ear tricking me.

My gyno saying that sometimes stress makes the body think it isn’t safe to support a pregnancy.

The acupuncturist who told me I needed “healing sleep” in order to fully rest.

---