Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
I want to take it easy. I want to, I want to, I have been trying so hard, I have built such a high and beautiful wall.
But I just can’t.
And as I start to cry, standing there alone in the cold quiet bathroom with a piece of plastic in my hand that says I’ve failed at the one single thing keeping me here, I try to pretend that I don’t feel my heart begin to ache, slow and wrong and worsening by the second, in a way that frightens me more than anything Trey has ever said to me.
Chapter Eight
This morning is hell, and it’s the same hell it has been every morning for two months running.
I wake wanting my wife. That’s how it begins, the way it’s begun every single day since she carried her things down the hall to the farthest room in my home, my body reaching across the cold expanse of the bed for a warmth that isn’t there, that hasn’t been there in two months and won’t be there again, and the half-second before I remember why is the only peaceful half-second I’m allotted in a day, so of course it’s the one that costs the most when it ends.
She used to be here. That’s the thing I can’t seem to teach myself to stop expecting, no matter how many mornings prove it wrong. Six months of waking up to her, and the habit doesn’t care in the slightest that the marriage underneath it has rotted clean through. The showers we used to share, the long ones that made us both late for things that genuinely mattered and left neither of us the least bit sorry, gone. Breakfast across the small kitchen table while I read her the worst of the sports columns in the worst voice I could put on, just to watch her laugh into her coffee and scold me for it, gone. Kissing her at the door on my way out. Making her tell me who she belonged to and standing there listening to her say it back soft and shy with the color climbing up her throat. All of it filed away now under a heading I can’t make myself look at straight on, the life I had before I learned what she was.
Everything is different because she wants another man. I wake up into that knowledge every morning the way you’d walk face-first into the same wall, and by the time the car has carried me downtown and the express car has carried me up, I’m in a mood the entire floor can read off me from clear across the bullpen. No one meets my eyes in the corridor. The assistants discover urgent reasons to be on some other floor entirely. A man learns, running a building this size, that there are days his people quietly widen their orbit around him, and they are never once wrong about which days those are.
There’s a report sitting at the top of my inbox when I drop into the chair, and the sight of the sender’s name does nothing at all to improve the morning.
Nolan. The subject line reads, with his usual economy, Day 1 findings. I make a mental note to have Bills wire him a bonus, because this is fast even for Nolan, and Nolan is the fastest man I know at this. Then I open it, and the speed stops mattering at all, because the speed was never the point. The attachments are the point. High-resolution, time-stamped, more of them than I want and exactly as many as I’ve earned for asking.
My jaw sets, and it stays set.
There she is. My wife, in the soft grey coat I bought her, at a café table with Barrymore leaning in low across it toward her. My wife on a park bench at his side, her face turned up to his, the same upturned face from Raymond’s folder. My wife outside the gates of her own father’s cemetery with the golden boy standing a respectful, intimate half-step too close to her in the cold. The dates run down the corner of each frame in neat white type, and I read them the way I’d read a balance sheet that’s just confirmed in black and white the fraud I’d only suspected, every line another small cold confirmation of the same rot. She has met him again, and again, and again across these two months. I never once asked where she went with her afternoons. I told myself a possessive man always knows where his wife is, and I never thought to turn that possessiveness toward the empty hours she spent away from me, because some last foolish corner of me did not want the answer it has now received.
Well. Here’s the answer. High resolution. Time-stamped.