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THEN
I’m in too much pain to go to Starbucks like we planned, so after Josh helps me to bed and tucks me in and brings me tea, I reschedule with Eden for the next day and sleep, until Annaleigh wakes me just thirty minutes later to nurse.
The next morning, I’m embarrassed at the elaborate breakfast Josh set out, like he’s abasing himself with the pancakes and fresh-cut fruit. I don’t enjoy a single bite.
It’s complicated to feel both intensely angry at him and intensely sorry for him. Watching him struggle through self-loathing? Watching him tiptoe around me? I hate it. All day long, even as I play the part of someone who has moved on, I hate it. Rita watches from the mantel, and I can feel her displeasure like slime on my skin. I just want things to go back to normal. I don’t want Josh to feel like a piece of shit. And yet I do want him to be sorry. Sorry enough to never do anything like that again.
Maybe, somehow, going to Starbucks will reset us. Maybe living out that evening as it was supposed to be can paint over the old evening.
Eden comes a few minutes before six o’clock. Josh is still upstairs in the bathroom, so I get the door.
“Hi!” she says. “I hope it’s okay I’m a couple minutes early. Where’s the cutie?”
I already liked Eden before, but hearing her eagerness to see my adorable, perfect baby just makes me like her more.
“She just fell asleep,” I say. “Come on in. And thanks for being so flexible yesterday. You know how it is with babies...so unpredictable!”
“Yep,” she agrees cheerily, following me into the living room and dumping her messenger bag on the couch.
Eden may be in her twenties, but she doesn’t look a day over eighteen. She’s wearing jeans so baggy, it looks like she’s playing dress-up in her dad’s clothing.
“Let me show you Annaleigh’s room,” I invite, but Eden has gone really still all of a sudden. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah.” Her finger wanders up to her neck, where she draws a line. “Um...are you okay?”
“Oh!” A furious blush floods my cheeks. I thought my scarf was covering the angry mark. It must have slipped. “Yes. Sorry! Ugh, so embarrassing. Just a rash. I have really sensitive skin.”
She looks at me with serious eyes and I laugh nervously because it feels like she’s seeing right past the lie. I thought I could keep the ugliness contained. I thought I could keep it safe and private, held only in my memory, where it could fade, or heal, or whatever you do with awful things that have happened. Now, the container has cracked.
Then Eden smiles. “Yeah, I have sensitive skin, too.”
“Oh good,” I gush as a feverish giddiness overtakes me. “Then you get it.”
Starbucks is great. Josh and I talk for the first time about potentially selling his mom’s house. What shape our finances need to be in before we make that move.
“It could be nice to get some land in the country,” I say, already dreaming of feeding chickens in the morning, Annaleigh toddling beside me in Wellingtons.
“You want to be a country wife, huh?” teases Josh. “Barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen?”
Far from the attention of the haters? Out of the house where Rita’s presence still hangs heavy? Surrounded by trees and cornfields instead of spying neighbors?
“I’d love that,” I say.
We don’t mention the instances of vandalism that have struck our house in the past week. How our grocery delivery was ransacked while it sat on the porch. We don’t mention how weird it is living next to someone whose favorite pastime is watching us through binoculars, or the fact that my tailbone is still sore from when Josh pushed my chair over last night by accident. We stand firmly in the positive as we eat our lemon pound cake and hold hands across the table.
I can almost smell the fresh wind that’s about to blow through our lives. Last night was a blip, a wrinkle, already in the rearview mirror, and there’s far too much ahead of us to keep looking behind at the things we’ve already zoomed past.
Life happens in one direction, and tonight, it feels good to look where I’m supposed to be looking: forward.
NOW
“May I see some identification, ma’am?”
The checkpoint before the highway on-ramp is blocked by three Dover County Sheriff cars, and it’s just my luck that the man on the other side of my window is Deputy Adams. Even though he’s been marginally more on my side than Mitchell, he has also seen me up close, and is therefore likely to recognize me. I can hear the hum of the highway just up the little hill, my promise of escape. If I can get past Adams.
I wish my head was feeling clearer. The plugged duct has gotten worse, shooting red streaks like infected roads toward my arm and neck. I’m feeling hot all over, and I’d place bets on my temperature reading above a hundred right now.
“Is everything okay, Officer?” I say in a breathless, higher-pitched voice than my own as I fumble in my purse for my fake ID, trying to hide the trembling of my hands. I pass him the little plastic card as a chilly blast of clear, spring air ruffles the bangs of my wig and momentarily cools my cheeks. “What’s going on?”
