Page 100 of Wrong Mail

All of it is a story. It's a good one. I've always been good at those.

The afternoon burns off while I sit with it. I get nothing down I can point to. Then I call Kane because I promised myself I would when it got bad. And it's bad.

I don't tell him what I think about David. I tell him I'm not sleeping, that the fragments are coming harder. One came today with a man in it, a bar, and a fear I can't shake. It felt like a memory and not a dream, and that's the part that frightens me.

Kane goes quiet. His silence costs him nothing and gives me room. Then he says the thing he has said since the beginning, gently, like a hand laid over a door I keep trying to open.

"Mallory. You've carried more in three weeks than most people carry in a year. When you're this depleted, the mind hands you all sorts of things and dresses them up as memory. I'd be careful trusting any of it right now." He takes a breath. "And I'd be very careful about digging into the old work. We've talked about this. There's nothing back there but the worst night of your life. You don't have to walk into it to prove you're strong."

"So I let it go?" I ask.

"You let it go. For now. It'll keep."

I'm so grateful for the permission that I don’t question it. I let the man in the bar and the old fear go. I file it under David, where I file everything now. Then I push the drawer shut.

The problem is, it doesn't fit in the drawer. The fear is wrong. The hand around the glass belongs to no one I can name. Some part of me knows, even as I lean my weight on the drawer, that I have filed the most important thing that happened to me all week under the wrong name.

But the drawer shuts. It always does.

Chapter Thirty-Five

David is home at noon, and it isn't the suspension keeping him here. Something else has landed. I can feel it before I reach the bottom of the stairs.

He was never home. That was our arrangement. David was always out saving people, while I was here keeping the lights on. For years, I resented it. Now I’d give anything to have it back.

The suspension is old news, three words on my phone in a Portland street days ago. Whatever this is, it’s new, and I can see it on him before he says a word.

He's on the phone, his back to me, using the low, careful voice he keeps for the lawyer. He says, I understand. He says it three times, and each one comes out smaller than the last. Then he sets the phone on the sill and stands there without turning around.

"They've gone over the access logs," he says, still facing the window.

"What logs?" I ask.

"From that night. The night the man from the break-in died." He turns, and whatever is on his face makes me look away. "Before, all they had was proof I was in the hospital. That's bad enough, but it's still something a lawyer could explain. It’s my workplace. People move through that place all night. There are a hundred reasons to be seen near a particular floor."

He drags a hand down his mouth.

"But the badge logs every secured door. Every time you use it to enter a restricted floor or wing. And mine puts me in the ICU wing that night, off duty, where I had no reason to be. It doesn’t confirm that I was in his room or at his bed, but it puts me close enough to matter. Twenty minutes before they called the code, my badge opened a door off that corridor. There's a camera at the end of it. I'm on it, Mallory. My height. My coat. My walk. There's no way to stand up and say it wasn’t me."

I sit down at the island because I know why he was on that floor, and knowing it is worse than not knowing.

He told me himself, two nights ago, with the glass by his hand and the whole rotten thing coming out of him at last. He’d badged in to meet Lena. He found somewhere quiet. In a hospital at night, that could mean an empty family room, a dark chapel, or a side corridor on an ICU floor after the visitors have gone home. He went there to be alone with the woman bleeding him dry. That same floor held the man who came into our house in the dark. The two had nothing to do with each other, but there is no power on earth that can make them look that way now.

Because the one person who could stand up and explain why he was on that floor, who could say he was down the hall arguing with her about money, is Lena. And Lena is dead, with nothing left to say for anyone.

I believe him.

That is the piece that keeps turning in me. About the one fact that could hang him, I believe my husband was telling the truth. I can't prove a word of it, because the only proof is a dead woman.

"I wasn't there for him," he says. He says it to me, to the room, to the lawyer already gone from the line. "I never went near that man. I never knew which bed was his.” His voice breaks at the next part. "But I can't tell them why I was really on that floor without telling them all of it. The second I say Lena's name, I've handed them a dead blackmailer and a man with every reason to want her quiet. And now she's quiet. Don't you see it? The truth is worse than the lie. The truth is the rope.”

And he's right. That is the horror of it, watching him work it out. Whichever way he turns, the record turns with him. If he says nothing, the badge places him close enough to a dying man with no reason to be there. If he tells the truth, it ties him to a woman who is also dead. There's no telling of that night that ends with David walking out of it clean, because the only door out was Lena.

"Which brings us back to Tuesday," I say. "The day Lena died."

I don't mean to. The question comes out before I can stop it.

“Where were you, David?"