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“You don’t need to call me anything. I’m sure some people need that kind of thing—shallow acclaim. I don’t.”
March’s pouty lips twisted in what might’ve been intended as a smile. “Alternatively,” he said, “we could go with Your Majesty.”
He waved a hand awkwardly. “Sorry, that was snotty, don’t mean to be a jerk. This is horrible for me, I’m just working at keeping afloat.”
Or taking charge of the situation? Meanwhile, Milo’s question had gone unanswered.
He repeated it.
March said, “When did she change? I really can’t be sure because I’m gone so often.”
The fingers of March’s right hand began tapping those of the left. “The earliest I’m aware of would be…I guess around two months ago. Pretty close to that. I’d been in Texas looking at properties, came back at night and found her gone. The ladies said she went running. When she showed up, she was in her running outfit and pretty sweaty.”
He sat up hard, blinked hard and frowned before sinking back into the embrace of the chair.
Sudden insight into the real source of his wife’s perspiration?
Milo said, “Two months ago.”
“Approximately. If you wait, I can fetch my phone and look up my schedule—no, I don’t really need to do that, I can figure it out, let me think…after Austin came Tulsa…then Nashville…then Memphis, I settled on Memphis and that was…nine weeks ago. That’s as close as I can get without checking.”
I said, “After that Meagin continued to run at night.”
March kept his eyes on Milo. “I never questioned her about it, just told her to watch for cars. There didn’t seem to be a reason to question her. In retrospect this probably sounds crazily naive but I trusted Meagin. We’ve been married for a year and a half and there’d never been a rough spot.”
Sad smile. “She always seemed happy to see me. That time, too. Sweaty but happy.”
His lips trembled and turned inward. The hyperactive hands had stilled. As if his body could handle just so much reaction.
“This is so…I can’t find an adjective. We had breakfast three days ago and now—thegone-ness of it all. It’s…and now I find out she was betraying me? How old was this Italian?”
Milo’s brows arched. “Twenty-nine.”
“That’s crazy,” said Doug March.
Milo said, “How so?”
“Exactly my age. In the past, she’d always gone for older men. When we met she joked about cradle-robbing. Joked about having me dye my hair gray. Told me I was tolerable because I had an old soul.”
He blinked. “Did this Italian have an old soul?”
“No idea, Doug.”
“Older men,” said March. “Or so she claimed.”
“You doubt it?”
“I doubt everything, now.”
He sprang up and hurried out of the room. Hooked right at the base of the staircase. Seeking a restroom? Taking the route that had led Adelita to the kitchen? Or continuing into the bowels of a massive service wing?
A house big enough to disappear in. But March returned at a near-trot moments later, carrying his phone in one hand, an open bottle of beer in the other.
Bud Light. Discount airline. Man of the people? Or striving to pretend?
Back in the chair, he downed half the bottle. “I need at least this level of alcohol to smooth out the edges. When you leave, I’m going to continue until I’m drowsy enough to sleep, but right now I want to be coherent.”
He lofted the phone. “Checked my travel schedule and I was prettyclose. Sixty-one days ago is when I returned and found out she’d taken a night run. But I can’t tell you she never did it before. As I said, I’m gone so often.”
