Chapter 3
The lie was so clean and immediate that for a moment I almost appreciated the efficiency of it. He had it ready. He had probably had it ready for months, stored somewhere accessible, rehearsed to the point of near-sincerity.
I looked at Brittany.
"He didn't know?" I said.
She looked back at me and I watched the options move across her face, and the one she chose was the one she always chose when she needed the conversation to stop being about what she had done and start being about how I was responding to it. "You're blowing this out of proportion," she said. "We can talk when you're being rational."
Fourteen years.
Fourteen years of that sentence, deployed every time she had done something that required a conversation she did not want to have, every time she needed the problem to become my inability to be calm about it rather than the thing that had made me not calm. I knew the move so well I could see it coming from the first word.
I smiled. I did not mean to. It was not warmth.
Andrew moved toward the door and I stepped into the hallway at the same moment, positioning myself in the natural line between him and the stairs. Not threatening. Just present. He was going to leave, and he was going to leave through me, and I wanted him to understand that there was a sequence of things that needed to happen before the house released him back to wherever he had come from.
"This doesn't have to be a big deal," he said, shifting his weight, looking for the angle where I was easier to get past.
"You were in my bed with my wife," I said. "It was already a big deal before I opened the door."
May you like
Brittany appeared behind him in the hallway. "Craig, stop. You're scaring him."
There it was again. My behavior. My tone. My presence in the hallway of my own house as the problem in the sentence. I looked at her standing there in the robe, hair loose, husband's bedroom behind her, another man in front of her, and I felt something in me go very quiet and very clear in a way that I recognized because I had felt it once before, years ago, at my father's funeral, when the grief was so complete that the other side of it was almost peaceful.
