If he’d be happy to see Juliette every day, did that mean things were good between them? Evelyn wasn’t sure, but he didn’t seem inclined to talk more about his wife. “So you get the same lunch every day?”
“No!” He looked vaguely horrified. “Of course not. I have a schedule. Today is Brie with tomato and basil.”
“Oh, a schedule.” She pressed her lips together and nodded.
He ran a hand through his too-long hair and shook his head. “Oh, God. I actually have a sandwich schedule. And it includes Brie.” His smile was all charm and wry chagrin, but his cheeks went pink with real embarrassment.
Evelyn laughed too loudly. The sound filled up the space, and then his laughter joined hers and pushed it even bigger.
“It’s cute,” she assured him as he shook his head.
“No, it’s not. I’m going to have to bring you in on this now. Split my Tuesday Brie sandwich and share my shame? It’s the only way to keep you quiet.”
She had the sudden, strange thought that he could be flirting. That wasn’t possible, though. She wasn’t the type of woman men flirted with. She hadn’t been for years.
But maybe he was a serial cheater. Maybe that was why Juliette was so unhappy. Evelyn cleared her throat. “I don’t want to steal your Tuesday Brie sandwich.”
“Come on. We still have to make a decision about the window.”
“True, but . . .”
“And I’ve got half a bottle of wine in the fridge.”
“It’s only eleven!” she protested.
“It’s art, though, not business.”
It was art. And she was an adult. And she’d obviously decided not to make it in to work again.
But what made the offer truly delicious was the possibility that Noah was coming on to her. If she said yes, she could sit and share a glass of wine with Juliette’s husband. Get a few intimate details of his life. Steal back a little of what Juliette had stolen from her. The idea filled Evelyn up with a warm buzz of satisfaction.
“All right.” She reached for the bag. “Tell me more about this sandwich schedule.”
“You’re mean.”
“Fine. Tell me a little about yourself then.”
He rewarded that with a smile. “Let me get the wine first.”
CHAPTER 6
BEFORE
Evelyn fought the urge to unmute the reality show on her bedroom TV. Keeping an eye on the action, she shifted the phone to her other ear as her sister, Sharon, told another story about office politics at the insurance company where she worked. The supposedly real drama flickering on the screen wasn’t even one of the shows that Evelyn usually watched, but the editors of these programs were skilled at making the most mundane conflicts compelling. Sharon was not.
Evelyn curled tighter under the covers and made a sympathetic sound as her sister kept talking. It was almost 10:00 p.m. Gary would be home soon. Evelyn had thought maybe she’d stay up so they could have sex. It had been a while—maybe even a month?—and despite the relief she’d felt over his explanation this morning, Evelyn was feeling vulnerable.
“Sharon,” she finally interrupted, “can I ask you something?”
“Sure. Anything.”
“How did you know Jeff was cheating?” She’d tried to ask it casually, but her sister’s silence conveyed far too much understanding. “I’m just curious,” Evelyn added quickly.
Sharon cleared her throat. “Well. There were a lot of signs. We stopped having sex, or I guess to be more accurate, he stopped complaining that we weren’t having sex. He was more interested in his phone. Always checking for emails and texts. He lost twenty pounds. All the typical crap you can find in any article. I’m sure you’ve heard it before.”
“Yes.”
“But more than that . . . I just felt it. I suppose it was a shift of energy. Away from me and toward someone else. Something was just gone.”
“Hm.” Evelyn couldn’t say that any of those signs struck a chord with her. Gary would never reduce himself to complaining about a lack of sex, though he did sometimes make snide comments about how early she went to bed. He wasn’t obsessed with his email or phone—he hated texting—and he’d always been in shape. As for the energy . . . Well, she wasn’t sure his energy had ever been very focused on her. First it had been school, then starting his career, then the house and Cameron and all the work that went into a successful practice. There’d always been distraction, but she’d understood. She’d had a few jobs over the years, but she’d never had a career. His dedication to his job allowed them to have this life.
“Do you think Gary is cheating?” Sharon asked, the words slow and careful as if she were placing them delicately on a table between them.
If she’d expected Evelyn to be upset by the question, she was wrong. Evelyn felt strangely distant from it. “I don’t think so. I was jealous over a female patient who called last night. I just wondered if I should be worried.”
“Should you?” Sharon asked.
“I’m not sure. Probably not.”
“Well, I haven’t heard anything. Not that we run in the same circles—”
“It’s nothing. Just momentary doubts.”
“Okay, but just . . . I don’t know.”
“What?” Evelyn asked, her body tensing in anticipation of some story that would confirm her worries. Gary at a coffee shop with a blonde. Gary pulling into a hotel. Sharon lived forty minutes away, but wasn’t that the kind of distance people went to hide an affair?
“I know how angry I was,” Sharon finally said. “How determined I was to kick Jeff out and make him pay. And then I was so triumphant to get more than he wanted to give me in the settlement. But now that it’s been a few years, I almost wish I’d never confronted him.”
“What?” Evelyn couldn’t keep the squeak of shock from her voice. “About the affair?” Sharon had hired the best divorce attorney in town. She’d embraced the fight. She’d been self-righteous and driven and right.
Sharon groaned. “I honestly don’t know what I was imagining. Did I think at my age I’d meet someone else and fall in love and start over? I’m a forty-five-year-old woman with three kids, and now I have to work fifty hours a week. Who the hell would I date if I even had the time?”
“Well . . . Okay, but Sharon, you couldn’t have stayed with him!”
“Couldn’t I?”
Evelyn shook her head in confusion. “I . . . I don’t get it. Do you wish you’d stayed? Even after you’d found out?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I said I wished I’d never asked. I wish I’d never known about that slut. I’d still be married. I’d still have my family. This is lonely, Evie. Lonely and exhausting. The kids are still in therapy, Jeff is already engaged again, and I have no one. All the girl power in the world doesn’t change that.”
“I’m sorry,” Evelyn said. “I didn’t realize you felt that way.”
Sharon laughed, a quiet, weary sound that brought tears to Evelyn’s eyes. “I’ve had two glasses of wine, or I wouldn’t have admitted it even to you. I’m just tired.”
“Let’s have dinner next week,” Evelyn said. “Just you and me.”
“That would be nice.”
“Somewhere fancy. I’ll drive so you can get drunk.”
“You’re an amazing sister. Thank you.”
They said good-bye, and Evelyn found she’d lost her taste for reality drama, so she switched over to the local news, determined to stay up and greet her husband tonight.
Her sister had inspired her. Sure, her own marriage may have lost some spark and fun, but that didn’t mean she wanted to be lonely and struggling. They’d almost made it, for godssake. Cameron would be a freshman at MIT next year. That was a benchmark, wasn’t it? A claim to success? Their only child was smart, healthy, and ready to head off to a bright future. Evelyn needed to nurture the happiness of this union instead of worrying about what might be missing.
Heck, maybe she’d even offer an olive branch of oral se
x when he got home. They could put last night behind them.
Laughing to herself, she unmuted the TV and propped up her pillows. The email alert on her phone dinged, and Evelyn reached to see which parent was sending some excuse for why she couldn’t help with this week’s homework club or next month’s book sale.
It was Heather Smith, who always claimed she couldn’t volunteer but could usually be talked into it with just a little wheedling, so Evelyn typed out a polite plea. She was so busy choosing the perfect smiley face that she almost missed the news story. In fact, she wouldn’t have looked up at all but for the words Old Highway 23 spoken in an urgent tone.
Evelyn’s eyes went wide at the sight of lights flashing in the dark scene. Red and blue reflected dully off black pavement. A spotlight caught the shadowy outlines of trees. She grabbed the remote and turned up the volume. “Police are asking anyone with information to call the tip hotline.”
A phone number appeared on the screen. Evelyn pressed frantically at the remote button that would reverse the story in five-second increments. She hit it too many times, backing up to a story about the funeral of some retired civic leader she’d never heard of.
Afraid she’d push the wrong button and change the channel, Evelyn let the story run, focusing on the coiffed newscasters as if her attention would force them to talk faster, faster.
They finally finished their murmurs of condolence, and the TV filled with those blasts of red-and-blue light again.
“Police have revealed that the death of a juvenile female last night was the result of a hit-and-run. The county sheriff says a passing motorist spotted the body of the seventeen-year-old girl on the shoulder around the ninety-five-hundred block of Old Highway 23 at 11:30 p.m. on Thursday night.”
Evelyn’s pulse became a living, panicked thing, fighting to burst free of her. Her throat and temples and the base of her skull all felt battered by the assault.
“Authorities are unsure when the accident occurred, but the girl was deceased before paramedics arrived on the scene.”
No.
“Her name is being withheld for now, but if you were on Old Highway 23 around this time or know anything about the accident, police are asking anyone with information to call the tip hotline.”
“No,” Evelyn said aloud, the word thick and guttural as it scraped past the pulse in her throat. “No.”
The story was already over, so she backed it up and watched again, then hit “Record.” The moment the red light blinked, she regretted the impulse. Would the recording be evidence of wrongdoing? Even if she deleted it, the machine would likely keep a record of what she’d recorded, what she reversed, exactly when she pressed “Record.”
Her pulse became violent, threatening to close off her breath completely. She realized she was up on her knees only when she grew dizzy.
“No,” she said one more time, trying to draw a slow, steady breath to calm herself down. This was ridiculous. Why was she thinking about evidence? There hadn’t been any sign of a dead teenager last night. The blonde, as pretty as she’d been, had been thirty or forty, not seventeen.
This was all a terrible coincidence. Nothing more.
She turned off the television and set the remote carefully on her bedside table, then picked up her phone and typed 9500 Old Highway 23 into the map.
Her first reaction to the search result was relief. That wasn’t where Gary had gone off the road. There hadn’t been a dead body lying a few feet from the reach of Evelyn’s headlights, just as there hadn’t been a ghost floating out from the woods. It really was a coincidence.
But then Evelyn made the mistake of enlarging the map. Even as she slid her fingertips along the screen, she heard her sister saying, I wish I’d never asked. But that wasn’t a choice here, was it? This wasn’t about jealousy or some personal betrayal. This was a life. A death.
As the roads on her phone stretched out into longer, narrower lines, she saw familiar names attach themselves to the map. Hickory. Then Saddleback. Then tiny James Lane. Finally, she spotted White Oak, the road she’d taken to get to Gary. The road he’d insisted she take.
An inch below it, two miles, maybe more, the icon marking the spot of the girl’s death glowed like a target. It was just above James. Hickory, then Saddleback, then James and White Oak, all of them crossing Old 23 like rungs on a ladder. Saddleback was the thickest rung, a more developed road with streetlights marching through the night. A main artery meant to feed housing additions that had never been built after the recession. Saddleback was the road she should have used to get to Old 23. It was the safest, the fastest. Why had Gary been so determined to keep her off it?
The target glowed, swelling bigger on the map until Evelyn blinked her eyes and it shrank back down to a dot.
Her heart had slowed, but it thumped hard now. A sick double beat she could feel through her whole chest. Her stomach twisted into a tight, hard mass. Beyond that, she felt strangely calm as she climbed carefully from their king-size bed. It was too tall for her, with the expensive kind of mattress that rose up eighteen inches and stayed still and quiet even when your partner tossed and turned or snuck into bed halfway through the night.
She put her phone on the bedside table and walked out of the room.
Halfway down the hallway, Cameron’s door was closed, his room quiet. Sometimes she let herself believe that meant he was getting a good night’s sleep, but she knew he likely had his headphones on and his laptop open until two in the morning. But he got good grades and had never been in trouble, so he deserved his privacy.
Aware she was sneaking, she tiptoed past her son. She was also aware of why she was trying to be quiet, and that was what scared her as she crept down the stairs and into the kitchen. It scared her, yes. Terrified her, really. But she stared calmly at the door to the garage before she approached, gathering herself to face the quiet horror that could be waiting on the other side.
She briefly considered finding a pair of shoes to put on, but why bother? Gary kept the finished garage floor clean. He sneered at the next-door neighbors, whose garage was just bare two-by-four walls and half-empty paint cans stacked on gritty concrete next to broken sports equipment. Gary took good care of their house. He took good care of their lives.
When she opened the door to the blackness of the garage, she half expected to find Gary standing there, keys in hand, but when she turned on the light, the Range Rover’s stall was still a blank space awaiting his return.
The BMW gleamed pale in the sudden light, the depth of the paint lost under the fluorescent bulbs. He hadn’t wanted plain white. Too typical. Too pedestrian. They’d waited four weeks for the ice-white model with the exact trim Gary had wanted. Wouldn’t that hurt him now? His expensive, atypical paint smeared across some dead girl’s skull?
Evelyn had convinced herself at some point between the bedroom and the garage. She knew she’d step in front of the BMW and see Pollock-like splatters of gore across the front. Long hair caught in the grille. A body-shaped dent in the hood. When she walked over and finally looked at the car, she nearly laughed in terrible relief.
No blood. No gore. No hair. Nothing.
“Oh my God,” she sobbed, before dragging in a strangled breath. “Oh my God.” She did giggle then, because it was so ridiculous. Maybe she was losing her mind, suspecting Gary of cheating and scheming and now, good Lord above, even murder. Maybe she was having one of those breakdowns that made nice housewives go away for a few weeks of treatment for exhaustion.
Hadn’t that happened to Suzanna Lopez? “A little retreat,” she’d said, her eyes shuttered against more questions.
Evelyn laughed harder, leaning over until she had to brace herself on the perfect white hood. “Maybe I just need a little vacation too,” she said, the hilarity of it all making the words hiccup out of her.
She spread her fingers over the smooth coolness of the BMW and closed her eyes until the humor had worked its way from her body. Her head dropped. She took a deep bre
ath.
And when she opened her eyes, she saw a shallow wave in the line of the front bumper. A faint concavity. That was all. No blood. No brains. Just a tiny dent on the passenger side of the bumper, almost at the edge. The edge closest to the shoulder of the road.
“Ha.” Evelyn managed one last quiet laugh. Funny, how these things hit you.
CHAPTER 7
AFTER
When Noah texted her, Evelyn was surprised, though she wasn’t sure why. After all, they’d exchanged numbers so he could let her know when the piece was framed and in the window.
In that back room of his gallery, she’d felt wicked, standing next to him and watching as he typed her number into his phone. “What’s your last name?” he’d asked.
Stupid that she hadn’t anticipated the question, but she hadn’t. Without that glass of wine with lunch, she probably would have stammered and stumbled and exposed herself as a fraud, but the alcohol had kept her from panicking.
She’d said her maiden name immediately—“Farrington”—and watched her long-ago self return to life on his phone as he’d typed. Then he’d murmured it to himself. “Evelyn Farrington.”
She’d only meant to keep Gary’s name from him. After all, Noah likely knew that his wife’s psychiatrist was named Dr. Tester. So she’d lied, and she was so glad she had. The sound of her old name had satisfied something buried inside her. She hadn’t always been Evelyn Tester. She hadn’t always just been Gary’s wife.
It was only 9:00 p.m., but she was already in bed, propped up by pillows, all her comforts at hand: a book, a glass of water, the remote, and her bottle of sleeping pills. She hadn’t taken one yet. She’d excused herself early as she did every night lately. Sometimes she was exhausted, but mostly she was just trying to escape Gary.
He’d probably be up until eleven, and she could no longer look at him without wanting to slap him or cry or maybe just fall to her knees and ask why he’d ruined their life.
Evelyn, After: A Novel Page 4