by A. J. Banner
“So in the space of a couple of days,” I said, “I learned that Kieran was having an affair, then became convinced that he was a murderer—that he’d killed my mother, and perhaps his first wife, and intended to kill me. Then I thought he was dead. Then I learned it was my ex-husband orchestrating much of that madness—forging my mother’s writing in her journal, making me believe she was afraid of Kieran. Doing all he could to turn me against him. And then he entirely lost it, chased me, nearly killed me.”
Dr. Thacker shook her head. “Incredibly traumatic, all of it. And so much to process. How did it feel to find your husband still alive when you thought he was dead?” she said. “I imagine you hadn’t even begun to grieve.”
“No,” I breathed. “It all happened so fast—in hours, really. But it felt like forever. It felt like my emotions were being yanked in all directions.”
“I’m sorry.” Kieran reached for my hand, gripped my fingers tightly. “I know I’m fully to blame for what happened between us. I take full responsibility. Not that it would matter if she were here, but Diane is gone—she’s not coming back to the island. And I’m trying to make things right.” He gave me a loving look. I focused on our hands in my lap.
“How much do you remember about what happened, Kieran?” Dr. Thacker asked.
His heel tapped up and down on the carpet. “All I know is, I went over to talk to Elise. I don’t even remember going into the house—the kitchen door must’ve been unlocked. I didn’t have a key, but Brandon must have. He’d changed the locks. Next thing I knew, I woke up soaked in the dinghy. I was stiff. I had a headache. The sea was choppy. I was scared shitless. There was nothing to do but try to row to shore.” Kieran took a deep, shuddering breath. His face had paled. “He could’ve just taken me out and thrown me overboard. Why the hell didn’t he?”
“He didn’t know how to operate your yacht,” I said. “Or maybe he wanted your body to be found, so I wouldn’t be looking for you. So he could be with me.” A shiver ran through me.
“You don’t remember anything else about that day?” Dr. Thacker asked Kieran.
He shook his head. “It took me a while to row into the harbor against the tide, and then I hitched a ride home. My phone was gone. I couldn’t get through to Elise. I wish I could’ve been there for her. I had no idea what he’d done, using that powder.”
“The ‘Juliet,’” Dr. Thacker said, checking her notes. “Do you think that’s why your mother named it that? Like what Juliet took in Romeo and Juliet? Causes people to seem like they’re dead, at a certain dose, but they wake up?”
“I imagine so,” I said. I’d thought my mother had chosen to name the plant after her middle name, but the reason had been far more sinister.
“Dangerous stuff,” Dr. Thacker said. “But then, I imagine so many plants are.”
“I pulled it out. But it could come back.”
“It was lucky Brandon didn’t give me quite enough to kill me,” Kieran said, rubbing his head.
“He probably thought he knew the dosage,” I said. “But my mom’s writings were confusing.”
Dr. Thacker sipped from a glass of water. “Well, as I say, this is all an enormous amount to work through. If you both seek out someone to talk to on your own, great. Our focus here will be on the two of you, as a couple. We’ll keep talking here if you’re willing.”
“The baby’s coming whether we like it or not,” I said. “But I’m not sure if I want to stay in this marriage.”
Kieran gave me a stricken look, squeezed my hand even tighter. “I want to be with you.”
I stiffened and went on, “I’m thinking about what I want to do. Stay or move away, be single, put everything behind me. I love the house, the shop . . .”
“I love you and the baby,” Kieran said, his eyes glistening with tears. “I’ll do anything.”
“This is a big decision,” Dr. Thacker said, “and a tough one to make at such a fraught time. Have you considered staying together for now, around the birth of the baby? That can be a hard time to be alone.”
“All right.” I nodded, agreeing, not looking at Kieran. He had also offered to remove himself from my will. I had altered certain clauses, but he still stood to inherit a substantial portion of my estate—for the care and education of our child until she was old enough to manage her own funds. I reminded myself that agreeing to a few months in therapy didn’t mean I would stay with him forever. It only meant our child’s parents would be together for her birth.
When we left Dr. Thacker’s office, I felt a glimmer of hope. I couldn’t deny the relief I’d experienced when Kieran had reappeared that night, taking my hand.
We kept going to therapy, once a week, and as the months passed, the trauma of those September days slowly fell away. I focused on my customers in the shop. I attended fund-raisers for the town garden, the library, the community center. I put on weight, my belly growing by the day. My feet began to hurt at work—my lower back, too.
After a while, I couldn’t lie on my side in bed anymore. Kieran took care of me, rubbing my feet, bringing me pillows, and we returned to a fragile sense of normalcy. Occasionally, when his cell phone rang, and he answered in a low voice, my antennae went up. But he would always smile, tuck the phone away, and come over to reassure me. Everything was okay now. I could trust him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“She’s asleep,” Kieran said, placing Bella gently in the bassinet. He gazed down at her with adoration in his eyes. “She’s so beautiful. Just like her mom.”
“Thank you, but you can’t tell what she’s going to look like,” I whispered, leaning back against four pillows. “She’s only three weeks old.”
“No, I can tell. She has your nose.”
“And your ears,” I said. “Very clearly your ears.”
“Your hands in miniature.”
“They’re cool hands, don’t you think?”
“And she’s fussy like you,” he said.
“All babies are fussy,” I said. But Kieran had the touch. He could quiet her so easily. I was so tired of trying, I could hardly move. Fatigue cut to my bones. I’d been up every two hours for what seemed like forever. Feeding her, burping her, changing her, holding her. Watching every facial expression, every movement.
Our lives before Bella’s birth felt like a distant, fuzzy dream of luxurious nights spent actually sleeping. She was all-consuming, exhausting. She took every space in my head, every ounce of my attention. But this was a blessing. I no longer dreamed of Brandon chasing me in the woods, grabbing my neck. But sometimes, when something reminded me of him, when I drove past a new construction project, I also felt a certain melancholy. I had once loved him, and in his mind, peering in through our windows, sneaking into our house, and trying to kill my husband had all been done out of love, because he cared for me in his twisted way.
But now the wonder of Bella’s smile, of her entire being, sent the past running for cover. When I looked into her cherubic face, I wondered how the world could ever have existed without her.
A July breeze wafted in through the window, carrying the exquisite, sweet smell of the flowering privet hedge. I looked around at the library that had become our temporary bedroom on the first floor, as I still had trouble climbing the stairs without pain. Kieran had set up our bed in here, had moved in the bassinet. I’d grown accustomed to falling asleep surrounded by shelves of books.
He reached over to adjust the pillows behind my head. “Anything else I can get you?”
I took his warm hand, and he sat beside me on the mattress. “You’re so helpful. I should be able to move back upstairs soon.”
“You need to heal,” he said, resting his hand on my belly. “Let me see the incision.”
I lifted my shirt to show him the scar across my abdomen, a little under a foot long. I hadn’t realized I had so much skin. The staples had been removed, and I no longer tucked a sanitary napkin between my skin and the elastic waistband of my sweatpants. The chafing
had been unbearable during the first few days. “Does it look okay, doc? Do I pass muster?”
“Everything’s A-okay,” he said. “Looks like you’re healing well. Any pain?”
“Only when I stand up. I get a twinge, but it goes away. I’m sick of being stuck down here, much as I love all these gardening books.”
“You could climb stairs if you take it easy. There’s no law against it. But you never take it easy. That’s the problem.”
“It’s in my nature to push,” I said, gripping his hands in both of mine. “Come to bed. It’s almost seven.”
“Seven!” he said, laughing. He nodded toward Bella. “That used to be dinnertime.”
“Dinner, breakfast. Night, day. It’s all the same now. You need some rest.”
“Soon.” He stood, waved his phone. “I have to check my messages.”
I groaned. Even now, when he had been so loyal, by my side these last months, I felt a touch of unease. “Hurry back—do you have to be on call?”
“Not often,” he said, bending down to kiss me tenderly on the lips. “I could say I won’t do it anymore. Because of Bella.”
“You would do that?”
“I would do anything.”
“No, your patients need you,” I said. “Go ahead.”
“We’ll take another walk in the morning?” he said brightly. “You need to keep exercising.”
“I am,” I said. “I got out of bed and walked only twelve hours after surgery, remember.” Not that the C-section had felt like surgery. It had all gone much faster than I had expected—the prep, the spinal, and then the delivery—although Bella’s birth had felt violent, unnatural. The table on which I’d lain had been shaking, and I could feel the pressure and tugging when the doctors had wrenched her from my womb. But we’d had no choice. She was breech. Kieran had been holding my hand the whole time, the anxious husband, not the doctor performing the surgery.
“You push yourself too hard,” he said again, checking Bella one more time. “That’s why I have to go with you when you head off down the garden path, to make sure you don’t run a marathon.” When we took short walks, he carried Bella against his abdomen in the tactical carrier, which looked like a bulletproof vest.
“I couldn’t if I tried. Come right back, okay?”
“Always.”
When he left, my breath still caught. I sometimes worried he wouldn’t come back. I could still remember the way he’d looked, lying in the garden, his skin ashen, when I thought I’d lost him. I exhaled now, closed my eyes, listened to the crackle of gravel as he walked down the driveway through the summer night, to find a signal on his phone. Our marriage still hung by a fragile thread, but we would have to keep trying. Nothing was ever easy.
My muscles felt tight—I needed to stretch. I’d made a tentative start with tai chi, when I could catch a few minutes. I opened my eyes, threw off the sheets, rolled over, and pushed myself up to a sitting position. I still couldn’t engage my abdominal muscles to twist upright without a spasm of pain. I stood and leaned over the bassinet to check on Bella. She slept peacefully, but I knew it wouldn’t last.
The night was cooling off now, the breeze carrying a summer chill. Only in the Pacific Northwest, I thought. I closed the window, hoped Bella’s sleeper would keep her little toes warm. The flannel sheet would help, and I felt tempted to tuck a blanket around her, but it was too dangerous. I’d had nightmares of the covers suffocating her.
I turned up the wall thermostat by a couple of degrees—it was strange to have to warm the house in summer, but we were on the windy side of the island. Where was my sweater? I looked around. Kieran had just done laundry, had put away my clothes in my dresser upstairs.
I checked through the folded shirts and pants he’d placed on shelves by the bed. No sweater. After a few minutes, he didn’t return. I hated relying on him—helplessness didn’t suit me. But he never complained about pulling his weight. Bella is my child, too. He had come through for me, shopping, cleaning, doing the heavy lifting. Caring for her.
His phone calls were taking a while. After another ten minutes, I thought, Screw it, I’m not going to wait anymore. I would get my own sweater, even if it meant climbing the stairs. I was sick of feeling like an invalid.
“Daddy said I could do it,” I told Bella. “I can climb stairs if I want.” I turned on her monitor, made sure the remote video of her face appeared on my phone through the wireless internet connection. I could look at my iPhone screen and see her every movement in the bassinet.
Each step to the second floor gave me a twinge. I took the stairs one at a time. Finally, I made it to the top. It was nice to be in the master bedroom again. We were starting anew. Except for the yawning space where the bed should have been. Kieran had painted the walls a soothing light blue, and the furniture was all new, too, made of distressed, reclaimed wood. There was no trace of the bedroom in which I had caught him in bed with Diane. This was a different space altogether now. We had transferred the antique dresser and bureau into the guest room. Bella’s nursery, down the hall, would wait until I could move back upstairs.
All this, although I had never expected to stay with Kieran at all. I still couldn’t really believe it, but I had needed him through the pregnancy, and I needed him even more now. His coat was draped over my dresser, hanging down over the drawers. I lifted it to move it out of the way, and a faint perfume wafted into my nose. I sniffed along the fabric until I found the source of the scent, a spot on the lapel. A familiar fragrance, but I couldn’t place it.
My throat tightened—my antennae went on high alert. I looked at the app on my phone. Bella still slept peacefully. Kieran wasn’t back yet. I checked the exterior pockets of his coat, found a few coins, a crumpled tissue, a rubber band. There were two inside pockets. One was empty. I pulled a folded napkin out of the other one, from the Starfish, the pub downtown. I almost tucked the napkin back into his pocket, but then I unfolded it. Written inside was the name Alexa and a local telephone number, and then, Call me.
Alexa. I remembered the name tag on a soft red blouse, on the waitress at the Starfish. Kieran and I had been in there a few times in the last several months, to pick up desserts I’d been craving. Alexa glided everywhere, balanced drinks and desserts on trays with ease as she wove around the tables, flashing her movie-star grin. I remembered her because she was perfect, like an android woman created from a fantasy—straight white teeth, luminous amber hair, and a ballerina’s body. She was barely eighteen, and she was in fact a dancer, heading off to college in the fall, hoping to be accepted into the Pacific Northwest Ballet School. She’d told us once when Kieran had asked where she’d come from, since we hadn’t seen her before. She’d moved in with her dad on the island, she’d said, just until school started in September. She’d been living with her mother in Spokane, but they weren’t getting along.
I looked at the name again, Alexa, written in a looping, immature cursive, and my hand began to shake. I imagined Kieran stopping in to the Starfish for cheesecake, a drink, tossing her his charming grin. He had captured her with his blue-eyed gaze, those shoulders. It would never end.
Numb now, I tucked the napkin into my pocket. When had Alexa given him her number? Recently, or had her overture initiated an affair days or weeks earlier?
My incision suddenly throbbed. My joints ached—my whole body felt heavy. I wanted to close my eyes and blot out reality, but instead I checked the pockets of the pants he had recently worn, draped over a chair. Pulled out a small, flat package from his back pocket. An unopened condom.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I was downstairs by the time Kieran returned, but not in bed. Bella was awake. I’d nursed her, and now I sat in the rocking chair, holding her swaddled in my arms. “You’re still alive,” I said. “Surprise.”
“That took forever,” he said, putting his phone on the desk.
“Someone in trouble?” I said. “Emergency?”
“Yeah, nothing for you to worry
about. How is our little beauty?” He emptied the pockets of his pants, putting his wallet, coins, and crumpled receipts on the desk.
“She was hungry,” I said.
He looked at me, did a double take. “What’s wrong? You’re crying.”
“Yes, I am,” I said softly. It didn’t help that my hormones had already sent my mood swinging in all directions. “I went upstairs.”
I could see a slight flicker in his eyes, then he broke into a smile. “That’s good. You made it all the way with no pain?”
“It hurt a little.”
“We can move up there again soon, then?”
“Who’s Alexa?” I said, unfolding the napkin from my pocket, holding it up in the air.
He feigned confusion, his brow furrowing. Took the napkin from me, pretended to read the words for the first time. “What’s this?” he said, looking at me, his gaze clear and direct.
“I found it in your coat pocket.”
“What coat?” He didn’t even blush, didn’t break a sweat.
“The one you draped over my dresser.”
“The trench coat? Oh—that’s right. I took a napkin from the Starfish, but I didn’t read what was on it.”
“That’s funny—you must’ve been flirting with her. With Alexa.”
“With Alexa! Who’s that?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know.”
“The waitress,” he said thoughtfully. He ripped up the napkin in a great theatrical show, threw it into the recycling bin. “She has a crush on me. It’s awkward. I had no idea she’d written anything on the napkin.”
But he knew. I knew he did. “You were in there without me. She gave you her number. She must’ve had a reason to believe you would want it. Did you flirt with her? Ask her out?”
“What? Hell no.” He came to kneel beside me. “You and Bella are everything to me. You know that.”