The Marriage Lie(41)

Flames. The word gives me a full-body shiver.

“And the kids?”

“Two siblings, three and five. Fast asleep in the apartment across the hall. Their mother was working the night shift.”

My stomach twists with horror for that poor woman. I think of her tucking her babies in that night before heading off to work, telling them she’d be home by the time they awoke, telling herself they’d be safe in their own beds. Their tragedy is every mother’s worst nightmare.

I curl around my pillow, burrowing deeper under the comforter. “You know, everything I’ve learned since the crash is so confusing. Him getting on the wrong plane to the wrong destination. Making up a conference. Meeting this friend Corban he never told me about. All these lies about where he came from and what his childhood was like. I don’t understand any of it. Except for the house.”

“Your house?”

I nod. “We must have seen a hundred. There was something wrong with every one of them. The kitchen was too dated or the yard was too small or the street was too busy. Nothing was ever perfect enough for Will. Our broker showed us that house more to prove a point than anything else. Like, see what you can get if you cough up another hundred grand? But you should have seen his face when we walked in the door.” I smile at the memory of how everything about him went completely still but the color in his cheeks, which got more and more flushed with each room we walked through. “By the time we got upstairs, it was a done deal. He had to have it.”

A sudden gust of rain machine-gun patters against the window. Dave swings his feet up onto an ottoman, folding his arms across his chest and settling in. “It is a gorgeous house.”

I think about the first time we walked up the steps, his face when we pushed through the stained-glass door, how I knew before we walked through, it was a done deal. “We made an offer that same day. Even though it meant mostly empty rooms and a mortgage we could afford only by the skin of our teeth. But now I understand why owning it was so important to him.”

“Because the house was a symbol of how far he’d come.”

“Exactly.” As I say the word, a familiar anger rises inside me all over again, and I lurch upright in bed. “If he had just told me why he wanted it so badly, I wouldn’t have fought him so much. I wouldn’t have complained about giving up my Starbucks habit or how we never got to go on vacation so we could buy our dream house. There’s not a soul on the planet who would have understood more than me. But he wasn’t ever planning to tell me, was he?”

Dave sighs, lifting both hands into the air. “Not this again,” he mutters.

“Not what again?”

“We already had this discussion, at length, last night at the bar. You even took a poll. An overwhelming eighty-seven percent of half-drunk hipsters agree that, no, Will was never planning to tell you.”

Normally, I’d be mortified by the thought of a hammered me asking people I don’t know to weigh in on my marriage. I’m not exactly an uninhibited type, and I don’t go around talking to strangers about my business. But I’m too focused on the bigger picture—the fact that my husband not only kept such essential parts of himself from me, his very favorite person on the planet, when we first met, but that he didn’t trust me, didn’t trust our love, enough to come clean.

“Not about his parents, not about the fire, nothing about his scary, sketchy past. He fed me all that bullshit about growing up with a loving single mother in Memphis, and I swallowed it whole. Did he even go to UT? Does he even have a degree? I have no idea, because I’m the most gullible person in the world!”

“You aren’t gullible, honey. You were deceived by the man you loved. There’s a big difference.”

“I’m a trained psychologist, Dave. I’m supposed to see through people like Will.”

“I don’t see how any of this is your fault.”

“Whatever.” I fall back onto the bed, covering my face with the pillow, new tears pricking at my eyes. Up until seven days ago, I was 100 percent convinced I knew my husband. I thought Will told me everything about himself. I thought we told each other everything. And now, I keep unraveling bits and pieces of the former him that lead me back to the same thought: I never really knew the man I married.

And now, looking back, I have to question everything. That time we went to San Francisco, a city he swore he’d never visited, and he knew the way with barely a glance at the map. Was it because he’d been there before? When he admitted in a game of Cards Against Humanity that he didn’t go to senior prom but refused to tell me why. And when we would go to La Fonda and Will would order chile rellenos and quesadillas con camarones with perfect pronunciation. Since when did he speak Spanish?

And then it occurs to me that I’ve lost Will twice now. The first time was when he got on that plane, the second when he posthumously morphed into a stranger. One was swift and shocking, the other more gradual but no less painful. Both wounds are fresh and jagged and deep.

“Tomorrow’s a week,” I say, my voice muffled. “I will have survived seven whole days without Will.”

“I know.” Dave is silent for a long moment, and I hear him push out of the chair, moving closer. “Listen, can I ask you something?”

“I’m pretty sure I couldn’t stop you if I tried.”