The Marriage Lie(50)
“What are you talking about?”
“Will’s behavior lately. He just seemed so...distracted and...I don’t know, off. Moody and super stressed out. A couple of weeks ago, some guy at the gym told him to wipe down the machine, and Will just lost it. He starts screaming and throwing punches, and I had to physically drag him outside and calm him down. I’ve never seen him lose his temper like that. Now I’m wondering if one thing had to do with the other, like if he was acting funny because of all the lies, or if the lies were to cover up something else. Does that make any sense?”
A flurry of emotions rise in my chest, a familiar hurt leading the pack. “It makes total sense, unfortunately.”
“Was he acting stressed with you, too?”
Events from the past month flash across my mind like a slide show. The time I was making dinner while he paced the backyard, his cell pressed to his ear and his face clamped down in a scowl, talking to a person he would identify only as a “colleague.” The time I came downstairs to him sitting in his car in the driveway, staring into space for a good twenty minutes. The time I rolled over to find him wide-awake, watching me with an expression I’d never seen before, an emotion I couldn’t define. When I asked him what was wrong, his answer was to make love to me.
But AppSec had just acquired the City of Atlanta as a client, and Will’s team was working under a tight deadline. He brushed his behavior off as work stress, and at the time, I believed him.
Or maybe I just wanted to.
Now, though? Now I’m certain there was something else going on. Something that made Will get on a plane to Seattle.
“You knew him better than anyone else,” Corban says. “What do you think was going on?”
I roll his question around my mind for a long moment, coming at it from every possible angle. I think about Will’s sketchy past, the destruction he left in his wake back in Seattle. The deadly fire that burned down a block of apartments and landed Will’s mother and two innocent children in early graves. His father, alone and bedridden in a state facility for the indigent. And these are only the people I know about. How many others are there?
I swish around the last of my tea, watching the dredges swirl around the bottom of my cup. “I think something—or more likely, someone—from his past came back to haunt him. I think that’s why he was acting strange, and why he got on the plane to Seattle.”
Corban doesn’t answer. I look up and he’s gone completely still.
“What?”
“I wasn’t going to tell you this, but based on that answer, I feel like I have to.” He pauses, holding my gaze with eyes so black, I can’t tell his pupil from his iris. “A day or two before the crash, Will called to ask me for a favor. He made me swear on my mother’s grave that I would do it.”
He stops, and so does my heart. “That you’d do what?”
“I promised that if anything ever happened to him, I’d look out for you.”
*
I return home to a mountain of Lowe’s bags climbing the walls of my foyer, and my father on his knees, a drill in his hand and a tool belt slung around his waist.
“What’s going on?”
“Floodlights at both doors, that’s what’s going on.” He roots around in one of the bags, pulls out a handful of light switches. “I’ll mount these guys on the inside wall, but the outdoor fixtures have motion sensors. Anybody who gets within five feet will find themselves in the spotlight. Literally.”
“Is this because of the letter?”
“The letter, the texts and the fact that you live smack in the middle of the twelfth most dangerous city in the country. I’m also changing your locks and putting in extra dead bolts and chains. And an alarm company is coming by later today to hook your system up to their central monitoring system.”
Mom comes in from the living room, a book tucked under her arm. “I also asked him to fix the sticky front door, reattach that loose floorboard by the kitchen table and replace that rubber thingy on the leaky hall toilet.”
“Valve,” Dad says, pushing to his feet. “She asked me to replace the rubber valve. I got enough to replace all of them. You’ll thank me when you get your next water bill.”
“I’ll thank you now, too,” I say, and it comes out only a little wobbly, even though what I really want to do is have a good cry that Will never got through his honey-do list. What were the last two that he added, our last morning together in bed? It takes me a second or two to come up with them—the filters on the air conditioners and the oil in my car. I resolve to take care of those myself.
My father bends his knees, putting his eyes on the level of mine. “If you’re worried about the costs, punkin’, your mother and I will foot the bill. We’d just feel better if you were safe and secure and hooked up to some kind of system, especially now that... Especially now.”
I know what he was going to say: especially now that Will’s gone. He looks so distraught, not to mention worried, that I wrap my arms around his waist and pull him tight, fresh tears gathering in my eyes. “Now that I’ll be living here alone, I’d feel better with a working alarm, too. Thank you. But I don’t want you to pay.”
“Settled, then.” Dad drops a kiss on the top of my head and unwinds us, fishing the drill from where he’d left it in the piles of bags. He hits the button, buzzing the blade around in the air, then takes his finger off the trigger. “Almost forgot. Will’s boss left another message while you were gone. By now, his fifth or sixth. I take it you haven’t found a chance to call him back yet.”