The Marriage Lie(77)

I slink around the corner to the back door. A pair of muddy sneakers—men’s—lie abandoned next to a pile of newspapers. Whoever lives here runs and recycles, and I add two ticks to the Not Will column. Will prefers the gym, and he reads his news online. I shove my way through the shrubs and move on to the next window.

The living room is empty, too, its contents too generic to make any assumptions about the person who lives here. A couch, two chairs, a couple of tables and lamps. I look around for anything personal, photographs or books or discarded items of clothing, but there’s nothing. Other than the shoes and the laptop, this place could be a model home.

A light flips on in the hall, and my heart stops, then kicks into high gear. If it’s Will, what will I do? Faint into the bushes? Bust through the window? I grip the sill, hold my breath and wait.

Disappointment balloons in my belly, hard and heavy, at the man who walks around the corner. It’s not Will, but I recognize him immediately. Tall build and broad shoulders, skin the color of coffee beans. I saw plenty of that skin just yesterday, when he was pushing a lawn mower across my backyard.

I move the pieces in my brain, sliding them around to find where they fit. The house. Will. Corban. If this is the address attached to the blocked number, the one Will’s been using to text since he traced me to Seattle, what is Corban doing here? And where’s Will? No matter how I try to shove them together, I can’t make the pieces connect.

Corban moves farther into the room, and I slide down to the next window, tracking his movements. He’s hunched over a cell phone, his thumb swiping at the screen. Whatever he sees there freezes his shoes to the hardwoods, and a frown pushes down on his forehead.

Something inside me goes on high alert, like Ava’s fancy sports car that beeps whenever her back bumper gets too close to something solid. The alarm in my head is screaming, telling me I’m backing up to something dangerous. A ravine, maybe, or the edge of a cliff.

Without warning, his head swings up, his gaze whipping to the window.

My window.

As if he knew exactly where to look.

I drop to the dirt, holding my breath and listening for a sign, but I can barely hear above my pounding heart. Did he see me? Is he on his way outside right now? I don’t wait to find out. I dig my limbs into the dirt and start scrambling, my heart lodged behind my teeth. Pine straw pricks my hands and skin, and cloth rips in the brambles—my skirt or my blouse or both—but I don’t stop. I duck my head and keep going. Twenty feet through the bushes to the end of the house, and then what? As soon as I hit the yard, I’ll be seen.

It’s either that or pray he doesn’t come outside.

A door slams, a dog barks, and that’s all I need to know. I burst from the branches, lunge into a sprint and tear across the yard for the car.

I tumble onto my driver’s seat and stab my keys in the ignition with shaky, dirt-caked fingers. I chance a peek up the yard as I’m peeling away, and there’s Corban standing in the doorway, one hand shading his eyes from the sun.

And smiling.

*

A few minutes later, I swerve my car between two SUVs in a nearby Home Depot lot and try not to hyperventilate. I’m no longer winded from my sprint across Corban’s yard, but my breath still comes in short spurts, and the air feels stuck in my lungs. I puff my cheeks and hold my breath like Corban taught me at the memorial—oh, the irony—and it helps. When I release it, my lungs unknot somewhat.

Corban saw me. Not only did he see me, he could have easily caught up with me. I’m not an athlete, and high heels and a pencil skirt aren’t exactly the best gear for a hundred-meter dash. In the time it took me to make it across his yard and into my car, a jock like Corban could have lapped me, twice.

But he didn’t even try.

He also didn’t look surprised. And he was smiling.

My cell stabs me in the pubic bone, and I dig it from my skirt pocket. I stare at the dark screen, and I recall an information evening Ted and I held for parents a few months ago. The subject was cyberbullying, and we were barely a half hour in when the meeting was hijacked by a couple of helicopter parents who had, unbeknownst to their kids, installed GPS trackers on their teenagers’ cell phones. They told us this proudly, as if spying on their kids was a God-given parental right, and I made the mistake of wondering out loud if that was crossing some sort of line. Ted spent the rest of the evening trying to calm everyone down.

But the point is, I know the technology exists.

The trackers these parents talked about were invisible, working undetected in the background. All you have to do is get a hold of the other person’s phone long enough to install it, and bingo, you know where they are at all times. The realization rises slowly, repellently, to the surface of my mind, and if it weren’t for all those texts from Will, I’d chuck my phone out the window.

And then another realization tightens the breath in my lungs.

The blocked number led me to Corban, not Will.

With shaking fingers, I wake up my phone and scroll through the texts—a whopping eighty-seven in all.

Heartfelt apologies. Detailed explanations and tearful regrets. He says everything right, except for one.

Seventeen times, he tells me he loves me. But not once does he say the words I want to hear. Our words. Not once does he tell me I’m his very favorite person, which means the person on the other end of this number also isn’t mine.