The Marriage Lie(93)

But just like I do now with Celeste, I smile and thank them politely, and then I move along.

Evan calls on my cell as I’m walking into the house. “Hey.”

“Hey,” I say, and already, I’m smiling. Evan and I talk a handful of times a day, and our conversations always start like this. “What’s up?”

“Braves versus the Cards at two, that’s what’s up. I’ve got seats behind the dugout. Wanna meet me there?”

Yet another thing Evan and I have in common, a healthy obsession with watching sports. We’ve discovered over the course of these past few weeks that there are many more interests and quirks we share, happier, more relevant things that bind us beyond the way we lost our spouses. It’s strange, when you think about it, how the one thing that brings two people together can be the exact thing keeping them apart. Maybe one day, way, way down the line, things between Evan and me could develop into more, but not yet. Not anytime soon. Both of us have a lot more grieving to do.

“Sure,” I say. “But it’s your turn to buy the hot—” I step into my kitchen, and there he is, there’s Will. The air rushes from my lungs.

He’s disheveled, and he’s lost weight since I saw him last. The lines on his face are deeper, too, slashing across his forehead and cupping the sides of his mouth like parentheses. Even his hair, a dark close-clipped brown, has gone gray around the temples. But he’s still as handsome as ever. My body goes numb at the sight of him.

“What happened?” Evan says into the phone, his tone turning serious. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.” My throat is strangled, and the word doesn’t come out right. It’s blurred and formless, even in my own ears.

The line goes quiet. “Is he there? Wait. Don’t answer that. Just...be careful, and call me later.” He hangs up.

I drop my phone onto the counter with a clatter, my eyes never leaving Will’s. I grip the marble and wait for the violent spasm of hatred and fury at seeing him again. I brace for it, but it doesn’t come. What comes is relief, swift and sudden, and love, like a warm layer of honey around my heart. I still love this man, dammit. I’m still in love with him. Despite all the lies and betrayals, I probably always will be.

“God, I’ve missed you,” he whispers.

I run to him, throwing myself at him with a flying leap.

He wasn’t expecting it. He goes back on a foot, but he catches me with a loud grunt. His hands wrap around my bottom, mine wrap around his neck, and after that I lose track of who does what. All I know is that he’s kissing me, and I’m kissing him back. Thirty-three days is the longest we’ve ever been apart.

And then I come to my senses.

I scramble out of his grip, rear back with an arm and smack him on the cheek as hard as I can. The flesh-on-flesh sound is loud, almost deafening in the stillness of the kitchen.

Will doesn’t move.

I rear back and hit him again, another hard slap where his cheek has already bloomed bright pink, the perfect shadow of my handprint.

Will jerks a little at the contact, but he lifts his chin and waits for another. It’s almost like he wants another blow. Like he welcomes the pain.

When I don’t rear back for a third time, his face sags. “You weren’t supposed to come looking for me. You weren’t supposed to ever find out the truth.”

“What is the truth? Because after the past month, I’m thinking pretty much every word out of your mouth was a lie.”

He shakes his head. “I never lied about my feelings for you. Never. That part is 100 percent true.”

A spiked ball of pain lodges behind my heart. I look around the kitchen, at once familiar and strange, at the notes on the fridge and the pictures by the bar and the marble countertops we picked out on a weekend road trip to South Carolina, and blink back tears.

“Yet you still chose the money over me.”

He doesn’t nod, but he doesn’t shake his head, either. “I gave the money back. Remember?”

“You didn’t give it back. You planted it on Corban’s computer, and for what? So the police would stop looking for you, so they’d think you were dead?”

“I did it for you. I killed Huck for you. The police weren’t going to do it, not until they saw a weapon, but Huck was a sick bastard, and he would have snapped your neck without blinking, just because he knew I was watching. I couldn’t give him that chance.”

Huck? I frown. “I thought Huck was living in Costa Rica.”

“Huck is Corban. His name is Corban Huck, not Hayes.”

And suddenly, it all makes sense. The kid who lived down the hall at Rainier Vista, the son of the woman who testified she heard three voices fighting the night of the fire, is Corban. Corban is Huck. Will’s best buddy, who was supposedly running a surfing school in Costa Rica, when he was here, in Atlanta, all along.

The lies just keep on coming.

I cross my arms over my chest, lean a hip against the counter and settle in. “Tell me, Will. The truth this time. I need you to tell me everything.”

*

We end up on the sectional in the den, where never, not even during the worst of our arguments, has there been so much air between us. Only a month ago, we would have talked everything out in the center of the couch, Will propped in the corner with me tucked under an arm. We would have held hands just because our fingers were close, would have soothed our harsh words with a caress or a kiss. But today, four couch cushions and a coffee table separate us like an impenetrable crater.