A Good Marriage by Kimberly McCreight
For Tony,
The beginning of everything good.
And the only ending that matters.
Love never dies of a natural death
—ANA?S NIN, The Four-Chambered Heart
Prologue
I never meant for any of this to happen. That’s a stupid thing to say. But it is true. And obviously, I didn’t kill anyone. Would never, could never. You know that. You know me better than anyone.
Have I made my share of mistakes? Definitely. I’ve lied, been selfish. I’ve hurt you. That’s what I regret most of all. That I caused you pain. Because I love you more than anything in this world.
You know that, right? That I love you?
I hope so. Because that’s all I think about. And solitary gives you lots of time to think.
(Don’t worry—I talked my way into “the box.” That’s what they call solitary. It’s too damn loud out there in the general population. All night long, people talk and scream and argue and mumble nonsense. If you don’t come in here insane, you’ll end up that way. And I’m not insane. I know you know that, too.)
Explanations. Would they make a difference? I can at least start with the why. Because this is so much harder than I thought it would be—marriage, life. All of it.
It’s so simple at the beginning. You meet someone gorgeous and smart and funny. Somebody who’s better than you—you both know it, at least on some level. You fall in love with them. But you fall even more in love with their idea of you. You feel lucky. Because you are lucky.
Then time passes. You both change too much. You stay too much the same. The truth worms its way out, and the horizon grows dark. Eventually all you’re left with is somebody who sees you for who you really are. And sooner or later, they hold up a mirror and you’re forced to see for yourself.
And who the hell can live with that?
So you do what you can to survive. You start looking for a fresh pair of eyes.
Lizzie
JULY 6, MONDAY
The sun was sinking lower in the skyscraper forest outside my office window. I imagined myself sitting there at my desk, letting the darkness fully descend. Wondering if tonight it might finally swallow me whole. How I hated that stupid office.
A light in the tall building opposite went on. Soon there would be another—people getting on with their work, their lives. All things considered, it was probably better to accept I was in for another late night. Finally, I reached forward and switched on my light.
In the small circle of brightness cast down onto the floor sat the uneaten lunch Sam had packed for me that morning—the special pepper turkey and Swiss on the right rye bread with carrots because he worried, justifiably, that I was vitamin-deficient. Sam had been packing my lunch every day for the eleven years we’d lived together in New York—eight of them married—even on those mornings he never made it to work himself.
I gave my uneaten lunch a halfhearted kick as I checked the clock on my computer: 7:17 p.m. It wasn’t even that late yet, but time always crawled for me at Young & Crane. My shoulders sagged as I tried to focus on the still utterly lackluster response letter to the DOJ that I was revising for another senior associate, one with zero criminal experience. The client was a cell phone battery manufacturer with several board members being investigated for insider trading. It was the typical criminal matter the firm handled: an unexpected wrinkle for a preexisting corporate client.
Young & Crane didn’t have a dedicated white-collar criminal practice. Instead, they had Paul Hastings, former chief of the Southern District of New York’s Violent and Organized Crime Unit. And now they had me. Paul had predated me at the US attorney’s office, but he’d been close with my mentor and boss, Mary Jo Brown, who’d insisted four months ago that Paul give me a job at the firm. Paul was an impressive, well-known attorney with decades of experience, but at Young & Crane he always seemed to me like a recently retired racehorse, desperate for the gates to snap back again.
M&M’s. That was what I needed to get through the letter, which, despite my best efforts, remained three paragraphs of unpersuasive dodge-and-weave. There were almost always M&M’s in the overflowing Young & Crane snack cabinet—a perk meant to ease the drudgery of the all-nighters. I was about to go in search of them when an email notification popped up on my cell phone, sitting on the far side of my desk—so it didn’t distract me. The message, to my personal account, was from Millie, and the subject line read “Call Me Back Please.” It was not her first email in the past couple weeks. Millie wasn’t usually this insistent, but it also wasn’t totally without precedent. It didn’t necessarily mean it was an actual emergency. I swiped the message into an “old emails” folder without opening it. I would eventually read it and her other recent ones—I always did eventually—just not tonight.
My eyes were still on my cell when my office phone rang. An outside call to my direct line, I could tell from the single ringtone. Sam, presumably. Not many people had my new direct number.
“This is Lizzie,” I answered.
“You have a collect call from a New York State correctional facility from …,” a computer-generated male voice intoned, followed by an endless pause.