Every Vow You Break(77)
She decided she wasn’t quite ready to make decisions regarding her day and took her second cup of coffee back outside to the patio, putting it down on the coffee table next to the small white stone with the red ring that she’d kept from Heart Pond Island. She touched a finger to the stone before leaning back, gathering her laptop, and clicking on the link that brought her to the wedding photographs.
There were hundreds of them, as the photographer had promised, laid out in a grid that loaded surprisingly fast. Most were in black-and-white, but a few were in color, and the images unspooled on the page like cards being turned over. Abigail had been prepared for a tidal wave of emotions but, oddly, maybe because she was expecting that, she felt relatively unmoved by all the pictures. She remembered the day well—getting dressed with the bridesmaids while sharing champagne, the official photographs on the hill with the Hudson River in the background, the walk down the aisle, the vows they’d written themselves, the cocktail party, dinner and dancing. She actually found herself enjoying some of the pictures, getting to see her friends and family dressed up again, having fun. The pictures that showed Bruce were harder to look at. Not because she grieved for him or missed him in any way, but because she found herself studying his face in the pictures, trying to see if there was any moment when he gave himself away, when he showed his true nature. She couldn’t see it.
In the posed pictures he looked stiff at times, his smile a little too wide, but that could mean anything. In the candid shots, he mostly looked relaxed and at ease with himself. There were even shots where he was looking at Abigail, and it looked as if there was love in his eyes. How had she been so fooled?
It was one of the questions she found herself asking a lot these days. How had she not recognized Bruce’s true nature? Had she been blinded by his romantic gestures? Or by his money and his success? Or had he just seemed so different from Ben Perez that she’d fallen for him regardless? She wasn’t sure she’d ever know.
But she did think there was maybe a clue in the wedding pictures. Maybe he looked as though he was in love with her because he really was, in some perverted and strange way? Even though he knew what lay ahead, that he would get his revenge for her infidelity, he still felt love for her, or an approximation of love?
And maybe she was reading too much into it? The most logical explanation was that Bruce was a psychopath, a psychopath who had gone to a seminar that told him what he always believed down deep, ever since his mother had abandoned his family: women weren’t to be trusted.
And the reason he’d looked genuinely in love in the photographs was because he was good at faking it.
Abigail was almost done looking at the album when something caught her eye in one of the last pictures. It was a photo of the last dance, she and Bruce looking tired and happy at the center of the dance floor. She remembered it well. Her stinging feet, the jazzy version of “Every Breath You Take,” making jokes with Bruce. In the photograph they are out of focus while the onlookers, the wedding stragglers on the edge of the dance floor, were shown in sharp detail. There were her parents, standing next to each other, her mother looking sleepy, her father beaming, probably a little drunk. Behind the onlookers was the wide-open door of the barn, its white-painted trim strung with garlands of flowers. A man stood just inside the door, edged by light, probably from the headlights from a departing car. Abigail zoomed in on the man. He was heavily pixelated, but she knew without a doubt that it was Eric Newman.
She remembered thinking she’d spotted him on her walk back down the carriageway that night. Not spotting him so much as smelling the French cigarette that he was smoking. It was strange to think he really had been there. She wondered if Bruce had snuck off at some point to talk with him, maybe even chat about the game they were about to play on Heart Pond Island.
She closed her laptop. She’d seen enough of the photographs and didn’t think she’d ever need to look at them again.
A cloud had gone over the sun, and the day had dimmed. The line of woods along the property was dark, and she looked for the sparrow but didn’t see her. She didn’t see the cat, either. A phrase entered her head: The woods are lovely, dark and deep. She’d said those words to Bruce on the island. Remembering that moment, she didn’t feel awful; she didn’t feel anything, actually.
Most importantly, her mind didn’t automatically go flipping through that catalogue of terrible images she’d carried with her for six months. Men in masks. Alec Greenly battering his wife to death by the fire. The feel of sliding a knife into Bruce’s throat, and watching an arc of blood leave his body. Instead, she thought about the day ahead, and what she might want to do with it.
Beasts had come for her. And she was still alive.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Margaret Atwood (for a quote I didn’t use, but thought of many times), Danielle Bartlett, Angus Cargill, Caspian Dennis, Bianca Flores, Joel Gotler, John Grindrod, Kaitlin Harri, David Headley, Sara Henry, David Highfill, Tessa James, Emily Langner (for telling me the Margaret Atwood quote), Ira Levin, Kristen Pini, Sophie Portas, Josh Smith, Nat Sobel, Virginia Stanley, Gordon Sumner, Sandy Violette, Judith Weber, Ben Wheatley, Dave Woodhouse, Adia Wright, and Charlene Sawyer.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Swanson lives with his wife and cat in Somerville, Massachusetts. His novels include The Girl With a Clock for a Heart, nominated for an LA Times book award, The Kind Worth Killing, a Richard and Judy pick and the iBooks store’s thriller of the year in 2015, and, most recently, Rules for Perfect Murders, also a Richard and Judy pick in 2020.