One By One by Freida McFadden(15)

We stand there for way too long before I finally pull away. I can tell without looking in a mirror that my eyes are swollen. “I’m sorry,” I say.

“For what?”

I shake my head. “I’m a terrible person.”

“You’re not a terrible person.” Lindsay brushes a wet strand of hair from my face. “But if you want to leave Noah, you should leave him. Don’t mess around behind his back.”

“You’re right.” I accept the crumbled tissue Lindsay hands me. “I really don’t want him to find out about me and Jack.”

She tilts her head to the side. “You don’t think he already knows?”

My heart sinks into my stomach. “You… you think he knows?”

“Well…” She shifts her weight between her boots. “Yes. I do. I think he knows.”

“Why?”

“It’s just a feeling I get.” She cranes her head to look over at the minivan. Noah is sitting inside, in the driver’s seat. He’s just staring straight out the windshield, unmoving. “I mean, I’ve known Noah for fifteen years, and I’ve never seen him act this way before. He’s generally pretty even-tempered.”

“Yeah…”

She’s right. Noah has recently stepped up his game when it comes to being obnoxious to me. Things had been getting gradually worse for so long, I just thought it was part of the trajectory. But maybe there’s a reason things have gotten so much worse lately. Maybe he does know.

Once again, I get that strong feeling I should back out of the trip now, while I still have a chance. As much as I’m looking forward to having a room alone with Jack, it isn’t worth the risk. Michelle could find out. Noah could find out, if he doesn’t know already. And this trip seems to be putting the final nail in the coffin when it comes to our marriage.

But I don’t know how I’m going to get home at this point. We’ve been driving for two hours, so it wouldn’t be a quick ride back home. It would cost a fortune.

It looks like I’m stuck. This trip is happening. But I’m going to take Lindsay’s advice. As soon as we get back to Castle Pines, I’m telling Noah it’s over.





Chapter 9


CLAIRE



It takes all my will power to march back to my minivan and sit down next to Noah in the passenger seat. The others have already taken their seats in the back, and I’m tempted to ask one of them if they’d like to trade. I don’t want to sit next to Noah. But it would be awkward to say that, so I sit down. And he shoots me a look like he wishes he had taken off without me.

Sometimes I look back on my marriage and try to figure out the exact moment when Noah and I started hating each other.

Like I said, we loved each other when we got married. We were one of those couples that never even fought. Like, we would have minor, stupid arguments about… I don’t know, maybe I turned up the heat too high in the winter. Or I caught him drinking out of the milk carton. (Why do men do that?) But it was usually stuff we would laugh about—teasing more than fighting. We were both easy-going people who hated to fight, and sometimes Noah would mumble something about “not wanting to end up like my parents.”

After Aiden was born, life got harder. We were excited to be parents, but also scared. Noah would sometimes sit bolt upright in the middle of the night and not be able to get back to sleep until he went to Aiden’s crib to make sure he was still present and breathing. Other times, we would have serious arguments about whose turn it was to change his diaper. Noah created a sign-in sheet on the refrigerator to keep track, but he took it down when he realized how far behind he was getting.

But still, I always thought we had a happy little family. Then Emma came along.

Emma is wonderful. Don’t get me wrong—I love my daughter more than life itself and I’d do anything for her. But she was not an easy baby. She had colic, and all she did was scream. I mean, I suppose she also occasionally slept and ate, but it felt like 99% of the time she was screaming. When I look back on that time, all I remember is this little pink baby with her eyes squeezed shut, her hands balled into fists, and her toothless mouth wide-open as she hollered at the top of her lungs. And we also had a toddler to contend with. The first few months of Emma’s life felt like a haze of the two of us passing her back-and-forth, stealing an hour or two of sleep whenever we could.

It was doable when I was on maternity leave. But then the summer ended and I had to go back to work. Emma was sleeping a little better by then, but not much. Noah and I were sleeping in shifts. It was awful.

On one particular night, I was determined to get a half-decent night of sleep because I had a big meeting at work the next morning, where I was talking to the school board about the special education program at our school. It was a really, really important meeting, and I didn’t think I could get through it on an hour of sleep. I pumped Emma full of two bottles of milk, hoping she’d conk out, but knowing it was a crapshoot.

I told Noah about the meeting and emphasized how important it was. I had to get a decent night of sleep. He swore he understood. So when Emma woke up screaming at two in the morning, I expected him to get up with her.

“I’ve got a headache, Claire,” he mumbled into his pillow. “Can’t you get her?”

I had a headache too. I had a headache almost all the time these days, as well as big purple circles under my eyes. Skipping out on my parental duties was never an option. “You know I have a big meeting tomorrow.”