One By One by Freida McFadden(16)

Noah squeezed his eyes shut. After a long minute of Emma’s cries increasing in volume, he got out of bed. And slammed the door shut behind him when he left the bedroom.

Just as the cries subsided and I started to drift off again, the screams abruptly started again. A few seconds later, Noah came back into the bedroom. He flopped down on the bed and covered his head with the pillow.

“I can’t deal with her,” he said. “You have to do it.”

“But I told you, I have a meeting tomorrow!”

“Well, I have a headache. I’m not getting up.”

And that was it, as far as he was concerned. He acted like Emma was my baby, he was doing me a favor by trying to help, but if he didn’t want to do it, he didn’t have to. I remember staring at him in the dark bedroom, waiting to see if he would change his mind. He didn’t budge. I had to get up and spend the rest of the night comforting Emma.

He never apologized for that one. Even though I was a wreck at my meeting the next day, and he ended up sleeping in after I dropped Emma and Aiden off at daycare. It was so incredibly unfair.

After that, it seemed like we were at war more and more frequently. He never carried his weight when it came to the children and the housework, and what’s worse, he didn’t care. He told me all I did was nag him. We stopped doing things together as a family—I preferred to go out with the kids myself so I didn’t have to watch him play with his phone instead of talking to me. And we never did anything together as a couple. I can’t remember our last date night. For a while, we were making an effort to get a babysitter and go out, but I can’t remember the last time either of us even suggested it.

I kept telling myself things would get better as the kids got older. But now they’re older. And it turned out, our marriage got too broken to fix.

And now we’re stuck together in this car. For hours. It’s become the most awkward car ride in the history of the world. I would give anything to get out of it. Occasionally, I hear some conversation from the back, but for the most part, we are all deathly silent. I am having trouble envisioning anything I could say that won’t result in a fight between me and Noah, and I don’t want to have another fight with him in front of everyone.

At this point, I just want to get the week over with so I can tell him it’s over. Hopefully, he won’t hire a hitman to take me out, but it wouldn’t entirely surprise me.

For the last half hour, the road we’re on has become progressively more narrow and isolated. I don’t think we’ve seen another car in twenty minutes. The pavement here is cracked and unkempt. My minivan’s tires snap fallen branches in the road and lurch on the uneven ground.

“Turn left onto Appleton Road,” the GPS voice instructs us.

Noah hits the brakes just as we come across the sign for Appleton Road. It’s a tiny road that goes one way. The pavement has been uneven up until now, but this road is entirely unpaved. Noah hesitates with his foot on the brake.

“This is the turn here,” Warner speaks up.

“Right.” Noah taps his fingers against the wheel. He’s anxious about going down this road. Unlike Jack, he’s no former Boy Scout. We’ve never been camping together in all our years of marriage. “Okay.”

Noah turns down Appleton Road, and immediately, the ride gets a lot rougher. There are no other cars around—it’s just us and the wilderness. I hold onto my seat as we make our way down this uneven path. But we’re close now. It’s not too much further to the inn.

And then the picture on the GPS freezes.

Noah keeps his eyes on the road as he taps the screen. Up on top, the words appear: Searching for signal...

“Damn,” he mutters under his breath.

“I’ve got the map,” Warner speaks up.

I hear him shuffling through his duffel bag. I pull my phone out of my purse—there’s no signal there either. I feel about as uneasy as Noah looks. I don’t feel any more comfortable with the wilderness than he does. I can’t wait to get to the inn and have WiFi access.

I wish I had called the kids back when we were on the main road. I had been thinking I would call them when we got to the inn, but now I wish I hadn’t waited. Even though I gave Penny a heads-up, I imagine Emma being worried.

“All right,” Warner says, “there’s going to be a fork in the road coming up, and you need to go left.”

“Right,” Noah says.

“No, he said left,” I say.

“I know he said left,” Noah snaps at me. “I was saying ‘right,’ like I got it.”

I swallow hard. “Okay. I was just making sure. I didn’t mean to…”

“Could you just… Just don’t talk to me, Claire. I need to focus.”

Noah presses his fingers against his eyeballs under his glasses, then focuses his attention back on the road. We come to the fork, and he slows to a complete halt. The road diverges in two directions, but the right path seems much better paved. The left is more narrow and has branches hanging down everywhere. The sun is still in the sky, but the left path looks dark and foreboding. If there’s a monster out here in the woods, it’s definitely on the left.

“Are you sure we’re supposed to go left?” Noah says.

Warner looks up from the map. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” he recites in that rich baritone. “And I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”