The New Husband(82)
“What do you mean by that?” she asked.
Hugh downed the second whiskey the waitress brought over before enjoying a few sips of beer. He cleaned the foam from his thin lips with the back of his hand.
Nina lost patience with him. “If I’m not safe,” she said, talking hurriedly now, “why wouldn’t you simply explain it to me over the phone? Why the insistence on the money?”
Hugh looked at her like she was dim. “Are you asking where’s the goodness in my heart?”
Hugh rolled up his sleeves to reveal for Nina a thin, near-bloodless arm, dotted with scars recognizable as needle injection marks.
“I gave my heart to something else. But I’ll make good on my promise. I’ll tell you the truth. That was our deal. So tell me, has he isolated you from your friends and family yet? Does he make you question things? Does he try to control your life? Trust me, Nina, you’re not safe.”
Nina’s throat went dry as a jumble of thoughts came to her, starting with Susanna and Ginny, who not long ago chided her for being so unavailable. But there were always valid reasons causing her to cancel plans with her friends, and Simon wasn’t keeping her from seeing her parents, as Hugh had implied. She hadn’t seen them because she didn’t want to bring the stress of Simon and Maggie’s difficulties to Nebraska, simple as that. Or is the strife something he’s cultivating partly for that purpose? The question she asked herself took her by surprise. She contemplated Hugh’s other allegations.
Does he make you question things? Does he try to control your life?
Nina went silent as her thoughts flickered back to their first big blowup in the new house, the one over the TV remote and the instructions she’d had no memory of giving. And there were other small, rather inconsequential happenings that didn’t seem to amount to much when taken as separate incidents, but as a whole began to form a disturbing pattern. There was Maggie’s perspective: the trip to Niagara Falls that she clearly thought had been fabricated to make Nina feel guilty about her new job; Simon’s thoughtless remarks at the school assembly; the missing homework; and of course, the dark look Maggie had described that Nina, too, had seen on that odd morning when Simon was preparing to cut the neighbor’s tree branches.
And don’t forget the day he bought you a home gym so you wouldn’t have a reason to work out with your friends, she told herself.
She thought about the dinner with the superintendent that Simon swore he had told her about, and the inappropriate remark about an affair—the one he later denied making to Ginny. Controlling? Perhaps.
Nina caught a glimpse of her distorted reflection in Hugh’s near-empty beer glass, seeing again the haircut she had gotten at Simon’s—what was it? Suggestion? Or was it more than that? No, she’d done it on her own, Nina told herself. She had willfully, enthusiastically, gone to that hair appointment, and made the dramatic change to look like the model in the magazine. A hair appointment Simon had made, she reminded herself, with hopes she’d style her hair to look like Emma Dolan. Other thoughts came to her, a swirl of doubt stirred up as if Hugh were a whirlwind churning up the uncertainty lurking within her. She recalled the mixed message Simon had sent about the job after gifting her the Coach bag, and found herself wondering if he was intentionally making her question things.
Nina had been deceived before, but the way Simon looked at her, loved her, the things he said, the note he wrote and put in that bag, his touch, the way he connected to her, all made her believe to her core that she wasn’t being lied to this time around. And every doubt Hugh’s accusations had conjured could easily be countered with some logical explanation.
Safe or not? Who to believe?
“Why do you keep saying I’m not safe?”
Hugh raised his head. His red-rimmed eyes bored into Nina’s. His fierce gaze made her cower inwardly, but she didn’t let it show on her face.
“Emma didn’t kill herself,” Hugh said. “He killed her.”
The accusation did not come as a shock. Simon had told her very clearly that the police had questioned him. Standard procedure—interview the spouse.
“Why would you say such a thing?” she asked.
“Because I know,” Hugh answered flatly.
“The police didn’t think so,” said Nina. “They’d have arrested him.”
“That’s because they’re idiots,” Hugh said.
And you have a lot of reasons to dislike the police, thought Nina, seeing Hugh’s mug shots in her mind.
“I think my money bought a better answer than that, don’t you?”
“I know my sister,” answered Hugh after a moment’s pause, “and she wasn’t suicidal.” He picked up his phone, again showing Nina the picture of a smiling woman at the seashore. “Does she look depressed to you?”
Nina felt a burst of sympathy for Hugh. “Depression wears many masks,” she said. “I know it’s hard to accept, but what we see on the outside doesn’t always reflect what’s going on inside.” Nina thought it highly doubtful he’d read excerpts from Emma’s diary, as she had.
“You sound just like the police,” Hugh said bitterly. “They jumped right to suicide because Emma was seeing a therapist. But she wasn’t in therapy because she was depressed. Simon was making her crazy. She never saw her friends. She stopped seeing me, our parents, all of us. There was always some issue, and Simon was at the center of it all.”