The Wife Between Us(58)

“You didn’t get enough in the settlement.” He puts the check on the coffee table. “I liquidated some stock for you and let the bank know there would be a large withdrawal from my checking account. Please use this to get some help. I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to you.”

“I don’t want your money, Richard.” He fixes his eyes on me. “I never did.”

I’ve known people with hazel eyes that morph from green to blue to brown based on the light, or what they’re wearing. But Richard is the only person I’ve ever met whose irises shift solely through shades of blue—from denim to Caribbean sea to a beetle’s wing.

Now they are my favorite shade, a soft indigo.

“Nellie”—it is the first time he has called me this since I moved out—“I love Emma.”

A sharp pain bursts in my chest.

“But I will never love anyone as much as I loved you,” he says.

I continue to look into his eyes, then I jerk away my gaze. I am stunned by his admission. But the truth is, I feel the same way about him. The silence in the air hangs like an icicle about to crack.

Then he leans forward again, and shock robs me of the ability to think coherently as his soft lips find mine. His hand cups the back of my head, pulling me in closer. For just a few seconds, I am Nellie again and he is the man I fell in love with.

Then I’m jolted back to reality. I push him away, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

He looks at me for a long moment, then stands up and leaves without a word.





CHAPTER





TWENTY-THREE




Sleep eludes me again that night as I recall every detail of my encounter with Richard.

When I finally drift off, he visits me in my dream, too.

He approaches me as I lie in bed. His fingertips trace my lips, then he kisses me tenderly, slowly, first on my mouth and then working his way down my neck. He lifts up my nightgown with one hand, then moves his mouth lower. My hips begin to move involuntarily. I choke back a groan as my body betrays me by growing warm and pliant.

Then he pins me to the mattress, his torso crushing mine, his hands trapping my wrists. I try to push him off, to make him stop, but he’s too strong.

Suddenly, I realize it isn’t me beneath Richard—it isn’t my hands being held down, or my lips parting.

It is Emma.

I jerk awake and sit upright. My breath comes in choppy gasps. I look around my bedroom, desperate to center myself.

I hurry to the bathroom and splash cold water on my face to erase the sensations that linger from my dream. I grip the hard edges of the sink until my breathing finally slows.


I climb back into bed, thinking of how my heart clattered and my skin tingled when I was dreaming of Richard. I still feel the aftereffects of that treacherous response to him.

How could I have been aroused by him, even in a dream?

Then I recall one of my recent psychology podcasts on the part of the brain that processes emotions.

“The human body often responds in the same way to two overarching emotional states—romantic arousal and fear,” a scientist had explained. I close my eyes and try to recall exactly what the expert said. “Consider the pounding in the chest, the dilating of the pupils, the increase in blood pressure. These are sensations that appear in both terror and arousal.”

This, I know well.

The expert had said something else about how our thought processes change during both states. When we are in the throes of romantic love, for example, the neural machinery responsible for making critical assessments of other people can be compromised.

Is that what Emma is experiencing? I wonder. Is that what I encountered, too?

I am too shaken to fall back asleep.

I lie there as images of Richard’s visit batter my mind. It was both vivid and fleeting—like a mirage—and as the long night stretches on, I begin wonder if it actually happened, or if it also was just part of my dream.

Was anything of the previous evening real? I wonder.

I walk in the first shimmer of morning gold, as if in a trance, to my armoire. I slide open the top drawer. The check is nestled among my socks.

As I put it back, I look down and see the white satin cover of our wedding album. This is the only physical documentation of my marriage that I have.

I can’t imagine I will ever want to view the photographs again after today, but I need to view them a final time. Our other photos are all in the Westchester house, unless Richard has already moved them into the storage unit in the basement of his city apartment’s building or destroyed them. I imagine he has; Richard would have disposed of every trace of me before Emma could stumble upon the unsettling reminders.

Aunt Charlotte told me a bit of what she’d witnessed during my marriage. Sam also told me what she’d seen during our last conversation—which turned into a worse fight than I could ever have imagined us having. But now I want to look for myself, with fresh eyes.

I sit cross-legged on my bed and turn to the first page. In the opening shot I’m in the hotel room, fastening the clasp on an antique pearl bracelet—my “something borrowed” from Aunt Charlotte. Beside me she artfully ties my father’s blue handkerchief around my bouquet. I turn another page and glimpse Aunt Charlotte, my mother, and me walking down the aisle together. My fingers are interlaced with my mother’s, while Aunt Charlotte has her arm looped through mine on the other side, since my left hand is grasping the bundle of white roses. Aunt Charlotte’s face is flushed pink and her eyes have a sheen of tears. My mother’s expression is difficult to decipher, although she is smiling for the camera. She is also set a bit apart from me and Aunt Charlotte; had we not been holding hands, I could take a pair of scissors and easily crop her out of the photograph.