The Watcher Girl(17)
I don’t mean to frown, but it makes no sense. Why would they spend all that time together and then decide they didn’t like them anymore? Something had to have happened.
“They didn’t have children,” she adds. “Didn’t plan to have any either. Maybe our interests just . . . naturally went in different directions.”
It’s almost as if she wants to make it clear that there was no falling-out.
“That’s too bad.” I place a compassionate inflection into my tone to overshadow my intrigue as my mind whirs with varying scenarios. When we were together, everyone who’d ever met Sutton loved him. I always teased him that he could walk into a room filled with strangers and walk out with five new best friends. The man was a people magnet in every sense of the word. He saw only the best in people—much to my dismay at times—and he never met a jerk he couldn’t redeem.
Campbell nods. “My husband . . . he’s choosy when it comes to who we associate with.”
Really?
I stay mum again, trying to picture Sutton as some kind of judgmental asshole.
But I can’t.
“He thought this other couple . . .” Her lips waver, forming a shy laugh as her cheeks tinge pink. This topic embarrasses her, I think? “He thought they were a bad influence. Or something.”
A bad influence?
What, is she not capable of choosing the people she wants to associate with? He has to make that decision for her?
I scrape my jaw off the floor. None of this sounds like Sutton.
“This is going to sound silly.” She leans closer. “But they liked to . . . smoke pot.”
Sutton and I smoked together all the time in college. At least once a week. More if it was midterms or finals.
I remind myself people are allowed to change. And maybe it was a habit he outgrew as he grew into his family-man persona.
“Your husband,” I say, “is he pretty . . . traditional?”
She smiles. “You could say that. He likes rules. And order. That kind of thing.”
“Where’d you say you’re from originally?” I ask, wondering if she has any friends from back home. Surely he wouldn’t cut her off from them? Maybe when I get back, I’ll do some poking around on her Instaface account and see what I can find. Tagged photos. Comments. Anything that can point me in the direction of whether or not she’s kept in touch with old friends. “I mean, where in Connecticut?”
“Blueberry Springs,” she says. Her left front tooth overlaps the other in the slightest of ways, and I’m secretly satisfied to find a sliver of imperfection in this moment.
“How’d you two end up all the way out here?”
“Sutton found a job here, talked me into moving.”
He found a job here. Interesting. So he wasn’t offered a job here. A job here didn’t just fall into his lap. He had to have been looking. I suppose it wouldn’t be completely out of the realm of possibility that he’d find a job thirty miles from Rutgers, where we met as undergrads, but what are the odds that out of five hundred towns in this state, he’d search for a job in the only one I’ve ever called home?
Sutton knew what this town meant to me. He was aware of its significance. How much I associated it with some of the best years of my childhood—and the worst year of my life. He witnessed the panic attack building in my system the first time I brought him here to meet my father. And he understood when I decided to cut the visit short and head back to campus. The entire ride home I word vomited into his ear all the things I loathed about this city and its inhabitants and everything it represented. It was probably the most I’d ever opened up to him in the history of our relationship. When I was done ranting, I swiped my hand at an itch on my cheek . . . only to realize I was crying.
It was the first, last, and only time I ever cried in front of him.
A cold sweat blankets my neck when I realize that perhaps I got this all wrong. Maybe he didn’t come here because of me . . . maybe he came here to get away from me because he knew I refused to set foot in this town?
“How’d you meet?” I ask, throat dry. I reach for another swig of water. “You and your husband?”
Her lips part, but before she has a chance to answer, her phone buzzes on the counter. “I bet that’s him, actually. Will you excuse me for a second?”
She disappears, Gigi on her hip, into a room down the hall.
At least she has the good sense not to leave her daughter alone with a stranger.
The tick of the kitchen clock echoes off the walls, and her voice is nothing more than a murmur of words I can’t distinguish from here. Do people normally take their spouse’s phone calls in privacy, or is that a Campbell thing?
Or . . . is it a Sutton thing?
I take the opportunity to gaze around the room, cataloging details for my mental files. Nothing strikes me as out of the ordinary. It’s a typical American household. Clean. Open. Neutral furniture in classic silhouettes like it was plucked from a warehouse showroom display. Baby accessories peppered around. A high chair. A playpen. A basket of toys. A neat pile of cardboard books. Aside from the family photos on the corkboard, this could be anyone’s place.
Nothing around me is going to answer a single question I have.
“I’m so sorry about that.” Campbell returns a minute later, bouncing Gigi in her arms. “Apparently he left an important file on his work computer, so now we get to run into the office and email it to him.”