The Wife Upstairs(49)

Eddie is looking at me now with an expression I’ve never seen before. “Did you think I didn’t know, Jane? Did it never occur to you to come to me?”

How? How the fuck could he have known? That first time, the money I gave him was mine. The second, yes, that was Eddie’s, but I was careful. I was so careful.

“He called me, too,” Eddie says, his hands on his hips, his head tilted down. “Some bullshit story about people in Phoenix looking for you.”

This can’t be happening; he can’t know. I can’t breathe.

“Did he tell you why?” I ask, my voice barely above a whisper, and Eddie looks up at me again, his eyes hard.

“I didn’t ask. I told him to go fuck himself, which is what you should’ve done the second he called.”

He steps closer, so close I can practically feel the heat radiating off of him. I’m still standing there, not even wrapped in my towel, just holding it in front of me, shivering with more than just cold.

“That’s what you do when people threaten you, Jane. When they try to fuck you over. You don’t give in to them, you don’t give them what they want, you remind them that you’re the one in charge, you’re making the rules.”

Eddie reaches out then, taking me by the shoulders, and for the first time since I met him, I stiffen at his touch.

He feels it, and the corners of his mouth twist down, but he doesn’t let me go. “I don’t give a fuck why someone in Phoenix is trying to find you. What I care about is that when he came to you with this shit, you didn’t trust me enough to tell me about it.”

I don’t know what to say, so I just stand there, looking down, wanting him to let me go, wanting him to leave, and finally, he sighs and drops his hands.

“You know what?” he says, stepping back and reaching into his jacket pocket. “Here.”

He pulls out a slip of paper and forces it into my hand.

My damp skin nearly smudges the ink, but I see it’s a phone number, one with a Phoenix area code. “This is the number of whoever was calling John.”

I startle, blinking down at the paper. “He gave this to you?”

Eddie doesn’t answer that, saying, “The point is, Jane, I’ve had this number in my wallet for the past month. Before I asked you to marry me. And I never called it. Not once. You know why?”

I shake my head even though I know what he’s about to say.

“Because I trust you, Janie.”

He turns, heading for the bedroom door, and then stops, looking at me. “It would be nice to get the same in return.”

With that, he’s gone, and I sink to the edge of the tub, my knees shaking.

But it’s not because of the number I hold in my hand. It’s not knowing that Eddie’s had it all this time, that at any point over the past month, he could’ve called it and learned … everything.

It’s because of what he said. How he looked.

That’s what you do when people threaten you, Jane.

His eyes had been so cold. His tone so flat.

I’d looked him in the eyes and hadn’t recognized him at all.

I can hear those women at the coffee shop again. It’s always the husband.

And for the first time, I honestly believe that it could’ve been.

Not Tripp, sitting across from me at lunch. He was a little bit drunk, a little bit belligerent. He’s also clumsy, and unfocused.

He’s nothing like Eddie.





23





“Girl, I swear you’ve gotten even skinnier!”

Emily is smiling as she says it to me, and I think it’s a compliment, but I can barely make myself smile back at her. We’re standing in the open courtyard of the First Methodist Church, people milling all around us, and I’m too aware of both how hot the evening is—even though the sun is going down—and also how wrong my outfit is.

In my defense, I had no idea what the fuck one was supposed to wear to a silent auction at a church on a Wednesday night, and black had seemed a safe choice—sophisticated, respectable. But all the other women are in bright colors, flower prints, that kind of thing, and I feel like a crow standing around a bunch of flamingos.

Eddie must’ve known it was wrong, but he hadn’t said anything, and I fight the urge to glare at his back as he stands there, talking to the reverend.

Now I smooth my dress over my thighs and say, “Pre-wedding jitters,” to Emily, who nods and pats my arm sympathetically.

“You’re lucky. When I got married to Saul, my stress response was to eat everything in sight.”

Her husband is over near a giant azalea bush, chatting with Campbell’s husband, Mark, and Caroline’s husband, Matt.

I realize that I hardly ever see Eddie with those guys, and that he never mentions them. Did the neighborhood pull back from him after everything with Bea and Blanche, or does he find these people as insufferable as I do?

Okay, they’re not all bad. Emily is actually nice, steering me around groups of people, introducing me as Eddie’s fiancée and never once mentioning the dog-walker thing.

It almost makes me feel sorry for all the shit I stole from her.

The auction items are inside the church’s Family Life Center, but despite the heat, everyone is congregating out here in the courtyard, probably because it’s so pretty and lush.