Dirty Red (Love Me With Lies)(69)

Caleb kisses both her cheeks and then under her chin, which makes her giggle. He repeats this again and again until she’s laughing so hard, both Sam and I smile.

“We should talk,” I say, standing in the doorway. I feel like an outsider when he’s in the room with Estella.

He nods without looking at me, makes her giggle one more time from his kisses, and hands her back to Sam. She immediately starts to cry.

I hear Sam say “Traitor” as we leave the room and head downstairs. Caleb looks once over his shoulder, as if he’s tempted to go back.

“You can see her after…” I say.

I had the kettle on before he got here; it is just starting to whistle as we walk into the kitchen. I set about making him tea while he sits on a barstool with his hands clasped in front of his mouth. The fact that his leg is bouncing is not lost on me. I dunk a tea bag into the mug of hot water and avoid his eyes. I am transferring the tea bag to the trash, when he says —

“You went to see Olivia?”

My hand freezes, tea drips on the tile and onto my pants.

“Yes.”

Now I know why his leg is bouncing.

“You forced me to do it.” I step on the lever that opens the trashcan and drop the tea bag in. I can feel his eyes on me.

He cocks his head. “You really believe that, don’t you?”

I don’t know what he’s talking about. I fiddle with my thumbnail.

“Did she call you?” That tattletale bitch, I think bitterly. And then in an almost panic — What else did she tell him?

“You had no right, Leah.”

“I had every right. You bought her a house!”

“That was before you,” he says calmly.

“And you never thought to tell me? Really? I am your wife! She came back when you had your amnesia and lied to you! You couldn’t tell me that you bought that woman a house?”

He looks away.

“It’s more complicated than that,” he says. “I was making plans with her.”

Complicated? Complicated seems like too good of a word for Olivia. I definitely don’t want to know about the plans he made with her, either. He needs to see the truth. I need to make him see the truth.

“I found out on my own, Caleb. How she lied to you when you had the amnesia.”

He cocks his eyebrow at me. Maybe if I tell him the truth, he will finally see how loyal I am, how much I love him. “I paid her to leave town. Did she tell you that during my trial? She was willing to sell you out for a couple hundred bucks.”

I once watched a natural dam break on television. I remember seeing a scenic picture of a river surrounded by trees. All of a sudden, the trees disappeared — sucked away by the collapse of the riverbank. A swell of angry water rushed around the corner, wiping out everything in its path. It was sudden, and it was violent.

I see the dam break in Caleb’s eyes.

Human eyes are the sign language of the brain. If you watch them carefully, you can see the truth played out, raw and unguarded. When you are the bastard child of a prostitute and you need to know what your adoptive parents are thinking, you learn how to read eyes. You can see a lie prod the truth, a hurt be swept into a cranial recess, happiness as a wide luminescent light. You can see the crushing of a soul beneath a terrible loss. What I see in Caleb’s eyes is a leftover hurt; hurt with mold growing on it. Hurt so profound that blood and tears and regret cannot possibly do it justice.

What does she have that I don’t have? She owns the deed to his house and to his hurt. I am so jealous of his hurt that I throw my head back and open my mouth to scream in rage. He won’t hear me. No matter how loudly I scream his name, he will not hear me. He only hears her.

“She wouldn’t do that,” he says.

“She did. She is a deceiver. She is not what you think.”

“You did that to her apartment,” he says. His eyes are wide, bleary.

I look away, ashamed. But, no, I am not ashamed. I fought for what I wanted.

“Why her, Caleb?”

He looks at me blandly. I don’t expect him to answer. When his voice breaks the tense air between us, I stop breathing to hear him.

“I didn’t choose her,” his voice breaks. “Love is illogical. You fall into it like a manhole. Then you’re just stuck. You die in love more than you live in love.”

I don’t want to hear his poetic analogies. I want to know why he loves her. I finger the gold hoop earrings I’m wearing. I bought them after I met her at the diner. They don’t have the same effect on me. Where they made her look exotic, I look like I’m playing dress-up. I yank them from my ears and toss them away from me.

But, I can be what he needs. He just needs to give me the chance to prove it.

“You need to come home.”

He drops his head. I want to scream — LOOK AT ME!

When he does, his eyes are raw.

“I filed the papers, Leah. It’s over.”

Papers?

I say the word. It whispers from my lips — burns them. “Papers?”

My marriage is worth more than something as thin and insubstantial as papers. You cannot end something with that vile word. Caleb is a man used to getting his way. Not now. I will fight him on this.

“We can go to counseling. For Estella.”

Caleb shakes his head. “You need someone to be able to love you the way you deserve to be loved. I’m so sorry — ” He clenches his jaw, looks at me almost pleadingly, like he needs me to understand. “I can’t give you that. God, I wish I could, Leah. I’ve tried.”