The Other Mrs.(22)

Joyce follows me into the kitchen. She gives me this look, like I have some nerve to drink water at a time like this, when we have a patient waiting. I can see it in her eyes every time she looks at me: Joyce doesn’t like me. I don’t know why Joyce doesn’t like me. There’s nothing I’ve done that would make her not like me. I tell myself it has nothing to do with what happened back in Chicago, that there’s no way she can know about that. No, that stayed there, because I resigned. It was the only way a claim of negligence didn’t end my medical career. But whether I’d practice emergency medicine again, I didn’t know. It was a blot on my confidence, if not my résumé.

I tell Joyce that I’ll be right there, but she stands watching in teal blue scrubs and nursing clogs, with her hands on her hips. She pouts, and only then do I take note of the clock on the wall behind her where red numbers inform me that it’s one fifteen in the afternoon.

“Oh,” I say, though that can’t be. I couldn’t possibly have fallen that far behind schedule. My bedside manner is decent enough—I’ve been known to go on a tad too long with patients—but not like this.

I glance down at my watch, sure that it’s slow, that my watch is to blame for my falling behind schedule. But the time on my watch mirrors the time on the clock.

I feel a frustration start to well inside of me. Emma has mistakenly scheduled too many patients in not enough time, so that I’ll spend the rest of the day scrambling to catch up and we’ll pay for it, the whole lot of us, Joyce, Emma, the patients and me. But mainly me.

  It’s a short drive home. The entirety of the island is only about a mile by a mile and a half wide—which means that on a bad day such as this, I don’t have time to decompress before I arrive home. I drive slowly, taking my time, needing an extra lap around the block to catch my breath before I pull into my own driveway.

This far north in the world, night falls early. The sun begins to set at just past four o’clock, leaving us with only nine hours of daylight this time of year, the rest of the day various shades of twilight and dark. The sky is dark now.

I don’t know most of my neighbors. Some I’ve seen in passing, but most I’ve never seen because it’s late fall, early winter, the time of year people have a tendency to hide indoors. The home next door to ours is a summer property only, someone’s second home. It’s unoccupied this time of year. The owners—Will learned and told to me—move to the mainland as soon as fall comes, leaving their home abandoned for Old Man Winter. Which makes me think now that a home like that could be vulnerable to break-ins, making for an easy place for a killer to hide.

As I go by it, the house is dark as it always is until just after seven o’clock when a light flicks on. The light is set on a timer. It goes off near midnight. The timer is meant to serve as a deterrent for burglars and yet so predictable, it’s not.

I go on. I bypass my own home and head up the hill. The Baineses’ house is dark as I drive past. Across the street, at the home of the Nilssons, a light is on, the soft glow of it just barely breaking through the periphery of the heavy drapes. I pause before the home, car idling, my eyes set on the picture window in front. There’s a car in the drive, Mr. Nilsson’s rusty sedan. Puffs of smoke spew from the chimney and into the winter night. Someone is home.

I have half a mind to pull into the drive, park the car, knock on the front door and ask about what Officer Berg told me. How Mr. Nilsson claimed he saw me arguing with Morgan in the days before she died.

But I also have enough self-awareness to know that if I do, it might come off as brash—threatening even—and that’s not the message I want to send.

I make my way around the block before going home.

Moments later, I stand alone in the kitchen, peeking beneath the lid of a skillet to see what Will’s cooking tonight. Pork chops. It smells divine.

I stand, with my shoes still on my feet, a bag slung across me. The bag is heavy. The strap burrows deeply into my skin, though I hardly feel the weight of it because it’s my stomach that hurts the most. I’m hungry, completely famished, my day getting away from me so that I never had time for lunch.

Without a word, Will slips silently into the kitchen and curls up behind me. He nestles his chin onto my shoulder. He slips his warm hands beneath the waistline of my shirt, wrapping them around me. A single thumb sweeps up and down my navel, strumming me like a guitar. I feel myself tense up at Will’s touch. “How was your day?” he asks.

I think back to the days when Will’s arms around me made me feel safe, invulnerable and loved. For a moment, I want nothing more than to turn and face him, to unload about the dreary workday; the run-in with Officer Berg. I know just exactly what would happen if I did. Will would stroke my hair before lifting the heavy workbag from my shoulder and setting it to the ground. He’d say something empathetic, like That sounds rough, as he poured me a glass of wine. He wouldn’t attempt to fix things for me as other men might do. Instead, he’d lead me to the single spindle-back chair pressed against a kitchen wall and hand me the wine. He’d drop to the kitchen floor before me and remove my shoes, massage my feet. And he’d listen.

But I don’t tell Will about my day because I can’t. Because there on the countertop sits his true crime novel, and in an instant, last night comes tumbling back to me all over again. From where I stand, I see the edge of Erin’s photograph jutting out from the pages of the book, just a couple of millimeters of blue trim, and even though I can’t see it, I still imagine the blue eyes, blond hair, rounded shoulders. The willowy woman who stands with her hands on her hips, pouting at the camera, baiting whoever’s on the other side of it.