When we got home, I left the groceries in the car. The milk would spoil. I didn’t care. I carried Leo inside on my hip.
“Stay down here,” I said, setting him on the couch. I turned on the television. Cartoons. “Mommy needs to check something.”
I took the stairs two at a time.
The guest room door was still locked.
I shook the handle. I twisted it until my wrist hurt. I pushed my shoulder against the door. It didn’t move.
Then I leaned my forehead against the wood and tried to breathe.
“Mark,” I whispered to the empty hallway. “What did you do?”
I heard little footsteps behind me.
Leo had followed me up. One hand curled around the banister.
“Mommy,” he said, in that very loud whisper that five-year-olds think is quiet. “I’m not supposed to say.”
“Leo, honey, please go back downstairs.”
“But there’s a surprise in there.” He climbed up the last two steps. “Daddy has the key. He keeps it in his work bag. He said only him and the lady can open it, because the surprise isn’t done yet.”
I closed my eyes.
Every clue lined up neatly and made a picture I had already finished painting in my head.
A locked room. A hidden key. A woman who came only when I was gone. Payments from our savings to her company. A child told to keep quiet. A husband who wouldn’t answer his phone.
I sank down onto the top step.
Leo sat down next to me and leaned his warm head against my arm.
“Are you mad, Mommy?”
“I’m not mad at you.”
“Are you mad at Daddy?”
I didn’t answer.
After a while, I went downstairs. I sat on the bottom step with my phone in my lap and practiced sentences in my head. Sentences I never imagined I’d have to say.
I want a separation.
I think you should stay somewhere else tonight.
Please don’t lie to me. Not today. Not this week.
My mind went to places it had no business going. The house. Our mortgage. Leo. Custody. Who keeps what. I thought about my mother’s life insurance check sitting in my desk drawer. I thought, at least I’ll have that. At least I won’t have to ask him for anything.
Then I hated myself for thinking it. That money was the last thing my mother ever gave me. I didn’t want it to be the thing that got me through a divorce.
Ten years.
Our anniversary was Saturday. I had already bought him a watch. A silver one, $380, from the jeweler on Main Street. I’d had them engrave the back. To Mark. Ten years. Always. K.
It was hidden in my sock drawer.
Leo wandered over carrying his stuffed rabbit, Mr. Buttons. He climbed into my lap without saying a word and pressed the rabbit against my chest.
That’s what finally broke me.
Not the locked room. Not the woman in the green dress.
My son knew something was wrong, and he was trying to fix it with a stuffed rabbit.
I held him and cried into his hair. He patted my back with his little hand, the way I pat his when he has a bad dream.
Then my phone buzzed against my leg.
For a second, I almost ignored it.
When I finally looked, my hands went cold.
Mark had sent me a photograph.
It was the guest bedroom, taken from the doorway.
Half of one wall was covered in brushstrokes. Soft blues. Warm browns. And in the middle of it, the beginnings of a woman’s face.
A face with kind eyes I would have known anywhere.
My mother’s eyes.
Under the photo were four short messages.
I took this yesterday.
I wasn’t ready to show you yet.
Please go upstairs.
I love you.
I stared at the screen. I spread my fingers and zoomed in on the picture.
Her eyes. The little crinkles at the corners. The way her hair curled behind her ear. Behind her, a window, painted so real I could almost feel the breeze. Her kitchen window on Alder Street. The one with the yellow curtains. The one she stood at every morning with her coffee, watching the birds at the feeder.
And above her, across the top of the wall where it met the ceiling, little dabs of silver.
Stars.
The blue paint under Nora’s thumbnail.
The silver stars.
The smudge on Leo’s thumb.
The locked guest room.
The tall bag with the sticks in it.
Three payments of $1,600 to NE Studio LLC.
Every single clue I had spent the last hour building into proof that my husband was betraying me suddenly rearranged itself into something completely different.
I pressed my hand over my mouth.
“Oh, God.”
It barely came out.
I had been wrong. Not a little wrong. Completely, totally, humiliatingly wrong.
I looked at Leo. He was curled up against me with Mr. Buttons, watching my face with worried eyes.
“Mommy?”
I swallowed the lump in my throat.
“Come on, sweetheart,” I said softly. “Get your shoes. We’re going back to the store.”
He tilted his head.
“To see the paint lady?”
I nodded.
“Yes. I think I owe her an apology.”
I had no idea if she’d still be there. It had been almost forty minutes. But I couldn’t sit on that step another second knowing what I’d said to her. The way I’d looked at her. The way I’d practically spit the word who in her face in front of half the supermarket.
I buckled Leo back into his car seat. This time my hands only shook a little.
The groceries were still in the trunk. I didn’t care about those either.
