The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,62

football player’s. She felt achy. Her nose throbbed. She wanted soup and crackers and some hot tea, but there was no one to make it for her.

She shook her head. “You are so fucking sad,” she told herself, hoping the verbal humiliation would snap her out of it.

It did not.

Charlie dragged herself out of the car before she was tempted to close the garage door and turn on the engine.

She ignored the empty space where Ben’s truck was not parked. The storage shelves that held neatly labeled boxes and sporting goods that he hadn’t yet claimed. She found a bag of cat food in the metal cabinet Ben had put together last summer.

They used to secretly laugh at other people whose garages were so filled with clutter that they couldn’t park inside. Tidiness was one of the things they were both really good at. They cleaned the house together every Saturday. Charlie washed clothes. Ben folded. Charlie did the kitchen. Ben vacuumed the rugs and dusted the furniture. They read the same books at the same time so that they could talk about them. They binge-watched Netflix and Hulu together. They snuggled on the couch and talked about their work days and their families and what they were going to do over the weekend.

She blushed when she recalled how smug they had been about their fantastic marriage. There were so many things that they agreed on: which way the toilet-paper roll should go, the number of cats a person should keep, the appropriate number of years to mourn if a spouse was lost at sea. When their friends would argue loudly in public, or make cutting remarks about each other at a dinner party, Charlie would always look at Ben, or Ben would look at Charlie, and they would smile because their relationship was so fucking solid.

She had belittled him.

That’s what Ben’s leaving was about.

Charlie’s shift from supportive spouse to raging harpy had not been gradual. Seemingly overnight, she was no longer capable of compromise. She was no longer able to let things go. Everything Ben did irritated her. This wasn’t like the socks. There was no chance of fucking their way past it. Charlie was aware of her nagging behavior, but she couldn’t stop it. Didn’t want to stop it. She felt the most angry when she mordantly feigned interest in things that had genuinely interested her before: the politics at Ben’s job, or the personality quirks of their various pets, or that weird bump one of Ben’s coworkers had on the back of his neck.

She had gone to a doctor. There was nothing wrong with her hormones. Her thyroid was fine. The problem was not medical. Charlie was just a bitchy, domineering wife.

Ben’s sisters had been ecstatic. She could remember them blinking their eyes that first time Charlie had laid into Ben at Thanksgiving like they had just come out of the wilderness.

Now she’s one of us.

Invariably, one or two of them had started calling her almost every day, and Charlie had vented like a steam engine. The slouching. The loping walk. The chewing on the tip of his tongue. The humming when he brushed his teeth. Why did he bring home skim milk instead of two percent? Why did he leave the trash bag by the back door instead of taking it to the garbage can when he knew that the raccoons would get it?

Then she had started telling the sisters about personal things. That time Ben had tried to contact his long-absent father. Why he had stopped talking to Peggy for six months when she went to college. What had happened with that girl they all liked—but not better than Charlie—whom he insisted he’d broken up with but they all suspected had broken his heart.

She argued with him in public. She cut him down at dinner parties.

This wasn’t just belittling. After almost two full years of constant abrasion, Charlie had worn Ben down to a nub. The resentment in his eyes, the persistent requests that she let something—anything—go, fell on deaf ears. The two times that he had managed to drag her into couples therapy, Charlie had been so nasty to him that the therapist had suggested that she see them separately.

It was a wonder Ben had the strength left to pack his bags and walk out the door.

“Fu-u-uck,” Charlie drew out the word. She had spilled cat food all over the back deck. Ben had been right about the appropriate number of cats. Charlie had