your husband anything you don’t want me to tell him.” It was early August and I was wearing a short dress that buttoned up the front. I pulled it over the top of my head, shucked my underpants, and slid on top of the finished kitchen counter. The height had been all wrong, and Brad had to slide a box of tiles over and stand on them. It was awkward and unsatisfying, but afterward I lied and told Brad, tears in my eyes, that it was the first time I’d had sex since the week after my wedding, that my husband had no interest in me that way. We got dressed, and I cried for a while, and then we got undressed again, and had sex with Brad sitting on one of the folding chairs the crew had brought in for their lunch breaks. I straddled him, facing forward, my leg muscles shaking. The look on Brad’s face, his eyes raking over me, told me all I needed to know. “Never anywhere else,” I said that afternoon. “Only here, and only when we absolutely know that no one will be showing up. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
“You tell anyone about this . . .”
“I won’t.”
A week later I told him that sometimes I dreamed about killing my husband. Two weeks later Brad told me he’d do it for me if I wanted. It was that easy. I told him if we did it right, and made no mistakes, that no one would ever suspect either of us, and we’d be able to marry, buy a yacht, take a yearlong honeymoon. When I’d mentioned the yacht, Brad’s eyes had lit up in a way I’d never seen, even when we were having sex. Sex had hooked him, but greed would keep him, and I had thought all along that he would hold his nerve, but now I wasn’t so sure.
I got off the couch, shook my arms out, bounced up and down a couple of times on the balls of my feet. My skin was crawling, my mind racing. I poured myself some Ketel One on ice, and wandered through the dark house. There was a stain on the second-floor landing where Ted had bled out. The police had told me about it so I wouldn’t be shocked. I touched it with my bare toe, a dark brown pool that almost matched the stain of the wooden floor. The cleaning service was coming tomorrow and I would make sure to tell them about it. I brought my drink into the media room and flipped through channels for a while, settling on Pretty Woman, my favorite film from when I was a young girl. It had been on television all the time then, as well, and I’d loved it, years before I even understood what a prostitute was. It seemed stupid now, but I watched anyway, saying the lines to myself before they said them on TV. I calmed down, and when the film was over, and my drink finished, I knew that I needed to drive back to Maine and talk with Brad. He needed to be prepared for what was coming, and I felt that if I had a little time with him it could make a difference.
My car was on the street instead of in the garage. I dressed in jeans and a dark green sweatshirt with a hood, and left the house. Walking to my car through the rain, I resisted the urge to look around, to see if somehow I was being watched. I didn’t think I was. My car was parked at the corner of my street. I got in, pulled straight out of the spot, and drove toward I-93. The roads were quiet, and it didn’t seem as though anyone was behind me, any lights suddenly appearing. I merged onto the highway, still feeling sure that I wasn’t being followed. I settled into a middle lane, slid a CD into the player, and tried to relax. The rain-shiny highway unspooled in front of me. It was late by the time I reached Crescent Cottages, the steady rain now a drizzle. Brad’s truck was not in front of his unit. I assumed he was at Cooley’s but I’d wait him out. It meant he’d be hammered when I finally got a chance to talk with him, but I hoped he wouldn’t be so far gone that nothing would sink in. My plan was to prep him for being