to Nigel, face-to-face. Tell him that she knew that he’d been looking at...things on the internet. She grabbed her jacket from the back of her chair, relieved at her own decisiveness. But she always had been the confrontational one; she just had to work her way up to it. Nigel, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with the battle; he wanted to win like everyone else, but he had other ways of doing it. Winnie didn’t want that type of fight in her marriage. What she really wanted was to turn back time, go back to the night she’d made the worst mistake of her life, take it all back like it never happened. If she could take that one moment back...her marriage, her son...everything would be healthy as it should be.
It was raining when she stood under the awning of the building just a few yards from where her car was parked. Winnie stood huddled there, her eyes looking at the bruised color of the sky and not really seeing it. Where would she go if she got in and drove right now? She didn’t know, so instead of walking to her car she flipped the hood up on her jacket and began walking along the sidewalk, dodging a couple of guys who had their eyes on their phones. The rain was more of a mist, and it swept into her face with an affection only Seattle rain offered.
If they fought it would get ugly, because that’s how people with secrets stepped into the ring. If she told Nigel she knew he’d searched for Lisa Sharpe online he would get accusatory, make her feel awful for snooping and then thinking the worst of him. And maybe he’d be right, or maybe he’d be gaslighting her; she was fairly certain she did her fair share of gaslighting herself. But Nigel wasn’t like Winnie; he wasn’t trying to punish himself for his role in her mistake. No, if he was searching for information it was to benefit himself. You couldn’t live with someone for years on end without knowing their patterns; good or bad you learned them.
Winnie licked the water off her lips. She wasn’t aware of where she was walking, or how fast; she was only vaguely aware of the people she passed and how they stared at her. It must be my makeup, she thought. The rain that was kissing her face was probably making her mascara run. A voice in the back of her mind was telling her that she was deciding how people were seeing her instead of facing the truth about how she actually looked; the voice sounded suspiciously like the therapist she’d seen for three years, the man’s voice more distinct in her mind than her dead father’s. He’d ended up losing his license, after which Winnie quit therapy indefinitely to become a full-time control freak mom.
It was when Nigel brought up renting out the apartment downstairs to help with bills that she’d started looking for a job. The thought of some stranger in her house, watching her, terrified Winnie. She just couldn’t do it, even though she’d agreed to put in the separate entrance. She stopped on the corner of a street she wasn’t familiar with and looked around for the first time. Calm down, she told herself, but she was calm. Almost too calm. Why was that? Because he couldn’t leave her, and that was her ultimate fear. She laughed, a raucous burst that made several people who were waiting for the light to change step away from her, the woman in the Burberry coat with the smudged mascara. But it was funny, wasn’t it? She was afraid of the thing that couldn’t happen. The smile wilted from her lips. It wasn’t that he couldn’t leave, it was that he wanted to and couldn’t. Perhaps it was too much to ask after what she’d done, but she just wanted her husband to love her...to want to be with her.
She’d somehow walked home, wound herself through streets she rarely drove down until she’d reached the opposite end of Greenlake Park and was now standing in front of her own house—a mess of wet clothes and running face paint. Her car was still in the parking lot at work. She’d walked four miles and hardly noticed. The last thing Winnie wanted to do was schlep all the way back to the office just as people were coming back from lunch. If people from