Dear Wife - Kimberly Belle Page 0,43

true.

“Help me out here, Jeffrey. I just want to make sure I’m not missing anything.” I lean toward him, hands folded on top of a sloppy pile of papers. “According to what you just told me, you were alone all afternoon yesterday, either in your car, at an unnamed restaurant or in a public park, from around 12:30 p.m. until a little after four, when the neighbor confirms you pulled into your driveway.”

He nods. “That’s right. Yes.” Add sweating to the list. His face has gone shiny, sprouting a million wet pinpricks.

“And at no point during those three and a half hours, the same hours your wife walked out of the Super1 on East Harding and disappeared, can anyone but you verify your whereabouts.”

He’s silent for long enough I almost feel sorry for him. He sucks a breath, then two more, thirteen brain-numbing seconds, and then the best he can do is: “Pretty much.”

I try to hold my expression tight, but the smile sneaks out anyway.

Gotcha.

BETH

I pull to a stop in the middle of the two-lane drive, double-check the address on the Post-it note Martina handed me earlier this morning and gawk at the building before me.

A church. Martina works at a church. A neo-Gothic monstrosity of beige brick and stained glass, with crimson gables and scalloped finials and lancet arches. In the very center of the main tower, a rose window stares out like the eye of a cyclops. Above it, at the steepest point of the roofline, a wooden cross reaches with long arms into a pale blue sky.

The Church of Christ’s Twelve Apostles.

Oh hell no.

My hand clenches around the gearshift, jiggling it into Reverse. The Church and I aren’t exactly on the best of terms, not since I went to the leader of mine for guidance and he refused to unshackle me from a monster.

“It’s perfectly normal to argue,” Father Ian had told me. “All couples do. But the successful couples learn to forgive. They put the resentment behind them and move on.”

I nodded my head in pious agreement. “I understand that, Father, but he...hurts me.”

“Hurts you how?”

For a second or two, I considered pulling up my shirt and showing him my cracked ribs. In the end, I settled on, “With his hands.”

“Closed or open?”

“I’m sorry?”

“His hands, when he hurts you. Are they closed or open?”

The logical part of me understands Father Ian’s reluctance to believe you would be capable of such cruelty. He’s known you most of your life, guided you through so many sacraments. And we were together for two years before you shoved me into that hotel wall. It was two more years before you punched me, and another year after that before you punched me again. The violence came on so gradually, and then so fast. To Father Ian, to everyone but you and me, my complaints came out of nowhere.

In the end, we compromised: Father Ian would counsel you on the proper ways to handle an argument, and I would pray to become a better wife.

A honk comes from behind me, two friendly, rapid-fire beeps. I look up to find a pretty blonde in my rearview mirror. She waves, diamonds winking on her wrist, and I try to remember what Martina called them, these wealthy women from the northern suburbs. Betty somethings. I gesture for this one to go around, but she doesn’t move, and the road is too narrow for me to turn around. With a sigh, I put the car in Drive.

The two-lane road slices through a manicured lawn clotted with oakleaf hydrangeas and boxwoods sculpted into perfect circles. Before I can find a place to turn around, it dumps me into a parking garage, five-plus stories of stacked concrete. I swing the Buick into a visitor’s space, finally shaking off the blonde on my tail. She motors past, rounding the corner to the next level.

The holy hush—that’s what I’ve since learned it’s called, this brushing of allegations like mine under the altar rug, though I suppose I should give Father Ian a little credit. He lived up to his end of the bargain and talked to you. But whatever he said only made things worse. You came home looking for a fight, one that ended with a concussion and a weeklong ringing in my ears. That Sunday, Father Ian pressed the communion wafer through my split lips like nothing had ever happened. As soon as I turned away, I spit the thing into my hand.

I realize that not every