The boldness of the coffee hits me hard, and I let my thoughts fly. “Why is it such a stretch for you to realize Joanna and I are two completely different people, with completely different relationships, who want completely different things?”
“Oh, believe me, the differences are stark. I notice them every day,” he replies through clenched teeth. Removing two salmon fillets from the fridge, he slams them on a second cutting board. “But old habits die hard. Forgive me if I continue to serve you her coffee.”
The differences are stark?
Isn’t that what I’ve wanted from the start? To be my own person, living out of Joanna’s ever-present shadow? But I don’t know whether to take what he said as a compliment or a criticism.
“Take that scowl off your face,” he spits, raising the knife. “It’s not pretty.”
Definitely a criticism.
“Michael and I are happy,” I say. “We’re so unbelievably in love. I’m sure you’ve seen it from the short amount of time I’ve been here. Being different from Joanna must not be so bad after all.”
“Mr. Harris is one of the most dedicated men I know. He’s thoughtful and charismatic. And he would do anything for his family.” Dean slashes through the bodies of the fish. Six equally spaced incisions. “But there’s another side to Mr. Harris I don’t think you’ve seen yet. A darker side.”
I try to laugh it off. “Are we talking about the same Michael?”
He glares, deadpan. “He’s got a switch that flips. Joanna used to talk to me about what would happen if she questioned his authority. He’d practically lose his mind.”
“I don’t think you can compare—”
“According to Joanna,” he goes on, stuffing seasonings and slices of lemon into the fish’s gaping lacerations, “they’d love hard and fight harder. Get into nasty screaming matches, those two. In the mornings, after their big blowouts, he’d send her long-stemmed red roses. One dozen for every year they’d been together. As if that could make her forget what had happened. He never understood her.”
“Ahem.” The voice sounds behind us, and Dean and I both freeze. “I hardly think Mr. and Mrs. Harris’s marriage problems are on this morning’s menu.” It’s Samara, hands on her hips, hair drawn back behind her ears, her thin lips set in a disapproving line. “What would Mr. Harris think if he knew you two were in here gossiping about him?”
“We’re not—” I start.
“Oh, don’t make excuses to her, Miss Roper. Threats are her thing,” Dean retorts, returning his focus to the fish. “I’d forgotten that the words that come out of my mouth are also under her scrutiny.”
As Samara storms out of the kitchen, mumbling something about people needing to mind their own business, I get up to follow. She can’t tell Michael that I was bad-mouthing him and Joanna. It’d make me look awful.
“Samara, wait,” I call out, and catch up to her as she enters the library. I shut the heavy doors behind us and watch as she begins straightening papers on Michael’s desk, refusing to look at me. “I wasn’t bad-mouthing Michael, I swear. Dean was talking about how he would buy Joanna flowers when they—”
“I heard every word of what you were saying in there.”
I pause, waiting for some kind of reassurance that she won’t say anything to Michael about it. But it never comes, and now I feel like I have to patch things up.
“I was talking about how much I love Michael, that’s all.”
“And what was Dean saying?”
“He might’ve mentioned how tumultuous his relationship with Joanna was.”
She piles books into a stack at the corner of the desk with a huff. “What no man in this house seems to understand is that Joanna was complex. One of a kind. She was lonely. Desperate to talk to someone who understood her. During one of the toughest times of her life, there were only two people who actually took the time