or she didn’t care, and since I doubted that she didn’t care, I assumed that somehow she knew something I didn’t, that they’d found a way to communicate, or that she already knew he had plans.
I didn’t see Brad again until Monday afternoon, when a cold mist was coming off the ocean, and I decided to explore the cliff walk. Miranda was napping. That morning we had driven up the coast to look at a lighthouse that was apparently worth looking at. It was at the end of a hook of land where the fog was particularly thick. We took photographs in which the lighthouse was barely visible, then drove farther up the coast and ate lunch at a clam shack that was closing for the season that week. Returning to the inn, Miranda suggested a nap, as she did every afternoon, and I joined her. In a strange way, the sex we’d been having since I knew that Miranda was unfaithful was better than it had been before. Anger toward my wife had made me become selfish, less interested in her needs, and only interested in mine, and she was responding to me in ways she never had before. That afternoon I had flipped Miranda onto her stomach and entered her from behind, holding her in that position even after she told me she wanted me facing her. I spread my body along hers, pushing my face into the tangled hair at her neck, gripping her wrists. I was surprised when she came shortly before I did, emitting a strange yelping sound. Afterward, she murmured, “You were quite the animal today. I liked it.” She curled into the fetal position and I watched her fall asleep. I counted the knuckles of her spine, studied the dual dimples above her buttocks, wondered about a quarter-size bruise high up on her thigh. As she began to lightly snore, my thoughts turned paranoid again. Was she this relaxed after having sex with Brad? Did she consider this her due, a lifetime of men catering to all her needs? All the tension that the sex had temporarily extinguished came flooding back. I wondered what it would feel like to punch her as hard as I could in the back of the neck.
I dressed and slipped out of the room, not leaving a note. I felt better once I was on the cliff walk, enveloped in the cold mist, staring out toward the opaque ocean. I walked fast, concentrating on the slippery footing, trying not to think of the last time I had taken this route to the house. When I reached the end of the walk, I checked my watch, noting that it had taken a little over thirty minutes to reach my new home from the Kennewick Inn. I stood on the bluff, staring toward the rear of my house. I wasn’t afraid of being spotted this time. I was a lord surveying my manor. I walked across the damp stretch of land, then looped around toward the front of the house through a stand of balsam firs. As I approached the driveway, I watched a truck pull away, and assumed I had just missed Brad. But as I came fully around the house, I saw his two-toned pickup truck, with him next to it, a cigarette jutting from his lips. He was punching a number into his cell phone, but stopped when he spotted me. He smiled and the cigarette bobbed up and down. I smiled back and walked toward him, hand outstretched.
It was time I got to know Brad Daggett.
CHAPTER 8
LILY
I hadn’t planned on falling in love, but who does? Eric Washburn was a junior, and president of a “literary” fraternity at Mather called St. Dunstan’s, although I didn’t know that at the time I met him. We met in the library. It was closing time on a frigid February night, and we were the last to leave, passing through the swinging glass doors together into an eye-watering wind. Eric offered me a cigarette, which I didn’t accept, then lit his own, and asked me what direction I was going in. He walked me to Barnard Hall, a gesture that at the time seemed born entirely from gallantry, and not from more sinister motives. At my entryway, he invited me to a Thursday night party at St. Dunstan’s. I told him I would come. He wasn’t particularly handsome; he had a long face and a high forehead, a bony nose