car and hitting my right side tells me I’m losing.
“Can you please shut that window?” I say.
He responds by pressing a button to his left, and the window slides all the way open.
Our house—I suppose it’s Malcolm’s house now, or soon will be—is as cold and dark as the night. Not even the back porch light is on. At after midnight on a Friday, Anne might still be up, if not studying then watching a movie. But if Malcolm’s told her I’m arriving, maybe she decided to stay in her room. Still, the house seems wrong.
I unbuckle my seat belt and think of running. Up the street to Sarah Green’s house. In the opposite direction toward the Delacroix’s or the Morrises’ or the Callahans’. Through the empty playground. Hiding inside my Acura that’s parked in its usual space in the driveway. Anywhere, really. Anywhere that isn’t this dark house with only my husband for company.
Malcolm kills the engine and comes around to my side, opening the door for me and taking my arm, squeezing it. He holds me like this until we reach the back door. His key slides into the lock, the door swings open, and I’m pushed inside.
“Go to bed, Elena,” he says.
“There are some prescriptions I need to fill.” I take the slips from my pocket, feeling Lissa’s pen nestled in the folds of material, and Malcolm takes the papers from me.
“I told you to go to bed.” Then, only slightly more civilly, “I’ll take care of it in the morning.”
“I need them now. There’s an all-night pharmacy down by—”
“Elena, I said Go. To. Bed.”
I expect Anne to poke her head into the hall at the sound of his voice, but there’s no opening of a door or feet running down a hall. We’re alone in this darkened house, with the shades pulled and the lights on their dimmest setting.
“Where’s Anne?” I say.
“Staying with some friends.”
“Which friends? When is she coming home?” I don’t know why I ask this; the answer seems pretty clear to me.
“Soon.”
What follows is five full minutes of a standoff until I finally leave him and go toward the hall to my room. A part of me expects him to stop me, to tell me I’m no longer welcome in his bed, to sleep in Freddie’s. But he doesn’t say a word.
My finger finds the wall switch and flicks it to the up position. This room is mine, and it isn’t. The dresser has been wiped clean, bare wood where photos of my family once sat in their frames, where a round silver tray used to hold my perfumes. I open the bottom drawer, where I keep pajamas and nightgowns. It’s empty. Every single one of my dresser drawers is empty, only the floral shelf paper liners covering the bottoms. One hand automatically goes to my mouth and stifles a scream.
Breathe, El. Just breathe. But I can’t.
In the mirror’s reflection, my walk-in closet beckons me to open it, to check inside, to see that all of my stuff is hanging on rods or folded on wire organizer shelves and that shoes are lined up in neat rows the way they always have been. I answer the door’s call, crossing the room, one hand still over my mouth, the other reaching out for the door lever. A hideous Let’s Make a Deal scenario plays through my mind: What’s behind Door Number One, Elena? Want to take a guess and win the big prize?
No. No, I don’t.
I do.
The white wire frames are there, in the same place they’ve been since I paid some consultant from a bed and bath store to design and install them. They line the side and back walls of the closet, virgin territory waiting to be piled with wool and denim and cotton. The carpeting is freshly vacuumed, stripes of beige pile shimmering under the light.
It’s like I’ve disappeared.
I spin away from the closet, reaching the window on Malcolm’s side of the bed in three steps, pushing the curtains aside and rolling up the roman blind, hearing it snap