Garret no longer felt like swimming. He said he wasn’t feeling well and excused himself, but they didn’t seem to care. Liz barely glanced up as he got up to leave.
The next time he talked to Liz, he attempted to express his hurt feelings, but she suggested he had a problem. Why couldn’t she talk to a guy without him getting jealous? The dude was a friend, and she never dreamed Garret would mind if she brought someone over to swim on a hot day. If she was going to cheat on him, why would she do it right under his nose? Garret ended up feeling guilty for jumping to conclusions. “She was very good at making you doubt what you’d seen.” He didn’t want to dwell on negativity and concluded it was a misunderstanding. He decided to put the incident behind him. He knew couples didn’t always agree, and he made an effort to look at the world from her perspective. But sometimes she criticized him for things that made no sense. “She tried to make it seem like I had memory problems. If I ever forgot something, she’d say, ‘Well, you do that all the time.’”
Garret knew that wasn’t true. He prided himself on his excellent memory. Sure, he forgot something once in a while. Everyone did that. Why was Liz so set on convincing him that he was becoming feeble-minded? It wasn’t worth worrying about, and he tossed it off as a personality quirk. No relationship was perfect, and he tried to look at the bright side.
In June 2012, Garret bought his first house. It had belonged to his grandmother, and when she moved into a nursing home, it was offered to him at slightly below market value. He liked the quiet neighborhood in Council Bluffs and was glad to live closer to both his family and work. The two-bedroom, one-bathroom home with a daylight basement had enough space for a roommate, so his longtime buddy, Gabe, moved in.
Garret and Liz were coming up on the two-year anniversary of the day they’d met, and overall, he thought things were pretty good between them. He didn’t mind that she leaned on him, and he helped her out whenever he could, sometimes giving her money to pay her bills. It felt good to save the day—to be the guy who stepped up to pay the electric bill she’d been anguishing over.
Liz was petite, and when she looked up at him with her big brown eyes, she could appear so vulnerable, it brought out his protective instincts. His heart went out to the single mother who seemed to struggle so hard to get by. Garret didn’t hesitate when she asked him to watch her kids when she had to work all night. They were good kids and easy to get along with. Trina was usually engrossed in a book, while Peter played video games. They stayed over at his place often. Liz hadn’t told him any specifics about her cleaning business, but it couldn’t have been easy on her to work all night. Not only that, it apparently was not lucrative.
Garret remembers that Liz had told him she had a lot on her plate. She had claimed that in addition to her housecleaning business, she was taking classes to become a dental hygienist and that she was also working as a nurse. He assumed it was true because he had seen her dressed for work in scrubs. He wasn’t sure where she worked, but he does remember the macabre joke they shared about her odd mix of careers: As a nurse, she would know how to kill Garret, and she could get away with it because she could use her cleaning expertise to wash away evidence. It was a ridiculous idea, and they’d chuckled about it. He couldn’t have imagined that he’d one day look back upon that “joke” with an icy shudder.
Despite the many hours she claimed she worked, Liz seemed constantly worried about money. His natural inclination was to offer help, though she usually made half-hearted attempts to protest. He didn’t have to help, she told him. She didn’t want him to pay her bills for her. She would just have to figure something out on her own. As she continued to mope and fret, he kept insisting until she accepted his help. She was his girlfriend, and he was glad to do what he could to make her life easier. It was gratifying to see her relieved