Page 125 of All These Beautiful Strangers

“Yes,” she said. She sighed. “I was going to throw them out but the girls saw them first. You know how they feel about the color purple.”

I smiled.

“Sera called them princess flowers,” Grace went on, her voice dry and sad. “We spent the afternoon making flower crowns.”

My chest ached. I opened my mouth to say something, then closed it.

“Grace, the person who did those things,” I said after awhile, “it wasn’t me. You know that.”

I could hear her breathing. “Alistair,” she said, “what happened the other night—”

“Won’t ever happen again,” I said. “You have my word.”

She didn’t say anything.

“You and—” I couldn’t bring myself to say his name. “That’s over?”

Grace paused. “Yes,” she said. “It’s over.”

“Okay, then,” I said after a moment, as if we were business partners negotiating a deal, and we’d both given up something that we hadn’t wanted to part with.

Last night, when I got in from the city, the house was dark. The girls were asleep and upstairs, Grace sat on our bed in her robe, watching television. She got up when she saw me come into our room. Neither of us spoke. I walked over to where she stood and got down on my knees in front of her. I wrapped my arms around her waist and said into the silk knot of her robe, “I’m trying. I want to try.”

Grace didn’t say anything. She just reached down and rested her hand in my hair, her fingers grazing my temple.

I slept in the guest bedroom down the hall. I set my alarm for five thirty that morning so I could wake up before the girls and slip into bed with Grace, all to preserve the girls’ cherished Saturday morning ritual of bursting into our room at dawn and waking us to make them breakfast by jumping on the bed. I could feel the weight of Grace’s body beside me as I lay there and we waited, both pretending to be asleep. After a while, I opened my eyes and watched her—her dark hair cascading over the pillow, her lashes still against her cheeks, her lips slightly parted. I almost reached out to touch her, but then I heard the door creak open, and Seraphina’s giggles, and Charlotte shushing her. I felt the bed move as their little bodies climbed onto the mattress.

I don’t think Grace heard me now as I came into the bathroom because when she glanced in the mirror, she seemed startled to find me there behind her.

I stared unabashedly at my wife’s naked body. The swell of her breasts. The curve of the small of her back. Her normally translucent skin had darkened, ripened in the sun. How many times had we made love in that bathroom—in the shower, on the vanity, on the tiled floor? The steam curling the ends of Grace’s hair, the sound of the water thrumming against the granite, muffling her moans? I came up behind her and put my arms around her, cupping her breasts in my hands, pulling her taut against my body, so she could feel the thickness of my want.

I felt her stiffen in my arms.

“Don’t,” she said.

I reached up to stroke her neck. I only wanted to make her feel good, to remember how good it was when we were together. We had agreed to try, hadn’t we? My finger slid over the ridge of something and my hand stilled. In our reflection in the mirror I saw it—the bandage on her left shoulder. I hadn’t seen it at first under the harsh fluorescent lights of the bathroom, and Grace had kept her shoulders covered all day. But there it was—the irrefutable proof that our fight earlier that week had happened. The marks that I had left.

It was an accident. She fell. And I had been there, yes, but it wasn’t my fault. Of course I had been upset. Of course I had said terrible things and maybe handled her a little roughly. But she had lied. She had betrayed me, betrayed our family.

Peter Hindsberg. Peter fucking Hindsberg. Why him? Who the fuck was he? An insurance investigator in Hillsborough? What about him was worth forsaking the life Grace and I had built together?

“Alistair,” she said.

I reached down and pulled the knob of the shower to turn off the faucet. Steam peeled off the granite. I could feel the heat coming off the water.

“Get in,” I said.

I saw the fear in Grace’s eyes, but it only fueled my anger. I leaned down and kissed her, cutting off her protests. I watched her close her eyes and go somewhere else in her mind, far away from me. Somewhere I couldn’t follow.

Afterward, I sat under the hot water of the shower for a few minutes by myself. When I got out, the bathroom mirror was coated with steam. I wrapped a towel around my waist and shaved. When I came out of the bathroom, Grace was dressed in jeans and a loose T-shirt. That’s when I noticed that my suitcase was open on the bed, and Grace was by the dresser, the drawer out; she was tossing my collared shirts into it.

“I want you to leave,” Grace said. “You’re never going to do anything like that to me, ever again.”

“So he can touch you, but I can’t?” I asked.

Grace didn’t say anything.

“I thought we said we were going to try,” I said.