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Chapter 13

“S he can watch a movie before bed,” I said to Finch Street. “Nothing too scary. Disney, but no Marvel.”

“Got it.”

It was late in the sweltering Georgia July, and I was wearing my favorite New York thrift store find, a vintage, pink silk, Christian Lacroix dress. Finch had come to sit with Mere, as I’d finally convinced Peter we should attend Dixie Minette’s dinner party, the one we’d argued over weeks ago.

The convincing had come at a price.

The day after our argument, I went back in the woods and managed to find my phone near the bluff where I’d fallen. I tucked it in my pocket and returned to the house with no comment. Peter and I were both acting like nothing had happened. Not the argument, nor me losing my phone. And certainly not what had happened between me and Jamie.

Peter’s insomnia hadn’t let up, and now his eyes looked perpetually red and hollowed out, a constant grim set to his jaw. The labs Doc Belmont had ordered seemed to be lost in the ether, and the man was flummoxed. He’d written a prescription for sleeping medication, and scheduled Peter for more tests down in Atlanta the following week. Regardless, this party was one thing I wasn’t willing to let go. We needed to take part in the community, and I didn’t think turning down the mayor’s invite was smart, so one morning while we were getting ready for work, I had brought it up again.

“You can get in a nap that day,” I said. “Mere and I will leave the house to you. The Minettes control everything in this town, and I really want to stay on the mayor’s good side.”

Peter muttered something under his breath about the “old Southern guard,” and I replied that in my opinion the old Southern guard had done a pretty damn good job keeping this town alive. He retorted that they hadn’t done that great a job as there was no bookstore, and what kind of pathetic excuse for a town didn’t have a bookstore? I then suggested he open a fucking bookstore if he considered it so crucial, at which point he frisbeed his phone at the mirror above the sink. The glass had cracked but not shattered, and I had rounded on him, the full force of my anger erupting.

“You can’t just throw stuff, Peter!” I yelled at him. “You’re a grown man! A father and a therapist, for Chrissakes! It’s not okay!”

Without a word he picked up his phone off the floor and gone downstairs. I listened as he stalked back through the kitchen, and then I looked out the window to see him take off across the field behind the house where I’d planted our vegetable garden. I watched as he strode across the field and disappeared over the hill in the direction of the woods.

Well, fuck him. He could set up camp in the woods, for all I cared. He wasn’t the only one who’d ever gotten by on two to three hours of sleep a night. When Mere was born, and I was working every day at the restaurant, I’d been a zombie, but I’d dealt with it. Now I was running out of patience. I had a lot on my mind, too. Mere and her fear of her own cat. A cat who, in the past few weeks, had turned into a feral creature who’d taken to only showing his face whenever he hadn’t been successful hunting for his dinner. It was getting harder and harder to talk Mere out of thinking he was the mythical demon-Catawampus-thing. And then there was that nasty little secret I was harboring: the kiss I’d shared with Jamie Cleburne. I felt guilty about it every day.

I blasted the blow dryer on my hair and tried not to think of the way Jamie’s body had felt against mine. After that night, things between Jamie and me had continued as if nothing had happened: he kept showing up at my bar for breakfast every day, sometimes with Alice, sometimes alone. I kept making him food and making small talk. He joked and laughed like we were just friends. Like we hadn’t explored each other’s mouths with our tongues, each other’s bodies with our hands, grinding desperately into each other in the gloom of his shop. I dream of this all the time, Billie. It’s all I can think about, he had whispered between kisses. The whole thing had lasted only a second, maybe two, then I had pushed him away and run for the door.

On the way back to my house, I’d felt so guilty, so ashamed, that I thought I was going to be sick. Jamie had apologized, and I’d apologized, and then I’d told him, in no uncertain terms, it would never happen again. He said he understood. When he dropped me off at home, I scrambled out of the cab of his truck so fast, I nearly tripped and fell.

After a week and a half, Jamie obliterated any feeling of awkwardness with his breezy way, and it almost felt like it had never happened. Almost, but not entirely. The whole situation had been a mistake, a betrayal, one born of my frustration with Peter and my isolation and maybe some sort of fatal flaw in my character. But I was done with it. Whatever the cause of my behavior, it seemed like Jamie was determined to move past it. So I decided I would, too.

After the mirror-smashing incident, I was downstairs in the kitchen making Nutella crepes for Mere when Peter returned from his walk. He was red-faced, pouring sweat, and approached me with a sheepish look on face. He kissed me on the temple, gently, and I smelled salt and earth and his sweat.

“I’m sorry, Billie. What I did was totally uncalled for. I was wrong, and it won’t happen again.”

I stepped into the pantry, out of earshot from Mere, beckoning him to follow. “You can’t do stuff like that anymore, Peter. It’s scary. Not just to Mere but to me.”

He looked down at the floor, ashamed.

“And it’s not like you. I don’t understand. What’s really going on?”

“I can’t sleep in this house, Billie.” He shook his head. Gazed over my shoulder. “At least, not when I’m supposed to. I thought it was because of the well, but then I started sleeping all the time, everywhere. During family time. When I’m supposed to be watching Mere. Do you understand what I’m saying, Billie? I fell asleep during a fucking appointment. While my client was telling me about her physically abusive mother.”

He rubbed his forehead with one hand. “I’ve started to think it’s something in the air—the dust everywhere in this house, the white dust. Maybe there’s asbestos in this place or some other kind of gas. Radon, or something, I don’t know, Billie, I don’t know what it is. I’m just telling you, whatever is getting to me, whatever is”—his voice broke—“tearing at my insides, it’s something here , in this place .”

I held up my hands. “We can find someone to come out and do some testing. See if it’s something that can be fixed. Or, I don’t know, we can move. Find another house altogether.”

He wilted a bit. “I don’t want to move. This house, the land, the privacy. It’s everything we’ve always wanted. I don’t want to give it up.”

“But no house is worth all this . . . your health. Your peace of mind.” I took both his hands in mine and squeezed. There was another option beyond the ones I’d just voiced—an option I knew neither one of us wanted to address. Still, the unspoken words seemed to hover in the air around us.

Go back.

We could go back to New York and leave all this behind. The mess I’d made with the betrayal with Jamie, the house with the weird vibes, the cat we could never find. But there would be a price to pay. I’d have to abandon another restaurant. And I really didn’t want that. I didn’t want to have to start all over another time. I’d come so far. Worked so damn hard. I wasn’t going to give up that easily. I’d given up without a fight once. I wasn’t going to do it again.

I held his gaze. “Peter. I am in this thing with you. We handle this and everything together, do you hear me?”

He nodded but didn’t look convinced.

“And if it’s not radon or asbestos, if it’s something else—”

I flashed to the image of little dead Juliana’s yawning mouth. The old woman with the crown of braids.

If this house is haunted, like Lilah said . . .

I forced myself to continue. “—we’ll figure it out. In the meantime, I really think it would be good if you got out and just . . . spent some time with people. People here in town want to know you. They know me and now they want to know you.”

He hesitated the slightest bit before pulling his hands from mine. He ruffled his sweaty hair then wiped his hands on his shorts. “Sure, yeah.”

I hugged him, willing myself to do it unreservedly. Willing myself not to believe that somehow, at the bottom of all this, my husband simply resented my success. My happiness. “I love you.”

“Let’s just get this over with” was all he said.

I watched him, his face flushed and handsome, that curl of cinnamon hair falling across his forehead. I loved this man, but there was so much between us now—a wall that we’d each been building so diligently that now I wondered if there was a chance of dismantling it.

Now, Finch cleared her throat, bringing me back to the present. “Anything else I need to know?” Mere was already pulling her by the hand in the direction of the stairs.

“Maybe just keep her up until we’re home,” I said, thinking of the nightmares. “We won’t be late.”