Page 6 of How to Fake a Haunting

I woke with Beatrix asleep beside me. While parts of the previous evening had taken on a dreamlike quality in my mind, the image of the iron finials smashing through the windshield, along with Adelaide’s words—The only way is to stage a haunting—danced in my head on a loop.

I stared at the ceiling, torn between my desire to text Adelaide and tell her I was in, and wanting to forget the whole thing—and not just Adelaide’s plan, but also my threats to Callum.

How much easier would everything be if I didn’t care so goddamn much?

If I didn’t want the best for Beatrix? If I could turn a blind eye—as I imagined so many partners did—to my husband’s toxic drinking and complete disinterest in being a half-decent parent?

I’d considered leaving many times before I had Beatrix, but the things Cal did, the promises he broke, never seemed quite serious enough to give up on him completely.

The drunken freak-out that resulted in a broken bathroom mirror and the weekend-long golf and drinking binges took on the air of an elder millennial’s last hurrah.

He was always apologizing, always pointing a finger at friends, at his brother and brothers-in-law, the allegedly worse and more frequent trouble they’d get into, always putting together short stints of sobriety, like a distance swimmer coming up for air.

And he’d been more excited than I’d been at the prospect of starting a family.

That excitement had coaxed me into making the ultimate mistake: believing that having a child would force Cal to grow up.

Four years later, and I knew the truth: Alcoholics don’t grow out of their alcoholism, and babies don’t make alcoholics any less alcoholic.

There was no point in wishing I’d left before Beatrix was born.

Now that I had her, I could summon only gratitude for every little decision that had resulted in my perfect daughter, who felt more like she’d been carved from my very bones than like she’d emerged from my womb.

Adelaide hadn’t been kidding when she said I had everything aside from Callum.

Well, aside from him and the drama his influential family and their obnoxious wealth created.

I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I allowed Callum’s behavior to harm Bea or permanently alter the trajectory of her life.

I leaned over Bea’s sleeping form and planted a kiss on her cheek.

Then I crept from her room, where I slept whenever I wasn’t hiding from my crumbling marriage in the daybed in my office, fighting against my foggy brain and burning eyes.

In the kitchen, I made myself an extra-large cup of coffee, surprised to find I was thinking about Adelaide’s plan for the second time since waking.

You aren’t really considering it, are you?

In the light of morning, it was even more ludicrous.

I surveyed the bright and airy house, with its still-new-looking appliances, and tried to imagine something sinister happening within its walls.

I was contemplating the logistics of wiring a coffee mug to subsequently yank across the room, Poltergeist-style, when I heard footsteps on the stairs leading into the house from the garage.

I got as far as sliding off my stool before a key clicked in the lock and the door into the kitchen swung open. Callum stood on the top step, energy drink in hand, blinking bloodshot eyes. He cleared the last step into the room and closed the door.

“Hey,” he said, his tone free from the previous night’s malice. “Bea still sleeping?”

I stared as he walked into the foyer and kicked off his boots.

“Is . . . Bea . . . still . . . sleeping?” I repeated, tongue slow, brain murky. He smiled, and that was when my disbelief turned to rage. “What the fuck, Callum? You crash the car last night and almost kill us, leave me to deal with everything, then stroll in now and act like nothing’s wrong?”

He scoffed. “I didn’t ‘almost kill’ anyone.”

“You drove us into a fence of metal death-spikes and then took off so you wouldn’t get arrested!”

He wrinkled his mouth, as if tasting something sour. “I took off because if the wrong kind of cop came, they would assume I was drunk once they found out we’d been at the gala.”

I laughed wildly. “And what kind of cop is that? One that’s not in your mother’s pocket?”

“Are you done? I have to get ready for work.”

Rage flared so intensely I thought I might double over from the force of it. “I told you I wasn’t doing this,” I hissed. “Not anymore. You’re not going to keep drinking, then come home as if nothing happened. I—”

Cal winced. “Seriously, Lainey, not so loud. You’ll wake up Bea.”

This time I did double over; otherwise, I would have screamed.

“And what about last night, Callum?” I asked, squeezing my hands into fists, “when Bea was trying to sleep after your parents’ stupid party, and you shattered the fucking windshield?

But you’re right, me talking in the kitchen might wake her.

” I shook my head. “I’m not doing this. I want you out. Today. I told you to stay at Monty’s.”

He laughed. “Yeah, okay, Lainey. I can’t stay at Monty’s.” He stepped around me, his eyes landing on the deck outside the kitchen window. He turned and gave me a lopsided smirk that reminded me of his brother. “Besides, if I stay at Monty’s, how am I going to fix the broken deck rail?”

I seethed, made speechless by his audacity.

I’d been asking him to fix the broken railing on the deck—the dangerously broken railing, suspended over a seven-foot drop—every week since the previous summer.

I hadn’t even let Bea out there by herself since the rail had splintered, and now Callum was treating the whole thing like a goddamn joke.

“I’ve got to shower,” Cal said. “Oh, and in case you were wondering, the car’s fine.

They’re replacing the windshield and the front bumper.

It should be ready by tomorrow. You can take my car until then.

I’ve got Monty’s truck.” I opened my mouth to reply, but he walked out of the kitchen.

A moment later, his feet pounded up the stairs.

I returned to the counter with my now-cold coffee and fumed, listening first to the water in the pipes as he showered and then to the creak of the ceiling as he walked across his bedroom.

He came downstairs a few minutes later and laced up his boots in the foyer.

“Did you happen to see if my case of seltzer is scheduled to come today?” he asked.

I gritted my teeth. “I don’t care about your seltzer. I care about you acknowledging your drinking problem.”

Callum straightened, his face clouding over. “You want to do this right now? So we can both have the shittiest day possible?”

“All my days are shitty, Callum. I mean it. I’m not doing this anymore.”

He narrowed his eyes to slits. “So we’re back to what you said last night? You’re divorcing me?”

I let out a groan. “Can’t you take responsibility for your own actions instead of turning everything around on me?”

Why are you even talking to him? Last night was supposed to be the end of talking until I was blue in the face, the end of negotiations and rationalizations. He was going to keep doing what he always did. I knew that. When was I going to get the depressing knowledge through my head?

Now. You’re going to get it through your head now.

Walk away. Be truly done. Nothing you’ve said in six years of marriage, four years since Bea’s birth, has made the slightest bit of difference.

Why the hell would it matter now? Then another thought occurred to me: There’s another way to deal with this . . . to deal with him.

The rage that’d been swirling in my stomach since Callum walked in dissipated like a tornado cut off from warm air. “Never mind,” I said. “You’re right. No sense fighting first thing in the morning. I’ve got to shower too, then get Bea up. See you later.”

I strode toward the stairs, pausing on the landing to listen to him open the door and walk into the garage.

In the bathroom off Bea’s room, I turned on the shower as hot as it would go.

I wanted to go numb beneath its stream, to be blessedly free from thinking about Cal and all his problems, at least for a few minutes.

But first, I had a message to send to Adelaide.

I’m in.

I listened to the whoosh of the outgoing text and set the phone on the sink. Then, before the steam could obscure my face in the mirror—a mirror similar to the one Callum had smashed six long years ago—I smiled at my reflection. “Let’s haunt this asshole,” I whispered.