Page 42 of The Heartbreak Hotel

Thirty-One

The photograph is sweet poison. I’m frozen in the entryway, clutching it two-handed.

Henry’s hair is so dark, no silver at his temples, shorter than I’ve ever seen it.

His smile is broad and open-mouthed, like he’s coming down from a laugh.

One hand holds Molly against him, fingers splayed over her belly, her legs tucked over his own.

She’s tiny: smaller than Quinn, in a velvet dress and ruffly socks.

I imagine Henry putting them on her and it traps the breath in my throat.

“It’s a lovely profile,” Pauline says. She bends over to unzip her boots. “Some of your past guests are even quoted! They just rave about you.”

But her words meet me like water, beading up and evaporating. I can hardly hear her over the ringing in my ears. Over the wail of details pelting me, relentless, one after another after another.

Henry’s fingers bracketed around Joss’s shoulder.

The angle of her head, tipped toward him.

The palm of her hand on his knee. I can feel it in my own hand, like a burn: the memory of touching him.

Joss is smiling straight into the camera and it’s like she’s looking directly at me.

You idiot , I hear. From Joss or from Goldie or from myself, I’m not sure. You absolute fool.

“Is everything all right?” Pauline asks. Distantly, I’m aware of Nan coming down the stairs. “You look a bit pale.”

“Everything’s fine,” I say, in a voice that sounds nothing like my own. It’s breathless and wavering. “Let me show you to your room.”

Nan takes the paper from my hands without a word, scanning it in the entryway while I bring Pauline’s bags up the stairs.

While I show her the activities card. While I point out her bathroom, where just a couple months ago Henry was spread flat on his back to fix the shower.

While I move on autopilot, the truth spreading through me like a virus.

Henry and Joss. Henry and Joss, here, in your house.

Henry and Joss in love, Henry and Joss with a child, Henry and Joss fighting in the garden.

Henry and Joss with an entire life you could never understand.

“The gardener,” Nan says, when I come back down the stairs. She points to Joss’s face before looking up at mine. “She and Henry were married?”

I nod, and Nan’s eyes cloud with understanding. “You didn’t know,” she says.

“I need to—” I don’t know where the sentence is going when I start it.

Crawl into a hole , maybe. I reach for my phone, my car keys.

Think of Joss sitting in my living room this fall, talking about her heartbreak.

Of Henry, right there, walking in on it.

“If Pauline needs anything, can you help her? I’m sorry. I’ll be back.”

“Of course,” Nan says. Her hand rests on my forearm for just a brief moment, grounding me. “We’ll be here.”

“Thank you.” I toe on my sneakers and pull open the front door. I trip on my way to the car—my eyes glued to my phone instead of the ground. Snow fills one of my shoes, soaking my sock through to the skin.

I text Mei first: Joss is Henry’s ex-wife.

Then Henry himself: There’s an article about your family in the paper.

You could have told me about Joss. When I drop behind the wheel I have no idea where I’m planning to go; I just know I need to be away from the house.

Away from the front steps where Joss and Henry sat with their daughter.

Away from that patch of wallpaper in the Lupine Room.

Mei calls me at the exact same time Henry’s text comes through: Where are you? I send her to voicemail and turn the car on. It’s frigid today—the first week of December. My breath condenses like smoke, obscures the house through my windshield.

I put the car in reverse and back out of the driveway, churning up frozen gravel.

Where am I? Where am I? I start driving toward the lake, directionless, letting the green lights determine my path.

I shouldn’t be driving, probably—my chest is shaking, breaths coming rickety and forced.

The road is slick with patches of ice, everyone taking it slow and careful.

The betrayal feels bottomless. All the times Joss could have told me. All the times Henry should have. I feel like the stupidest woman to ever set foot on earth. I hate both of them for making a fool of me.

I’m at a red light near the turnoff for Rocky Mountain National Park when someone honks at me, pointed and prolonged.

It jolts me into the present: I clutch the wheel and look up at the rearview mirror, where Henry’s black SUV looms immediately behind my bumper.

There’s snow clustered at the bottom of his windshield.

He points left, saying something that I can’t hear.

I want to drive away and never show him my face again; I want to crawl through his window and cling to him like a koala bear; I want to throttle him for keeping something like this from me.

The light turns green, and when I don’t move, the car behind Henry honks at us both. Henry waves left again, more dramatically this time. I clench the steering wheel and flip on my signal.

I wind through a residential neighborhood, Henry right behind me.

I think about driving home, or to his place, or to the highway.

I wonder how long he’d follow me, wonder what he could possibly have to say when I finally run out of gas.

But after we’ve looped through the neighborhood twice and I still haven’t figured out what I want to do, Henry lays on his horn again.

I watch him reach for his phone, his car slowing, and then my phone lights up in the cup holder: Pull over.

The neighborhood opens up to undeveloped land, fields of winter-crisp reeds cut by a trickling ravine that winds all the way to Lake Estes.

It’s frozen today: a floe of ice through the grass.

I pull onto the shoulder and put my car in park.

The field is ringed in mountains, Longs Peak snowy and commanding in the distance.

Before I’ve even had a chance to take a deep breath, Henry’s body fills my window.

“Are you stalking me?” I demand, looking up at him through the glass. It sounds bratty and unhinged, which is exactly how I feel.

“I was driving to the house and I saw your car,” Henry says. He tries to open my door, but it’s locked. “Can you open this, please?”

For a second I let myself imagine not opening it.

Turning the car back on, rolling away from Henry, leaving him standing in the field like the exact kind of idiot he’s turned me into.

But I make the mistake of meeting his eyes, and it’s excruciatingly clear.

I can’t drive away from Henry—not from the worried line between his brows, not from his infuriatingly beautiful face.

I open the door, and he takes a step backward. I lean against it as soon as it’s closed, putting as much space between us as possible, tears rising in my throat like a threat. I swallow.

“Louisa,” Henry says. He takes a deep breath and sets his shoulders like he’s bracing for me. Already, his cheeks are pink from the cold. It’s unbearable, the way he wears every feeling so honestly on his face. “That’s not the way I wanted you to find out about Joss and me.”

Joss and me . I feel it like a slap.

“You lied,” I say. Wind blows across the meadow, rustling the snow-laced grass, and I hunch into myself. I left in a rush; all I’m wearing is a long-sleeve T-shirt. Henry starts to shoulder out of his coat. “When I asked about her. You said she was long gone.”

“That wasn’t a lie.” Henry steps forward to wrap the coat around me, and I shrink away from him.

He freezes, eyes tracking over me, before stepping backward and holding the coat in the space between us.

On principle, I don’t want it—but I’m already shaking, and I also don’t want to have this conversation while trembling like a pathetic damsel.

I take it, hunching into its borrowed warmth.

“My romantic relationship with Joss is long gone. It’s been more than five years since the divorce. Longer since it was over between us.”

“That’s not the same, and you know it.” The coat smells like Henry. Citrus soap, aftershave, everything good. My body betrays me by wrapping it even further around my shoulders, burrowing into him. “Joss isn’t gone —she’s right here. I thought she was my friend.”

“She is your friend,” Henry says, and I let out a sharp exhale. It’s so patronizing—like I’m a child.

“Friends don’t keep things like this from each other.”

Henry’s wearing a button-down, and I wonder if he came from work.

Wind teases through his hair and I watch goose bumps rise on his neck, the dip in his collarbone.

I make myself look away as he says, “Our relationship to the house is complicated. She takes care of the garden because it makes her feel close to Molly. I manage the rentals because I can’t bear to sell it.

” He takes a step closer to me, eyes serious and searching on mine.

“But our relationship to each other is simple, Louisa. We were partners once. We went through something incomprehensible together. Now we take care of the house. That’s it. ”

“Then what were you fighting about, in the garden?”

He blinks. His nose is turning pink. “Nothing,” he says, and I shake my head.

“I can’t be with someone who keeps secrets from me.” It’s out before I’ve thought it through; before I’ve even realized that it’s true. Nate had an entire life I didn’t know about. Now Henry does, too—after I sat, shaking with panicked adrenaline, on his couch. After I told him all of it.

“It wasn’t a secret,” Henry says, taking a half step closer. “I would have told you, I—”

“When?” I angle my chin upward, don’t move my gaze from his. “Why should I believe that?”