Chapter 17
Intruder
Cecily
There’s someone trying to get into my house.
I lie in the inky dark, gripping the sheet beneath me, my heart shuddering.
There’s a heavy tread on the deck beneath my open window. It’s not one of the kids. It’s not the sound of anyone I know, even if it made sense for someone I know to be creeping around my house in the middle of the night, which it most obviously does not.
I grope for my phone on the nightstand. It’s not there. I left it downstairs on the counter where I placed it after I got a text from Teo asking me if I’d gotten home all right. We’d ditched our landline two years ago—a decision I’d fought at the time because cell phones could die or not be within easy reach when you needed them. Tom had hushed my fears. We hadn’t received any calls on our landline except for telemarketers for years, and what could possibly happen with us both there safe and snug? I’d agreed rather than fight.
And now look. My life seems to be one long series of my worst fears being realized.
Two more heavy steps, and now it’s the sound of someone rattling the handle on the sliding door. Barely breathing, adrenaline and anxiety fighting for prominence, I roll onto Tom’s side of the bed, trying to keep my breathing regular, trying not to make the bed squeak. I slide my hand under the mattress. It’s still there, the knife Tom kept in case of intruders, the one I was never happy about because what if the kids found it?
“There are plenty of knives in the kitchen,” he’d always say in the tone he used when he thought I was being an irrational mother. And then I’d start to doubt myself, even though I knew that this knife, in its hunting sheath, hidden away, would have an attraction to the kids that all the ordinary, everyday knives sitting in the butcher block never would.
“At least it’s not a gun,” I hear Tom’s voice saying now. But right at this moment, with my children asleep in their rooms down the hall, I wish for a gun. This knife I’m clutching is useless to me if whoever’s trying to get in my house intends violence against the kids or me.
The kids.
The handle rattles again. I force myself to stand and pad quietly across the carpeted bedroom floor. The room’s pitch-black because this is how I’ve always needed to sleep, and now that Tom’s gone, I can shut the blinds and wait until my alarm wakes me rather than rising with the vagaries of the sun.
My hand reaches for the doorknob. I find its cool surface and ease open the door. Out in the hall, I think I can hear breathing, but that might be my own. I get to the door to Henry’s room before I freeze in fear. I feel like I have Sophie’s choice. How can I protect both my children at once? How could I ever choose between them?
Another click from downstairs, and I hear a muffled curse. Instinct drives me to Cassie’s room. She’s the easiest to wake. She’s lying on her back, her arms splayed above her head, her phone still clutched in her hand. I shake her gently. Her eyes flutter open.
“What—”
I place my hand across her mouth as I lean down and whisper into her ear. “I think there’s someone trying to get in the house. Don’t say anything. Follow me to Henry’s room. Bring your phone.”
Her eyes are wide with fear, but she nods. She looks so young and vulnerable in her too-small T-shirt and the matching bottoms that graze her calves. We hold hands as we cross the hall. We stop as we hear something tapping against the glass. Cassie’s shaking so hard it feels like she’s vibrating. I tug her hand, pulling her into Henry’s room and locking the door behind us. I grab the chair from his desk and tilt it under the door. Cassie sits on the floor next to Henry’s bed, huddled into the space between his nightstand and the bed frame. Henry couldn’t be more oblivious, snoring gently, his covers pulled up to his chin the way he’s always done ever since he was a tiny thing.
I sit next to Cassie on the floor and pry her phone from her hand. She tries to speak, but I shake my head. The battery’s low, but there’s enough to make a call. I can’t help but notice the text on her screen from Kevin. Sleep tight, it says.
My fingers shake like they did a year ago when I texted the kids to let them know I was alive as I tap out 911. I press the phone against my ear, turning the volume low. The woman who answers asks me to state the nature of my emergency.
“Someone’s trying to break into my house.”
“I’ll need you to speak louder, ma’am.”
“Someone. Breaking in. My. House,” I hiss. “Send the police.”
“Ma’am . . . are you there, ma’am? Do you need the police?”
I call up the keypad and press the number one, loud and long.
“Is that one for yes, ma’am?”
I press again.
“Are you in danger?”
Another press.
She asks me if the GPS system is showing the correct address, and I confirm it.
“I’m dispatching a unit to your house immediately. Keep this line open.”
I gather Cassie to me and lean her head against mine. Where earlier tonight her smell was foreign, adult, now it’s an echo of her as a baby. The 911 woman speaks, reassuring me, but nothing will comfort me until I know my children are safe.
I can’t hear anything now. Is he in the house? Does he have a weapon? What, what, what does he want?
Cassie and I stare into each other’s eyes. I do my best to convey both the seriousness of what I’m feeling and the assurance I need to. We’re going to be okay. We’re going to be okay. If I think it a million times, can I implant the suggestion in my daughter’s mind? Can I make it come true?
Cassie reaches down and takes the knife from where I’ve stashed it in the waistband of my pajamas. I shake my head as she removes the blade from its sheath. She nods back, makes a slight stabbing motion with it. It must be the nerves, but I want to laugh.
I put my hand around her wrist. We cannot do this. We cannot try to defend ourselves.
I speak into the phone. “Please hurry.”
“Ma’am? Did you say something?”
I press one again.
“Hurry,” I say as loud as I can without disclosing our location if he’s in the house. “Please.”
“They’re two minutes away, ma’am.”
I sound my acknowledgment as something flashes through the window. Is that a . . .
I spring to my feet and pull the chair out of the way.
“Mom! What are you doing?” Cassie says in a harsh whisper.
“It’s okay. The police will be here in a moment.”
I open the door as more lights flash. I can hear the whine of sirens approaching. I run down the stairs, suddenly unafraid, the adrenaline winning. In the kitchen, I find what I knew I would when I saw the lights: a man with a camera standing on the other side of the glass.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I scream.
“Say cheese,” he says loudly enough for me to hear him as his flash goes off once again.
After the police have left without catching the guy, the kids have been soothed with cocoa and calming words and are back in bed, and the alarm is on, which I forgot to do earlier, I try to settle into my own bed without much success. What the hell was that all about? Why are people so interested in my life? It’s not like I went around asking for any of it . . . The photograph, the publicity, the status as the poster child for a tragedy I wish I had nothing to do with. I tried to bat it away, and I hate how it makes me a target. Take last night at the restaurant with Teo. A simple moment that should’ve been private, between us, was fair game to some passerby.
I even wanted to turn down the money until my mom talked me out of it. But I’ve used it for the kids—paid off the mortgage and the debts from the restaurant that never was, topped up their college funds, created a trust. I work as hard as I can on the Compensation Committee to make sure that as many deserving families as possible get their due. And yet, it’s never enough. I still feel like a fraud, a fake, a prop in my own life.
What the hell was that man doing? What was he hoping to find? Me with another man? Me with . . . Oh God. I’m so, so stupid.
I pick my phone up off the bedside table, where it will sleep forever now, and open a web browser. TMZ seems like the best bet. And yes, there it is.
TRIPLE TEN WIDOW MOVES ON?
Teo and me kissing is tonight’s breaking news.
The dawn, when it finally comes, does not improve what happened in the night.
Though I need to tell Cassie and Henry about the kiss before they read about it online, I don’t want to wake them again. I let them sleep in while I count the ways in which I’ll kill the man who terrified us when they find him. I silently send curses to the man or woman—I wasn’t able to tell which—who took the picture of Teo and me. I revive the litany of words I have for Tom, the betrayer, because if he hadn’t done what he did, I’d be a real widow, too torn up with grief to even think about a man, even one as great as Teo. And then I think about her, that anonymous woman who tore my life open. Who is she? Where is she? If she’s alive, does she lie awake at night full of regrets? Or did she slough off Tom’s death, consider it a close call, and scurry back to the comfort of her family, her life?
I get up and go to Tom’s study. I start to pull items from his desk and sort them into piles—keep, toss, donate. I try to tell myself I’m doing what I should’ve done long ago, sort through his things and start to make room for myself in here. But really, I’m looking for evidence, some sign or clue to point the way to her. I’ve been avoiding this forever, not asking the right questions when I had the chance, not searching my own house for further proof of his betrayal because I had enough to deal with.
But now, in the early morning after a night when my stitched-together life feels like it’s falling back apart, it seems like the right time to look under corners and reach to the back of drawers to see if I can find the monster after all and slay it.
Instead, all I find are remnants of our life together. Old bills, the to-do lists he’d make, packs of photographs that never made it into albums or frames. Tom was old-fashioned about his photographs; he didn’t want them to be only digital, so he’d dutifully take his camera chip into the pharmacy and return with an envelope full of carefully curated memories. The ones I find today are an amalgam from the year before he died—our last ski trip, the house we rented in Cape Cod with the Rings, Kaitlyn and I with our arms slung around each other after our first successful foray on the stand-up paddleboards we rented.
Kaitlyn’s wearing the wide-brimmed hat she always wore to protect her delicate skin from the sun. I was more reckless and have the wrinkles to prove it. Kaitlyn looks happy that day, strong and smiling, halfway between the broken woman I’d befriended and the one she was in the months before she died. I didn’t notice it so much then, as it was happening, like the changes in my own face that caught me up short when I finally looked at myself for the first time in a while. But examining this picture now, I recall clearly what she looked like the last time I saw her, when I met her for coffee before she went to work and we talked—I talked—about Tom.
She had dark circles under her eyes, and though she said all the right things, the things I needed, her eyes were downcast, and she kept stirring her coffee without drinking it. When she’d said she had to go, I’d stood up and hugged her. I’d asked her, finally, if she was okay. What was wrong?
“It’s nothing. I haven’t been sleeping well.”
“Any reason in particular?”
She’d shaken her head. She had more than a few gray hairs mixed in with the honey brown she’d adopted as a hair color a few years before. I wondered if she’d noticed them the way I’d noticed my own, evident to me despite their being close enough to my natural blonde to be invisible to most people.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not . . . It’s not happening again.”
“I wasn’t thinking that. But it would be okay if it did. You can tell me. I want you to.”
“I know . . . I just don’t know how to talk about it.”
“About what?”
She shook her head again. “Not today, okay? You have enough on your plate.”
“Then when?”
“How about next week? When things have settled down.”
We’d hugged again, and then she was gone, running to her car with her purse over her head to block the worst of a sudden pelt of rain.
Franny. It must’ve been Franny she was thinking about. She must’ve known the day was coming when she had to fess up to Joshua, to her kids, to us, and how that was probably going to rip her life to shreds, when she’d just gotten finished building it back up.
How I wish I’d known. How I wish I could’ve told her there was nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to fear in telling me, that it was keeping the secret that was painful.
Was it ever.