When fall came and the film series ended, she began going to the library and looked for the books that had inspired the movies. Be bold, Walter Huff told Phyllis Nirdlinger—no wonder they had changed the name for the movie. Not even Barbara Stanwyck could play someone named Nirdlinger and make her sexy. Polly began to study the encyclopedias, the ones that didn’t circulate. There was a diagram of the human body layered on three color transparencies that showed exactly where everything was. The heart is not really on the left side of the body, although we place our hands there to say the pledge. It’s much closer to the center. And it tips slightly, almost as if it were drunk.

Once you know where the heart is, then you need to know where the rib cage is. Because even the best knife could break on a bone. Night after night, Polly slipped her arms around Ditmars, tickling his chest softly. Counting his ribs, willing her fingers to memorize the topography of his body. She needed the best knife she could find, so she squirreled away money, bought a beauty of a Japanese butcher knife, one she never used for carving.

She would get one chance. Only one. She went to sleep night after night next to her husband, praying for the literal strength to kill him.

“Sleep?” Adam asks.

“Eventually,” she says, putting her hand in his. They lie on their backs, side by side, like brother and sister. When she tells him everything, he will understand.

Right? Right?

*

Polly is up with the sun. Adam finds her at the kitchen table, not a stitch on, drinking hot coffee. No matter how warm the day, she always wants to start it with a cup of hot coffee.

“So we go, right?” he says. “There’s nothing to bind us here.”

“Casper will have a heart attack if you leave. He’ll do anything for you.”

“Summer’s almost over. Doesn’t matter how good the food is. No one’s going to come to Belleville just for the food.”

“They might. If the place were nice enough. A little paint, cosmetic changes. It could be something really special.”

“I don’t see that happening.”

“Maybe not right away. But it’s more your place now than his. He’d probably do whatever it takes to keep you. I don’t see why we should have to go.”

“But if you don’t want Cath to tell people about you—”

“Maybe she should go.”

“She’s pretty rooted, best I can tell.”

“They say the big trees topple over fastest. Because they don’t bend.”

“What are you saying?”

“The only power she has over me is what she knows. I’m going to tell you what she’s got on me, Adam. What she thinks she’s got on me.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“No, I do. I need you to decide if you want to be with me once everything is out in the open.”

He takes the mug of coffee out of her hand, says: “Baby, I do know.”

“What, exactly?”

“I know who you used to be. What you did.”

“How?”

A pause. “She already told me.”

“And?”

Years go by. Dinosaurs roam the earth, find extinction, mankind begins, Jesus dies on the cross. Columbus sails to America, the world wars are fought. All those things happen while she waits for him to reply.

“I don’t care.”

He loves her. He actually loves her.

“Then I’ll tell her tonight that she can say whatever she thinks she knows. I’m not leaving. And today, I’ll tell Casper. I don’t want him to hear it from her.”

“You said she wanted money from you.”

“Can’t get blood from a stone.”

He falls to his knees in front of her, almost as if he were about to propose, which delights and terrifies her in equal measure. But all Adam wants to do is bury his head in her midsection like a child. They remain this way for a very long time, Polly cradling Adam’s head, grateful the world has finally sent her the man she needs, the man she deserves.

20

Adam clocks Cath making a beeline for him the first chance she gets at work. It’s Thursday, the last day of August, they’re busy at lunch and dinner. Mr. C can get by with Cath alone on the lunch shift, but he’ll need both his waitresses for dinner.

“Your girlfriend’s not who you think she is,” she says.

He says, “What girlfriend?” and keeps on working. He’s layering mozzarella between local tomatoes, then drizzling pesto vinaigrette. It doesn’t really require a lot of focus, but he keeps his eyes on those tomatoes as if he’s making rosettes for a wedding cake.

Cath, perhaps mindful of the fact that it’s hard to collect blackmail once you’ve let the secrets out into the air, doesn’t say anything more, just cocks her hip, then saunters away, swinging her ass hard. He’s dying to learn how much she knows. The facts in the video are the ones in the public domain and her state trooper brother-in-law might have been able to grab some records, especially if Cath filched Polly’s social security number. But the money that Irving knows about—nobody knows about that, according to Irving. He only found out by accident. Millions, he said, and won on a lie.

According to Irving. Who didn’t bother to tell Adam about Polly’s past until he decided he wanted to make Adam feel like a jerk. It’s funny—knowing what he knows now isn’t enough to make him stop loving her. But if he had known all along, it might have been enough to stop him from falling in the first place.