Chapter 2

The night before we left, Julian did something unheard of and filled the tank of that Mercedes G550, even tossing the spare fuel cans into the back. I stood at the floor-to-ceiling window in the living room, looking down toward the garage. Maine's early-spring wind still carried a bite of ice, and it set the bare branches of the old oak outside creaking.

I turned to go get him the heavy Barbour jacket from the study. The wind on the northern coast could cut to the bone, and he never took it seriously.

The jacket was draped over the back of his desk chair. I had just picked it up when his phone lit up on the desk.

A calendar reminder popped onto the screen, black on white, like a small verdict.

"April 12, 8 p.m. Vivienne Cole, private dinner. The Danforth."

Today was April 5. Seven days round trip, and he had it timed to the minute. We would be back on the seventh day, just in time for Vivienne's private dinner the night of the twelfth. So that was why he was willing to take this trip with me. Because it didn't cost him a single thing he actually cared about.

He picked up a brown paper bag from the passenger seat and handed it to me. "Passed that bakery in Portland. Grabbed it."

I opened the bag. Inside was a cinnamon-glazed donut, still warm, the glaze glistening damp in the light. That shop was in Portland's Old Port. From the Ashford estate, it was a forty-minute drive. His "passed by" probably meant some night he had left Vivienne's place and looped halfway across Maine.

He still remembered that shop. Remembered that I used to have to detour for a cinnamon donut every morning before my day could begin. But he had never once asked when I had stopped.

I broke off a piece and put it in my mouth. The glaze dissolved on my tongue, sticky, sweet. But I couldn't taste any of it. The dead had no sense of taste.

"Same as always," I said.

"I'm having dinner with Vivienne at Fore Street," he said. "Won't be back tonight."

I looked at the side of his face. A single pale-blond hair clung to the collar of his black turtleneck. Not mine. My hair was dark brown.

"Okay," I said.

He hit the gas, and the G550 rolled out the estate gates, headlights carving an arc across the gravel drive before disappearing into the dark at the end of the road.

I stood where I was, the kraft paper bag still clutched in my hand. I had no sense of taste left, and still something bitter rose in my throat.

That guest room, where I had slept alone for a year, was mine alone again tonight.

I sat in the bay window of the guest room from one in the morning until daybreak, and went over the last three years from start to finish.

The first year. My father's real estate company partnered with the Ashford Group on a project in Boston Harbor, and when the financing collapsed, the Ashfords chose to pull out. Not that they couldn't have saved it. They just didn't want to. And my husband, Julian Ashford, vanished for the six worst weeks of that storm. By the time he came back, my father's company was already in bankruptcy proceedings.

The second year. I got pregnant, and lost it before ten weeks. The day of the miscarriage was also April 12. Three years earlier, that was the day he and Vivienne first "ran into" each other. Three years later, on the same day, he was going to her private dinner. The afternoon I lost the child, my phone got a TMZ alert. "Ashford Heir Dines With Mystery Blonde." The same date, three years around, looping back again.

The third year. I asked to separate for the first time. He said something I still remembered. "Eleanor, you couldn't survive without me."

I thought about it all night.

Outside, the sky went from ink-black to deep blue, then from deep blue to gray-white. Maine days come late. The early-March morning was still dim and overcast.

In the end, what was left in me was not hatred. Not bitterness.

Calm.

I supposed that when a person died, the heart really did stop. Even hating someone took energy, and I didn't have that much left.

At first light, the whole house was still asleep. Julian hadn't come back the night before. The servants lived in the side wing, and no one would pass through the main hall.

I slipped into the guest room and dragged the black body bag out of the closet. I worked it into the very back of the G550's trunk, covered it with an old raincoat, and weighted it down with an emergency toolbox. As long as I never opened the trunk, he would never find it.

At 7:58, Julian appeared at the door, right on time.

He had changed his clothes. Deep-olive cable knit, a dark-green Barbour jacket, hunting boots. In his hand was a suitcase. Oversized, silver, the Rimowa aluminum model, its surface already covered in scratches. It wasn't his. Everything of his was black, a black nylon Tumi case, understated to the point of vanishing.

This silver case belonged to someone else.

He noticed my eyes on it and offered a careless explanation. "My things are all at Vivienne's. Had her pack for me. Saves a trip."

His mistress packed a suitcase for his wife's trip. And then this suitcase would travel the last stretch of my life with me.

He was probably waiting for me to blow up. Waiting for me to kick the case over, yank everything out and throw it on the floor piece by piece, demand to know what exactly I was to him. The old me would have done it. But that me had stopped breathing.

He stared at me for a few seconds, his lips moved, and in the end he said nothing.

"Get in," he said, pulling the door open. "We make it there in four days."

I sat in the passenger seat and buckled up. As the G550 rolled out the estate gates, I glanced in the rearview mirror at the house I had lived in for three years. Gray-white stone walls, black wrought-iron gates, the ivy on the portico shivering in the winter wind.

I thought I would cry. But I didn't. All that surged up was a kind of emptiness, like a beach after the tide had gone out.

The car turned onto Route 1, and Julian switched on the radio. A classic rock station. Bruce Springsteen, singing "Born to Run."

I had chosen this route. North on Route 1 onto the coastal branch, through Camden, Belfast, Acadia, over two hundred miles in all. Lighthouses along the way, reefs, the open endless Atlantic. Every one of them a place I had marked on the travel plan I made our first year of marriage. But this trip, I had no time for the scenery.

"We only have seven days," I said. "This is the fastest way north."

Julian tapped two fingers on the wheel. Ahead was a straight stretch of coastal road, the gray-blue Atlantic on the left, white foam on the crests, the leafless birch forest on the right. Then he said something that surprised me. "If you want to stay a few extra days, that's not out of the question."

In seven days the Devil would come and take me away, the way you brush off a fallen leaf.

"No need," I said. "This is fine."

Julian's fingers paused.

"Eleanor." He said my name, something in his tone I couldn't name. "When did you get so easy to deal with? This isn't like you."

I blinked.

"And what would be like me?"

He opened up then, like the words had been pressed down inside him too long and had finally found their way out.

"The winter we first got together, I was in New York on business. One in the morning, you called and said you were lost at JFK, told me to come get you. I ran out in the hotel slippers and looked for you for forty minutes. And there you were, sitting in a Starbucks drinking hot chocolate, going, 'Oh, you're here.'"

"And there was your birthday. I booked a private room at Fore Street in advance, and you said you didn't like the menu that year and made the chef redo every single course on the spot. The Patek Philippe I gave you, you said the dial was too big, ugly, and you threw it straight off the balcony into Portland Harbor. That watch took the Swiss headquarters half a year to make."

"And last year I was in London for a merger. You sent me dozens of messages a day. I was in due-diligence meetings, at a lunch with Goldman, just lying down at two in the morning, and the phone wouldn't stop buzzing. In the end I got so fed up I just shut it off."

Every single thing he listed, I remembered.

That winter in New York, I flew up from Miami to see him. The flight was delayed six hours, and I got to JFK at one in the morning. He had my old flight info. He didn't know I'd changed flights. I waited at the airport for two hours and made a dozen calls no one picked up. I wasn't lost. The signal was bad. After he came, I didn't explain, because I thought, if he cared, he would already know.

That Patek Philippe. I threw it not because I disliked it, but because he had said it was "a freebie from the brand, didn't cost me anything." Later I learned from his assistant that he had it custom-made, with our wedding date engraved on the back of the dial. The next day I searched the harbor for two hours, scraped my knees raw, broke a nail, and fished it back out. It was in the drawer of my vanity now, wrapped in a square of felt. He had never once asked.

Those dozens of London messages. That day there was a knife attack on London Bridge, right near his hotel. When I sent the first one my hands were shaking. By the twentieth I couldn't cry anymore. The thirty-first he didn't answer. He had shut the phone off. When he called back later, the first thing he said was, "Could you not make such a big deal out of everything?"

But now he was dragging it all out, one thing after another, his voice full of grievance and complaint, like he was the one who had been wronged in this marriage. And what good would explaining do? Would he apologize? Would it hurt him? Would he regret that his read on every one of those things had been wrong all these years?

No. He would just think I was making excuses.

I looked at the side of his face, swallowed every explanation back down, and only asked one thing.

"So many disappointments. Why didn't you just leave?"

Up ahead was the entrance to a scenic overlook, and Julian was turning the wheel into it. His mind probably hadn't caught up. The words slipped out of him. "Because I loved you, obviously."

The car went abruptly silent. The song on the radio had just ended, and the next station was news, the announcer noting in a flat, even tone that there would be wind tomorrow.

Love.

How long had it been since I'd heard that word from him?

I only remembered our wedding night, when he carried me into the bedroom and pressed his forehead to mine and said, "Eleanor, I'm done for. You've got me for good." I only remembered him reading his vows at the wedding and choking up partway through, three hundred guests in the church watching him cry, and he didn't care.

As for after. Everything changed. As deep as the love had run, that was exactly how much these things, these wounds, hurt.

I closed my eyes and didn't want to think about it anymore.

Julian probably regretted letting it slip too. He cleared his throat, his lips moved, about to patch it over.

A black shape shot out in front of the car.

He wrenched the wheel hard to the right, and the whole body of the G550 swung out, tires shrieking against the asphalt. The seat belt cut into my shoulder. The travel mug on the passenger side flew off and cracked against the windshield. I lurched forward and was yanked back by the belt.

A white-tailed deer had bolted out of the roadside brush, cut across the road, and run into the birch forest on the other side. Its tail stood straight up, a small white flag, flickering a few times between the gray trunks before it vanished.

That "because I loved you, obviously," and every patch he hadn't gotten the chance to make, all of it scattered in the shock.

He said nothing more, just put it back in gear and pulled onto the road, and turned the radio up a few notches.