The Push, Ashley Audrain [popular novels TXT] 📗

I never asked where you were going during the days because I didn’t much care. To see her, to find a new job? I didn’t know. I told you to cancel your parents’ visit for Christmas, although it seemed like a punishment for us both.

‘Why don’t you call my mother?’ you said. ‘You seem to enjoy keeping her up to date about me.’

She’d told you I’d called.

I don’t know what excuse you gave her when you canceled. I didn’t answer her calls after that, although it hurt each time I ignored her.

On the eighth night, I found you in the den cleaning up your desk. All of your projects were put away, handed off to the people taking over your clients. The long arm of your lamp was tucked against itself now, as though it would be put in bubble wrap and packed for a move. Maybe it would be. I looked for the tin of blades and didn’t see it anywhere.

‘Where did you put all your things? Your modeling tools?’ I held my breath and felt the shame of needing to know where the blades were. The anxiousness tickled in my chest, threatening me. You pointed to the closet while you sorted through a box of loose papers. I slid open the door and scanned the messy shelves. Old board games and stacked empty picture frames and dictionaries I’d saved from college. The tin was there, on the second shelf, between your architecture books and a bin of rulers and pens. I closed the door and turned to you. Your shoulders were starting to build the same hunch your father had. I wondered if she liked to run her hand against the bristles of hair on the nape of your neck, if she would one day shave them for you like I did every so often.

‘What is she like?’

You lifted your head. The room felt so different without the shadows from your lamp that had always danced over the wall as you worked. You were so still. I held my breath again and wondered what you would say next. But you didn’t speak. I asked you again: ‘What is she like, Fox?’

And then I left. I went to bed. I wondered if you’d be gone in the morning, but a few hours later, or maybe it was just one, I felt your side of the mattress move.

‘I’m not seeing her anymore.’

You’d been crying. I could hear the thickness in your nasal. There was nothing inside me. No relief. No anger. I was just tired.

In the morning I brought coffee to you in bed before Violet woke up. I sat next to you while you drank it.

‘We lost enough when Sam died,’ I said. You rubbed your forehead. ‘You never dealt with your grief properly. You’ve never faced it.’

I waited for you to speak.

‘Sam isn’t why our marriage is falling apart. He doesn’t have anything to do with it.’

The door to our bedroom opened and Violet walked in and stared at us. You looked at me slowly, your sleepy eyes now as wide open as hers. And then you looked back at our daughter.

‘Morning, honey,’ you said.

‘Breakfast?’ she asked. You left the room behind her.

60

It had been a stupid place for me to leave it. Under the bed. I’d tossed it there when I heard you come home midafternoon. You never took notice of the books I had lying around anyway. And I hadn’t thought of her, if I’m being honest; I barely existed in her world, and she barely existed in mine beyond the logistics of the routine we kept.

I don’t know why I bought it. I knew it wouldn’t help, but it felt like something I could do to try to make it real. To make me feel something other than desperately curious. Two months had passed since I confronted you about the affair. And all I could think about was: Who is this woman? What’s she like? You refused to say a word about her – all I knew was that she’d been your assistant. The woman you’d taken our daughter out to lunch with.

Every time I asked you to tell me more, you shook your head and said only, quietly, ‘Don’t.’

I found the book in her backpack. Surviving an Affair: How to Overcome Betrayal in Your Marriage. Violet was eating yogurt at the kitchen counter, her after-school snack, and looked up as I stared at it in my hands. I didn’t know what to say to her – she was ten. Could she have known what an affair was? I thought of the older kids at school whom she wouldn’t have hesitated to ask.

‘Why did you have this?’ I asked nervously. She raised her eyebrows knowingly and went back to stirring her bowl.

‘Answer me.’

‘Why did you have it?’

I walked away.

An hour later, I knocked on Violet’s door and asked if we could talk. She spun her desk chair around slowly and looked at me blankly. I held the book out and said that I wanted to clear something up – that this book was research for something new I was writing. That we should talk about what this grown-up word ‘affair’ meant – what she thought it meant. That I didn’t have this book because there was something wrong between her mom and dad. That we loved each other very much.

‘Okay,’ she said. And then she put her head back down to her workbook.

I knew she knew who the woman was. Maybe that day you took Violet to your office wasn’t the only time they’d met – I didn’t know what secrets you two kept. It was so strange to me that she’d never used the unicorn pencil or eraser the woman had given her. She’d kept them on her bedroom shelf, on display like trophies, prized possessions that must have meant more to her than I had realized.

I