Page 138 of Night of Shadows
I stand at the end of the dock alone for one more minute. The water laps. The loon calls. The lake house is the lake house.I have been coming here for fifteen years, and tonight is the first night the lake house has been a home instead of a refuge.
I walk back up the dock.
? ? ?
Maeve is already in the master bedroom.
I have not slept in the master bedroom at the lake house since 2017. I slept in the second bedroom every time I came up alone, because the master felt too big for one person, because the master had been the room my parents shared when they came to this lake house in the 1990s before my father was killed, because I had been the person who could not be alone in a room a married couple should occupy.
Maeve is in the master bed in one of my old t-shirts. The lamp on the nightstand is the small yellow one I bought in 2014 and never replaced. The light is warm. The window is cracked open, and the smell of the lake is in the room and the curtains are moving in the way curtains move in a lake house at 10:43 PM in February.
She’s sitting up against the headboard. She’s reading. The book is open on her lap. The ring catches the lamplight as she turns a page.
She looks up when I come in.
She says, "Lex."
I say, "Yes."
"Come to bed."
I undress. I get into the bed. The mattress is the lake house mattress, which is firmer than the brownstone mattress, which I am only now noticing because I am the person I am in amarriage and is noticing mattresses in the way men who have been married for fifty-two years notice mattresses. Maeve sets the book aside. She turns toward me. The lamp casts the small yellow light on the side of her face.
She says, "Lex."
I say, "Yes."
She says, "I am pregnant."
I go very still.
Chapter 38
Lex
A Second
"Maeve."
"Yes."
"How far along?"
"Eight weeks. The doctor is happy. Everything looks good."
"Eight weeks?"
"Yes."
"When did you find out?"
"Three days ago."
"You were going to tell me here?"
"I was. I wanted to tell you here."
"Maeve?"
