Page 13 of The Wife He Replaced
"Of course he will. Because if you overreacted, then he doesn't have to look at what you're reacting to."
Madeleine wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. "Can I stay for a few days?"
"You can stay as long as you need. The guest room's made up. There are towels in the hall closet." Paige squeezed her hand. "And Maddie — don't answer your phone tonight. Whatever he has to say can wait until you've slept."
Madeleine didn't answer her phone. She turned it off and left it on the nightstand in Paige's guest room. She lay in a bed that smelled like lavender dryer sheets, stared at the ceiling and listened to the silence, which was nothing like the silence ofthe penthouse. That silence had been a presence, a thing that lived in the space between her and Drew, growing denser every month. This silence was just silence. Clean. Unoccupied. It asked nothing of her.
In the morning, Paige made coffee and eggs and didn't mention Drew. They talked about bread: Paige was experimenting with a spelt levain that kept collapsing during the second proof, and about a mutual friend from culinary school who'd just opened a place in Portland, and about whether preserved lemon worked in shortbread (Paige said yes; Madeleine was skeptical). It was the most normal conversation Madeleine had had in months, and the normalcy of it ached in a way she hadn't expected, because it reminded her of who she was when she wasn't Drew Adler's wife. She was a woman who argued about preserved lemons. She was a woman who cared whether spelt levain held its structure. She was a woman with opinions, expertise and a life that existed outside of a thirty-second-floor penthouse where nobody tasted the food.
She turned on her phone after breakfast. Fourteen missed calls. Twenty-two texts. She scrolled through them without reading closely —please call me, where are you, I'm worried, Maddie please— and found the one that mattered, sent at six-forty that morning:
I spoke to Paige. I know you're there. I'm coming to talk to you. Please don't leave before I get there.
She looked up. Paige was drying a cast-iron pan with a dish towel, not meeting her eyes.
"He called you?"
"At six a.m. I told him you were safe and that he should give you space. He said he was coming anyway." Paige hung the pan on its hook. "I'm sorry. I didn't tell him where I live — he already knew from the holiday party a few years back. I can tell him to leave when he gets here."
"No." Madeleine set the phone on the counter. "I'll talk to him."
"You don't have to."
"I know. But if I don't, he'll keep coming. He doesn't understand whatgive me spacemeans. He hears it asgive me space until I calm down and come home."
Drew arrived at nine. Madeleine heard his car on the gravel — she'd always been able to identify his engine, the low hum of the Audi — and she went outside before he could knock.
He was standing by the car. He looked like he hadn't slept. His dark hair was uncombed, his jaw unshaven, his coat thrown on over a wrinkled shirt. He looked, for once, like a man who didn't have a system in place. Madeleine registered this and refused to be moved by it.
”Maddie." He took a step toward her. She stayed where she was, arms crossed, standing on Paige's front porch with the cold air coming through her sweater.
"I told you not to follow me."
"You told me not to follow you home. I gave you the night. But I can't just — you left. You packed a bag and left. I found your ring on the dresser."
"I know what I did."
"Then talk to me. Please. I've been up all night trying to understand what happened and I need you to help me understand because I don't — I know you're upset about Tori but what you saw was not?—"
"Drew." She said his name with enough weight to stop him. "If the next words out of your mouth areit's not what you think, I need you to not say them. Because I've heard that sentence from you so many times that it's lost all meaning. It's become your way of telling me that what I saw with my own eyes is wrong. And I can't hear it again."
He closed his mouth. He put his hands in his pockets. He looked at the gravel. "Okay. Then what do you want me to say?"
"I want you to tell me the truth about Victoria."
"I've been telling you the truth. She's my business partner. She's my friend. She was upset about her mother and I was there for her. That's it."
"That's it."
"Yes."
"Then why did you close the door?"
"I told you. She was crying. I?—"
"You close doors for privacy, Drew. For intimacy. For things you don't want other people to see. You don't close doors for professional support. You close doors because what's happening inside them belongs to the two people in the room, and when you closed that door with her you made a boundary that excluded everyone, including your wife, and I don't think you even realize you did it."
He was quiet. She could see him processing, running her words through whatever internal framework he used to sort information into categories: valid, invalid, requires response, can be managed. She waited for the sorting to finish. She knew which bin she'd end up in.
