Page 93 of Crowned in Sin
I woke up already certain. That's the part I can't get past, lying there at five in the morning listening to Nico breathe beside me like nothing had happened, like the whole night hadn't cracked something down the center of us. He didn't reach for me after. Not once. I lay there rigid and waiting, and he just let the silence sit there between our bodies. Somewhere in that waiting, I stopped being his wife and started being a woman making a list.
I'm not running yet. I tell myself that twice while I zip the bag, like it'll make it true. I just need one morning where I'mnot anybody's wife, anybody's problem, anybody's asset. One morning that's mine.
I'm at the top of the stairs when Giorgia finds me.
She doesn't say my name like a question. She doesn't ask where I'm going, or why there's a bag over my shoulder at seven in the morning, or whether Nico knows. She just stands there in the hallway with a stack of towels against her hip, looking at me the same as she has since the day I moved in, like she already knew this morning was coming before I did.
"You'll eat something first," she says. It isn't really a question either.
"I'm not hungry."
She nods like that's an acceptable answer, which surprises me. Then she sets the towels down on the hall table, unhurried, and comes closer, and puts one hand flat against my cheek for a second. Just a second. Her palm is warm and smells like rosemary and dish soap.
"Be careful," she says.
Two words. She doesn't dress them up. She doesn't ask me to stay, doesn't call anyone, doesn't do a single thing to stop me. But something in the way she says it sits heavier in my chest than a full conversation would have, and I carry it all the way down the stairs and out the door and into the car, a weight I can't put down.
I drive to Gravesend without deciding to.
I don't tell myself I'm leaving Nico. I don't let the word divorce anywhere near my mouth. I just need one place in this world that's mine, that was mine before any of them, before the moneyand the name and the ring I still haven't taken off. My mother's house. My house, technically, now, though it's never once felt that way.
The key still works. Of course it does. Nothing in this house ever changes.
I let myself in, and the smell hits me first, dust and old carpet and the ghost of my mother's cigarettes baked into the walls. For a second I just stand in the front hall, breathe it in, and let my eyes sting.
The nausea's been sitting under my ribs for weeks now. I've been blaming it on everything except the obvious thing, stress, the wedding, Dad, the folder of documents that blew my whole life open. I've had six different explanations, and none of them have been the right one. I think some part of me has known that for a while and has been too scared to check.
There's a drugstore two blocks from here. I still remember it clearly, and I still remember the pain that goes with this place.
I buy the test with cash, in a paper bag, like I'm seventeen again and hiding something from a man who is, as far as I know, three hundred miles away doing whatever men like Frank Carpenter do when they're not making my life a horror movie.
I take it in my old bathroom; the one with the cracked tile and the window that always sits a half-inch open. I sit on the edge of the tub and wait. The three minutes stretch out longer than any three minutes I have ever lived through, and somewhere in there I stop breathing and don't notice until my chest aches from it.
Two lines.
I sit on the cold edge of that tub, don't cry, don't laugh, and don't do anything. I just look at it, at the two pink lines that don't care one bit what kind of week I've had. A baby. Nico's baby. Growing right now, right here, inside a body that woke up this morning already planning to leave him.
The timing is obscene. I almost say it out loud, just to hear how ugly it sounds.
There's no one to tell. That's the thought that finally breaks something loose in my chest, quiet and complete. No mother to call. No husband I trust enough to say it to. No friend I could tell without inviting forty questions I don't have answers for. Just me, and a plastic stick, and a house that has felt dangerous to be alone in for as long as I can remember.
I sit there a long time. Long enough that when I finally stand up, my knees have gone stiff.
I carry the test out into the hallway with me because I can't make myself put it down, can't make myself throw it away yet either, and I'm halfway to the kitchen, trying to figure out if there's a version of today where I eat something, when I hear him.
"Welcome home, Lyddie. Knew you'd come crawling back eventually. Just like your mother did."
I stop moving.
He's already inside the house.
He's sitting in my mother's living room, in the same chair he always sat in, like he's been waiting there since I left at seventeen. I never had the one thing I'd counted on, a window, a warning, a few seconds to run. He's got nothing but time,because he's known for seven years that a door this house left open would eventually swing back toward him.
This is what I've been afraid of since the night I fled this house with nothing but a bag over my shoulder.
"Frank."
His name comes out of me smaller than I want it to.
