Page 67 of The Illusion
"This is nice," he says.
"Yeah."
"I'm glad we went away. I think it helped."
I don't know what to say to that. It didn't help. We came back early. He spent the middle of the night on the phone with Devon. We didn't have sex. We didn't reconnect. We just went through the motions and came home. But he’s acting like it worked. Like we're fixed now.
"I've been thinking," he says. "Maybe we should plan another trip. Something longer. Maybe a week somewhere warm."
"What about Devon?"
"Ryan can stay with her again. Or she can stay at his place. She'll be fine."
“When?”
“Maybe the weekend after the Living Trust is distributed? We can celebrate having that off the to-do list. It’d be great to actually get away, just with you. We could go back to the Maldives or go somewhere different, like Paris.”
I want to believe him. I want to think that we could actually get away. That Devon wouldn't call. That Asher wouldn't sneak into the fucking bathroom to talk to her at three in the morning. "We can talk about it," I say.
He kisses the top of my head. "Sounds good."
Devon comes into the living room a few minutes later. She sits in the armchair across from us and tucks her legs underneath her. "What are we watching?" she asks.
Asher picks up the remote. "I don't know. What do you want to watch?"
She shrugs. "I'm easy."
He scrolls through options. Devon makes suggestions. I sit there and watch them negotiate what to watch like I'm not even in the room. Eventually they settle on some thriller I've never heard of. Asher keeps his arm around me. Devon curls up in the chair with a blanket. We watch the movie in silence. Halfway through, Asher's phone buzzes. He pulls it out and frowns at the screen.
"Work?" I ask.
"Yeah. I need to respond to this." He gets up and goes into his office. I hear the door close.
Devon and I sit in the living room. The movie plays. Neither of us speaks. After a few minutes, she glances at me. "He's been working so much lately."
"He always works a lot."
"I know. But it seems like more than usual. I think he's stressed."
I don't respond.
"I'm glad you guys are doing better, though," she says. "He seems happier."
I look at her. She's watching the TV, her expression neutral. But there's something in her tone. Something that feels like a test. "We're working on it," I say.
"That's good. Marriage is hard." She says it like she knows. Like she has experience. She's eighteen years old.
Asher comes back twenty minutes later. He sits and plays around on his phone. When the movie ends, Devon says goodnight and goes upstairs. Eventually, Asher and I go to bed, too. He kisses me. He tells me he had a good day. He falls asleep within minutes.
I lie awake and stare at the ceiling. He acting like we're fine. Like the trip worked. Like we reconnected. But we didn't get the chance to. And him acting like we did reads false. He’s not this stupid. No one is. Which suggests that he’s pretending.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
JULIE
I've started takingthe long way home from work. It's not conscious at first. I just find myself turning left instead of right, taking the scenic route through Bellevue instead of the direct path. The drive takes an extra fifteen minutes, sometimes twenty if I hit traffic. But those extra minutes feel like borrowed time. A buffer between the version of myself that exists at the shop and the version that has to walk through my own front door and pretend everything is fine.
