I pull my knees up and scoot to the far end of the couch, away from him. I cover my mouth. “Oh, God.” The words crash against my trembling fingers.
He tries to touch my arm reassuringly, but I flinch. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I shouldn’t have kissed you.”
I’m shaking my head because he doesn’t understand. He thinks I’m upset and feel guilty that he’s married, but I saw her. Standing. She was standing. I point to the top of the stairs. “I saw her.” I whisper it, quietly, because I’m terrified to say it louder. “She was standing at the top of the stairs.”
I can see the confusion cross his face as he turns to look at the stairs. He looks back at me. “She can’t walk, Lowen.”
I’m not crazy. I stand up and back away from the couch, covering my bare chest with my arm. I point at the stairs again, finding my voice this time. “Your fucking wife was standing at the top of the fucking stairs, Jeremy! I know what I saw!”
He sees in my eyes that I’m telling the truth. Two seconds pass before he’s off the couch and running up the stairs, toward her bedroom.
He’s not leaving me down here alone.
I grab my shirt, pull it on over my head, and then run after him. I refuse to be alone in this house for another second.
When I reach the top of the stairs, he’s standing in her doorway, staring into her room. He hears me approaching. And then he just…leaves. He brushes past me without making eye contact and stomps down the stairs.
I take several steps until I’m close enough to peek into her room. I only glance in there for one second. It’s all the time I need to see that she’s in bed. Under the covers. Asleep.
I shake my head, feeling my knees wanting to buckle. This can’t be happening. I somehow make it to the stairs, but I only make it halfway down them before I have to sit. I can’t move. I can barely draw a breath. My heart has never beat this fast.
Jeremy is at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at me. He probably doesn’t know what to think about what just happened. I don’t know what to think. He walks back and forth in front of the stairs, looking at me every now and then, I’m sure because he’s waiting for me to start laughing at my tasteless joke. It wasn’t a joke.
“I saw her,” I whisper.
He hears me. He looks at me, not with anger, but with apology. He walks up the stairs and helps me up, then keeps his arm around me as he leads me back down. He takes me to the bedroom and closes the door, then wraps himself around me. I bury my face in his neck, wanting the image of her out of my head. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I just… Maybe I haven’t been getting enough sleep… Maybe I…”
“It’s my fault,” Jeremy says, interrupting me. “You’ve been working for two weeks without a break. You’re exhausted. And then I—we—it’s paranoia. Guilt. I don’t know.” He pulls back, holding my face with both hands. “I think we both need about twelve hours of solid sleep.”
I’m convinced by what I saw. We can blame it on exhaustion or guilt, but I saw her. I saw everything. Her fists clenched at her sides. The anger in her expression before she rushed away.
“Do you want some water?”
I shake my head. I don’t want him to leave. I don’t want to be alone. “Please don’t leave me alone tonight,” I beg.
His expression doesn’t reveal what he’s thinking at all. He nods, just a little, then says, “I won’t. But I need to turn off the TV and lock the doors. Put the cake in the fridge.” He heads for the door. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
I go to the bathroom and wash my face, hoping the cold water will help calm me. It doesn’t. When I return to the bedroom, Jeremy is sliding the lock across the top of the door. “I can’t stay all night,” he says. “I don’t want Crew to get scared if he wakes up and can’t find me.”
I climb into the bed and face the window. Jeremy climbs in behind me, then wraps himself around me. I can feel his heartbeat, and it’s almost as fast as mine. He shares the pillow with me, finds my hand, and slides his fingers through mine.
I try to mimic his pattern of breathing so that mine will slow down. I’m breathing through my nose because my jaw is clamped too tight to take in normal breaths. Jeremy presses a kiss to the side of my head.
“Relax,” he whispers. “You’re okay.”
I try to relax. And maybe I do, but it’s only because we both lie here for so long, it’s hard for muscles to retain that much tension after a while. “Jeremy?” I whisper.
He runs a thumb across my hand to let me know he hears me.
“Is there a chance… Could she be faking her injuries?”
He doesn’t answer right away. Almost as if he has to give the question some thought. “No,” he finally says. “I saw the scans.”
“But people get better. Injuries heal.”
“I know,” he says. “But Verity wouldn’t fake something like this. No one would. It would be impossible.”
I close my eyes, because he’s trying to reassure me that he knows her well enough to know that she wouldn’t do something like that. But if there’s one thing I know that Jeremy doesn’t…it’s that he doesn’t know Verity at all.
I went to bed convinced I had seen Verity at the top of the stairs last night.
I woke up full of doubt.
I’ve spent most of my life not trusting myself in my sleep. Now I’m starting to not trust myself when I’m awake. Did I see her? Was it a hallucination because of stress? Did I feel guilty for being with her husband?
I lay in bed for a while this morning, not wanting to leave the room. Jeremy left my bed sometime around four this morning. I heard him lock the door, then he texted me a minute later and told me to text if I needed him again.
Sometime after lunch today, Jeremy knocked on the door to the office. When he came inside, he looked like he hadn’t slept. He hasn’t slept much this week at all because of me. From his point of view, I’m a hysterical mess of a woman who wakes up in his wife’s bed in the middle of the night and then claims I see his wife standing at the top of the stairs after he finally kisses me.
I thought he had come to the office to ask me to leave, and honestly, I’m more than ready to go, but the money still hasn’t hit my account. I’m kind of stuck here until it does.
He had come to my office to let me know he got another lock. For Verity’s door this time.
“I thought it might help you sleep. Knowing there’s no way she could leave the room if that were even possible.”
If that were even possible.
“I’ll only lock it at night, when we’re asleep,” he continues. “I told April her door comes open at night because of drafts in the house. I don’t want her to think it’s there for any other reason.”
I thanked him, but after he’d gone, I didn’t feel reassured at all. Because part of me worried that he’d put the lock there because he was worried. Of course I wanted him to believe me, but if he believed me, that meant it might be true.
In this case, I would rather be wrong than right.
I’m struggling with what to do with Verity’s manuscript now. I want Jeremy to understand his wife in the way that I now understand her. I feel like he deserves to know what she did to his girls, especially since Crew spends so much time up there with her. And I’m still full of suspicion since he spoke of Verity talking to him. I know he’s only five, so there’s a chance he was confused, but if there’s even a remote possibility that Verity could be faking it, Jeremy deserves to know.
But I haven’t worked up the courage to give the manuscript to him yet because it is just a remote possibility that she’s faking it. It would be more plausible to believe I was seeing things due to exhaustion and sleep deprivation than it would be to think a woman could fake a disability of that extent for months on end. Without any apparent reason.
There’s also the fact that I haven’t finished it yet. I don’t know how it ends. I don’t know what happened to Harper or Chastin, or if the timeline of this manuscript even covers those events.
There isn’t much left to read. I’ll probably only be able to digest one chapter before needing to take a break from the horror of this manuscript. I make sure the door to the office is closed, and I start the next chapter and decide to skip it, along with several others. I don’t even want to read about a simple kiss, much less more sex. I don’t want to ruin the kiss we shared by reading about him doing that with another woman.
When I’ve skipped yet another intimate scene and reach the chapter I feel may be an explanation for Chastin’s death, I double-check the office door again before starting it.
So Be It
I got pregnant with Crew within two weeks of lying to Jeremy about my pregnancy. It’s as if fate were on my side. I thanked God with a prayer, even though I don’t believe he had a hand in it.
Crew was a good baby (I’m assuming). By that point, I was making so much money, I was able to afford a full-time nanny at our new house. Jeremy was staying home with the kids after quitting his job and didn’t think a nanny was really necessary, so I called the nanny our housekeeper, but she was a nanny.