Chapter Forty-three
Sean is standing at his bedroom window,staring at the street below.
What the hell was that all about?he wonders, as Aiden and Maggie retreat to their respective houses.
He’d been lying in bed, unable to sleep, when he became aware of something happening outside. He’d climbed out of bed and gone to the window, witnessed Aiden at Maggie’s door, then watched him collapse on the step and bury his head in his hands. Maggie had appeared seconds later to sit down beside him, her hand on his back.
How he would have loved to have been able to listen in on that little tête-à-tête! Except that he couldn’t chance opening the window and having them notice him. As it was, he’d been forced to hide behind the curtains, sneaking only sporadic peeks at the scene below, in case one of them should glance his way.
Not that he doesn’t have his suspicions as to what Aiden was doing there. He’d had a front-row seat for the man’s unprovoked attack on Mark and watched Maggie comforting his distraught wife. He’d seen Heidi leave with Maggie and assumed she was spending the night at her place. Aiden had likely come to the same conclusion when Heidi failed to come home at the end of the night’s festivities.
Hence his middle-of-the-night foray.
Fortunately, whatever Maggie said to Aiden had been enough to calm him down.
For now.
But Aiden strikes Sean as a hothead, and he suspects it’s only a matter of time before he erupts again.
Some celebration tonight turned out to be!he thinks, and might have laughed out loud, had Olivia not been sleeping only a few feet away.
The last thing he wants to do is wake Olivia.
“So, it appears you have a clone,”she’d said as they were getting ready for bed.
“They say everyone has a double,”Sean had replied casually, silently cursing both Erin and her mother: Erin for almost giving him away and Maggie for butting her head in where it didn’t belong. He liked her better when she was a timid little mouse who kept to herself and rarely said a word to anybody. Suddenly, she’s everyone’s best friend, coming to his wife’s rescue at the grocery store and now to Heidi’s. Hell, she’s even managed to befriend that snooty bitch, Dani Wilson.
How the good doc ever got himself saddled with that one is something he’ll never understand.
He looks toward the Wilson house next door and thinks he sees Nick in his bedroom window. The commotion likely woke him up, Sean decides, lifting his hand to wave. But the doctor, if he was there at all, disappears before Sean can complete the gesture.
Sean climbs back into bed, careful not to disturb Olivia. He knows he can’t fool her forever, that by continuing to lie to her he’s digging his own grave.
What he doesn’t know is how to stop.
—
Olivia feels the weight of her husband’s body as he sinks into bed beside her. She fights the urge to ask him what was going on outside, feigning sleep so as not to risk a conversation that would inevitably end with her confronting him with her suspicions.
Suspicions that his drinking has gotten out of hand.
That he’s been lying to her about Advert-X.
Lying about everything.
She buries her head in her pillow to stifle a groan. How else to explain his persistent vagueness when questioned about his job, how evasive and general his answers always are, how fidgety he gets when she presses for details, how she rarely sees him without a drink in his hand?
Take tonight. He must have consumed at least half a dozen beers, which might be acceptable if he were Mark’s age, but even Mark had stopped at three. And Mark had every reason to indulge. He’d been assaulted, for God’s sake!
What the hell was that about?
Was Julia’s grandson really having an affair with Aiden’s wife?
Olivia opens her eyes, stares into the darkness. She has a much more important question to consider than whether two of her neighbors are sleeping together. Namely, who was the man Erin saw on the beach last Monday afternoon?
Was it Sean’s clone?
Or was it Sean himself?