The first time my husband tried to lunge across the table at me in the psychiatric hospital, the restraints caught his wrists with a hard metallic snap. He jerked forward, the leather straps biting into his skin, his eyes wild and bloodshot under the harsh fluorescent lights. Behind him, the wall clock above the observation window ticked steadily toward 5:05 p.m., each second a tiny hammer on my nerves and his.
“I am not crazy, Morgan!” he shouted, voice cracking against the reinforced glass between us. Spit dotted the surface in front of his mouth. “Tell them!
Tell them what you did. Tell them this is you. All of this is you.”
I set the phone back in its cradle.
In the visitor room, conversations had to go through the landline on each side of the glass, just like in jail. The handset on my side felt warm against my cheek, the cord looping gracefully between my fingers. “Ethan,” I said softly, letting his name land like a mercy, “I know you’re not crazy.”
His chest heaved.
For a second, hope flickered across his face, fragile and desperate. Then I smiled. “I’m the one who made sure everyone else thinks you are.”
The clock behind him chimed five low, dull notes that echoed down the corridor.
Five chimes. Five years of marriage. Five months since the night this really started.
—
Five months earlier, on our fifth wedding anniversary, the steak I’d cooked for my husband had already gone cold. The ribeye sat in the center of his plate, a perfect sear dulled by time, juices congealing in an unappetizing gray-brown puddle. Candle wax had run in thick red drips down the silver candlesticks, hardened streaks that looked like dried blood against white linen.
Our townhouse on the Upper West Side was quiet except for the grandfather clock in the corner of the dining room. Six feet of dark oak and brass, its pendulum swung back and forth, back and forth, the tick and tock cutting the silence into even slices. I swirled the red wine in my glass and watched the liquid climb the sides like lazy flames.
At exactly eleven o’clock, the clock began to chime. Twelve times, then one less. Eleven heavy notes rolled through the house like the slow tolling of a sentence.
Ethan was an hour late. A thin smile curved at the corner of my mouth as I studied my reflection in the glass of the china cabinet. The woman looking back at me wore a silk slip dress the color of cabernet, cut dangerously low in the back, her dark hair pinned up just so.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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