I sit with that too.
I read about the list of people who wanted him dead. The paper is careful not to name them but the paper lists them in categories. A competitor on the commodities side who lost forty million in a trade two years ago. A former associate who had spent time in federal custody and had come home angry. A man in Chicago who had been, the paper says cautiously,disappointed.
Any of those men could have done it.
Someone has done it.
Someone has done it and the police do not know who, and I know the shape of it, and I have not yet decided what I know. I have two theories, which I have had since Monday morning in this kitchen, and I am not going to collapse them into one yet.
I hope they do not want me dead.
I had nothing to do with it. I knew a fraction of what I should have known about my own husband's business. I am thirty-six years old and I was kept, by him, in a soft room. If anybody looks at me with the questions the grand jury was going to ask, I willnot be able to answer them. That is what I would tell a man in a dark suit. That is what I would tell my father.
I hope they do not want me dead.
---
I put the tablet down.
I put the quilt off my shoulders. I stand. I walk to the window. I look out at the drive and at the pines.
I think about leaving.
I think about it plainly, the way I thought about not calling on Monday. I sit with it, as a thing I could do. I could walk to the shed and find a coat. I could walk to the road. Walking, I could be at the county road in three miles, and at the Millard diner in another six, and from the Millard diner I could call the number my father gave me in a card on my twenty-ninth birthday, and my father could have a car at the Millard diner in six hours.
I could be on Long Island by tomorrow.
I could be in my father's guesthouse by tomorrow evening, showered, in clothes that fit me, calling an attorney, giving a statement to the Redwater City Police Department that I had walked away from the fire in shock and had been in a motel near the highway all week.
I could do that.
I look at my hand on the window sill.
The pale band on my finger has gone. It has faded out. In five more days I will not be able to find it with a flashlight. I am in a stranger's kitchen in a flannel shirt that smells like her, and I came apart in her arms last night in a way I did not know a body could come apart, and the woman who did that to me is in the city this morning, lying for me.
I know she is lying for me.
I have known since Tuesday, and I knew again last night, and I know this morning. Whatever she is, she was somehow there when the fire that killed Daniel was blazing, and she has pulledme out of it, and she is carrying me now in a bed in a cabin in the forest, and she is carrying the weight of carrying me in whatever rooms she stands in by day.
I think maybe she is dangerous.
She is not dangerous to me.
I am only saying this out loud this morning.
She touched me last night when I asked her to. She gave me sex that was transformative. And I can’t stop thinking about it. And her.
If I leave today, she is in a room tomorrow that does not have me in it, and she has to reckon with whatever she did on Monday night without the woman in her bed that she did it to save.
She saved my life.
I do not want her to reckon alone.
That is the sentence.
I stand at the window and I turn the sentence over and over in my mouth and I cannot make it into a different sentence.
I do not want her to reckon alone.
