Page 35 of Wreckage and Rain

The hot water hits my back and I stand under it and I don't cry. I have decided, somewhere between the front porch and the upstairs bathroom, that I am not crying anymore today. Thecrying happened on Autumn's couch. What's happening now is something else and it doesn't have a name yet but it doesn't require tears.

I wash my hair. I scrub my face. I let the water run hot enough to leave a mark.

He hasn't even checked on me, no call, no text to find out why I didn't come home. He also doesn't know I'm home. He's standing in our kitchen in our house on a Sunday morning and he is so completely outside of his own marriage that the woman he is married to could walk in the front door and walk up the stairs and turn on the shower and he doesn't notice. Because his attention is somewhere else entirely. Because there is a different woman in the room with him. The version of him that exists in our house with me has become someone else completely, and that person is wherever Cheyenne is.

***

I'm wrapped in a towel, hair dripping, when I hear him.

What I hear is his voice stopping. The phone call ending mid-laugh. A second of silence. Then footsteps. Fast. The front door opening.

Then nothing for a second.

Then his voice, sharp, alone, in the driveway.

"Summer?"

He saw the car.

I stand in the bathroom in my towel and I look at myself in the mirror that's fogged at the edges. The woman in the mirror is calm. Her eyes are clear. Her hands aren't shaking.

I don't answer him.

I hear him come back in. The front door closing. His footsteps moving fast through the kitchen, through the living room, to the bottom of the stairs. He stops there. He's listening for the shower and not hearing it. He's calculating how long I've been home.

"Summer? Babe?"

I don't answer.

I dry my hair. Slowly. Take my time. Find the soft jeans and the old t-shirt I keep in the closet for the days when I don't want to look like I'm trying.

By the time I open the bathroom door, he's at the top of the stairs. Pale. The phone still in his hand. Looking at me like he's trying to calculate the mood in his head.

"You're home," he says. "I didn't... when did you..."

"Long enough."

I walk past him.

I go downstairs.

I make myself a coffee in the kitchen where he was just standing, and I don't look at him when he comes down behind me, and I don't say anything when he says my name a second time, and a third.

There is nothing left to say to a man who didn't know why I didn't come home and when I came home.

Chapter 8: The Warning

Summer

He is in the kitchen when I come back downstairs with my purse. Standing at the counter. Pretending to read something on his phone. He has been pretending all morning. Pretending to make coffee. Pretending to read the news. Pretending to want to look at me. Whenever I pass through a room he's in, he opens his mouth and then closes it again. Whatever he was going to say, he can't find a way to say it. He doesn't know what I heard. He doesn't know how long I was home. He doesn't know whether I caught the laugh or just the goodbye.

He doesn't ask. Because asking would mean he'd have to face the fact that he had time for his call with Cheyenne, but made no attempt with me. Right now silence is the only door he has left.

"I'm going out."

"Where? I'll go with you."

"I said I'm going out."