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I don’t have a proper response for her. I’m too irate. I can’t see straight, much less possibly formulate coherent thoughts and turn them into words that she will understand. What she has done is unforgivable. And worse, she dragged Chet into the mix.
“Anyway,” she says like a confession. “I didn’t want this to happen.”
“But it did happen.”
“Oh, Sadie, love. This is what you should know about liars, cheats, and deceivers: It’s easy for someone to show up in your life and tell you that they love you; it’s much more difficult for them to demonstrate that love consistently. That’s why Chet couldn’t say no to me. He doesn’t love you. Which means he isn’t worth your time.”
“It wasn’t about love.”
“That’s where you’re fooling yourself. Everything is.”
I hear someone speaking to her in the background. She places her hand over the speaker, then I get muted. When she comes back on the line, her tone has gone from indignant to sanguine. “Anyway, even you can’t turn a blind eye to what this means. It’s opened a door for us; we’ve turned a corner. I know your secrets— and now you know one of mine.”
“One of them?”
“Everyone has secrets, darling. You know that. Although, that’s not why I called. I have a favor to ask of you.”
She is impetuous, and I am half in love with her, and so I say the only thing in the world that makes any sense. “What?”
“We’ll discuss that later,” she says quickly. “I just wanted to know you’re not terribly mad.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. But you will be. Soon enough you’ll see that this was for the best. One day down the line, when you and Ethan have reconciled, you’ll understand. Sometimes you have to tear things down before you can rebuild them.”
“We—” I try to tell her that I filed for divorce. I try to tell her that she’s just fucked up the one bright spot I had in my life. But as usual, she cuts me off before I get the chance.
“We can’t let a man come between us, Sadie. Not now. Not ever.”
I don’t say anything. What would be the point? She’s already won so completely.
“Oh and Sadie,” she whispers into the receiver. “That handyman of yours…let me tell you, he knows a thing or two about tearing things down and rebuilding. God, I wish you’d told me sooner. He is amazing in the sack.”
ANN FINDS her way into my bedroom. The clock beside my bed reads 12:43 a.m. She climbs under the covers and slips her hand up my T-shirt. I ask her helplessly how she got in. She says she ripped the key off of Chet, of course. She tells me she’s very resourceful. But she proves it when she twists her fist in my hair and kisses me on the mouth. Hard and relentless, desperate and seeking. At first, I tell her no, but I wasn’t sleeping anyway and I suppose what she’s come for is better than lying there bored.
She heads south and I let her do what she does, not only because she does it well, but because she owes me after what she did with Chet. She whispers her secrets into the darkness and my thighs. We make love, and I don’t say no to that either, because she’s offering a kindness I want to take.
I don’t say no, because every love affair has its rituals. And because if she stops her brand of sorcery, I just might kill her for what she’s done, and like Ethan says, this is the kind of sex I like. He says it’s the only way I know how to connect. My husband is right. I know this because afterward, Ann orders me to get dressed. She says she has something she wants to show me. Something unbelievable.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
HER
I smell blood before I see it. She is asking for you, they tell me. Who they are referring to, I don’t yet know. I only know I hate blood, and this feels keenly like my worst nightmare.
Ann told me where we were going. To see Paul at work. I hadn’t really thought too far past that, which as it turns out is usually a mistake.
She leads me into an office, and then into an operating room, and the next thing I know I’m inhaling burning flesh.
The room is cold and sterile. About like you might expect. There’s music. Classical. It almost, but not quite drowns out the whirling and the buzzing of the machines. I hate surgery, I say to Ann. She smiles and tells me to hold my breath, it’ll all be over soon. She reminds me of my mother in that way.
I don’t listen about the breath holding, a pity really, because something smells like barbecue and now I realize I’ll have to hate barbecue forever. A day will never come again when the smell of it will not remind me of flesh opened up.
But how could I not want to see this for myself, Ann demands, as I hurl into a bag she has shoved into my face. She was asking for you, after all, she says incredulously, and then she tells me it’s sort of my fault that she’s here.
If I weren’t in the process of wrenching up my guts, I would remind her of what she says in her book: Guilt is a useless emotion.
She grins proudly as I wipe the remnants of the contents of my stomach from my mouth with the back of my hand. You’re very sexy when you’re vulnerable, she tells me, and that’s when I hear the small voice. She’s there, Ann says. Behind the partition.
