The way that he lied was effortless. Like it cost him nothing. It didn’t wear at the edges of who he was. It didn’t worry away his integrity because he had none. He was hollow. His heart a stone. He cared for nothing but himself. Vanessa swiped at her eyes.
“Don’t play stupid with me, Tom. Don’t treat me like I’m too dumb to know what’s going on,” she said, her voice thick with unshed tears built up over the course of a decade.
Tom reached for her shoulders again, once more trying to turn the tide in his favor. He leaned down to kiss her. She turned, making his lips land on her cheekbone.
“You’d really get off the phone with her and try to sleep with me?” Vanessa shrieked, batting his hands away.
“Vanessa,” Tom said. He reached once more for her shoulders.
“Stop!” she said.
He grabbed her and shook her.
“I don’t love anyone but you!” he shouted.
The words were shells, hollow forms inside of which the emotions they named should have rested. But coming from him, now, they meant nothing. Vanessa would have died to hear him say those words not long ago. She would have thrown herself on the train tracks for Tom to tell the world that he loved no one but her. But now, she just wanted him gone.
Instead of yelling at him, she crossed her arms.
“I want you to go,” she said.
Tom laughed.
“Where?”
“Anywhere but here. I want you out of the house.”
“I’m not leaving the house,” he said firmly.
“Get out, Tom,” she said.
She pulled away from him and he grabbed her wrist, firmly enough that it burned as she twisted away from him.
“Get the fuck out, Tom,” she spat.
“I’m. Not. Leaving,” he said each word as a sentence of its own.
Vanessa turned from the study, sure of her steps, knowing exactly where she was going. He followed her into the bedroom as she walked around the end of the bed to her nightstand. She pulled the drawer open.
“Calling 9-11?” he snarled. “Getting them to throw me out?”
She grabbed the envelope and cut her finger as she felt for the edge of the paperwork she sought. She pulled it from its casing, her blood staining the top corner. She handed it to him, leaning across the bed and dimpling it with her weight resting on one arm.
“Read it,” she said, her words venomous.
Tom snatched the paperwork from her. His eyes flew over the words, absorbing them silently. He said nothing. He dropped the letter on the bed. His hands flew to his face. He rubbed at the day-old stubble forming on his jawline.
“When were you planning on telling me this?” he asked, his voice suddenly filled with the emotion it had lacked earlier.
“I wasn’t,” Vanessa said.
Tom grabbed his jacket and his keys, and he left.
The next few weeks were tense. The unspoken things between them enough to make moving through a room difficult. It felt tangible. Anytime a silence descended between them, one or the other would do their best to break it—to make the situation somehow bearable again.
Vanessa hadn’t contacted Mark. She had no intention of doing that. She didn’t want him to know that the child was his. She didn’t want to upset the life that he’d built with his own family. Any compassion that she felt when she thought of Mark evaporated when she thought of her own husband.
At first, Tom retreated. He kept his distance from Vanessa. He slept on the couch. He kept late hours at the office again. But she didn’t hear any more conversations with his former lover. At least that wasn’t going on, to the best of her knowledge.
What Tom did when he was gone from the house, though, was a mystery.
Finally, one afternoon, Vanessa was sitting on the back patio. It was a warm day for winter. Somewhere in the low sixties. She had the chimenea going, keeping her warm as she read the newest novel from her favorite author. A dark psychological thriller about a woman who killed her husband. Vanessa couldn’t deny that the idea hadn’t occurred to her, too. She understood.
Tom had been gone for most of the morning. He wasn’t teaching today, but Vanessa didn’t really care where he’d gone. There was a part of her that thought it might be better to not know.
But then he appeared in the kitchen. She watched as he put away some groceries that he’d evidently been gathering. She wondered what in the hell he’d done that for. Maybe he planned on making dinner for her in some ill-timed peace offering. She’d felt sick the last two days. Morning sickness that bled into the rest of the day, she thought.
She watched as he boiled some water and then made two cups of tea, his back to her. He left the kitchen and came out onto the patio with them, steaming in the crisp air.
He sat one in front of her and the other in front of himself. He sat down across from her.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“An olive branch,” he said.
She reached for the mug, the ceramic sides hot to the touch. She inhaled the scent of the tea. Something strange and foreign to her. Not earl gray and not citrus. It had an earthiness to it. She wondered if he’d gotten it from the health food store that he’d fallen so in love with in the last few years.
Tom had become more and more consumed with his physical appearance as he aged. Though he wasn’t even middle aged yet, he was as vain as a man in the midst of a mid-life crisis. He took up weightlifting, running, and eating a low-carb diet. And Vanessa couldn’t deny that she’d seen a difference in him. But his preference for whole-grain this and gluten-free that annoyed her.
She sighed and tried to be in the moment. Her husband had brewed her a cup of tea. She’d always thought that bringing someone a hot drink was one of the most caring things
