I don’t have anything else to do, so I stand in front of the washing machine while it goes through its cycles. As I watch the water and soap swishing, my underthings and t-shirts slapping against the little round window, I hear him say it, almost as if he’s in the room with me. “I know this talk.”
I furiously finger the scar in my eyebrow, the one that I painstakingly cover each day with eyebrow pencil, combing the rest of the hairs over it to hide it. It’s the only clearly visible physical reminder of the accident. Nobody knows that my leg aches from my hip to my ankle when the barometric pressure drops to a certain level. Jude’s seen the surgical scar on my hip, but he knows it’s part of my secret. He also knows I have bad headaches sometimes, but he doesn’t know it’s because I have a titanium plate in my head from where they had to reconstruct part of my skull. Those scars are well hidden under my thick hair.
“I know this talk.”
When was that, in the sequence of events? Had I told him my parents were dead? No. We were still talking about two different things: me about my secret; him about unplanned pregnancy. Or pregnancies, more like it, if he “knows this talk.”
I drop heavily into one of the plastic chairs in the dungeon-like laundry room. Jude has a kid? Maybe he’s not just running away from bad memories in England or a wretched ex-wife. Maybe he’s running away from responsibility in general.
No. I don’t believe it. Not the guy I know. There’s another explanation. I can’t think of one right now, but there is one. Has to be. He’s never breathed a word of this. No pictures of the kid, no unexplained phone calls, no nothing. I can’t believe the guy I love, the Jude Weatherington who can’t even bluff when I ask him if something makes my butt look big, could lie about something that major.
Of course, according to my definition of lying, he hasn’t, I remind myself. I’ve never come out and asked him, “Did you and Kiersten have any children?” It seemed so obvious that they didn’t. There was no evidence to the contrary.
However… he never lied to me about being “groomed” for bigger things at work, either. Unless you count calling himself “a cog” lying. Which I kind of do, especially if he knew that wasn’t the case. But still, he’s not any guiltier of lying than I’ve been for the duration of our relationship.
That doesn’t mean I don’t have the right to be upset, though. Especially if he has a kid he never told me about. I mean, what if we had started talking about marriage?
Wait for it, wait for it…
Oh, I see.
She’s got it!
That was never in his plan. Of course not. I’m such an idiot. To think the first guy to pay any attention to me would actually like me enough, once he really got to know me, to marry me. I should have known that this was a fluke. My spinster card has not been revoked. I’ll be digging that out any day now.
And I haven’t even begun to probe the open, weeping wound that is the subject of the car accident that changed my life and ended my parents’ lives. I finally—finally!—trust someone enough to tell them about it after all these years, after he’s begged and pleaded with me to tell him, after I’ve agonized with the guilt of keeping it from him, but it turns out I grossly misjudged him. So not only can I not trust him, I can’t trust myself to correctly judge someone’s character.
The only one winning in all of this is Dr. Marsh. I’ll be padding his retirement quite nicely for the next several years.
I’ve moved on to supervising my clothes in the dryer when Jude appears in the laundry room doorway. I hop down from my perch on the dryer and turn my back to him. “Why are you here?”
“Because you won’t return my phone calls,” he answers simply.
“That’s usually a good sign that someone doesn’t want to talk to you,” I explain.
“But we need to talk. I know you like to run away when things get nasty, but—”
I whirl around. “That’s a really interesting statement from you.”
He eyes me warily. “Oh? I don’t recall running from trouble.”
I want to know, but I don’t want to know. “Never mind. It’s not like I’m going to get you to tell me the truth, anyway, so what’s the point?”
Sighing, he says, “I didn’t come here to have a row with you.”
“Well,” I scoff, “you’d better turn around and leave, then, because I kind of want to scratch your eyes out.”
“Libby…” He comes closer, his arms open.
“Don’t!” I insist, pressing myself up against the dryer as far as I can. “I’m serious.”
He drops his arms. “Right. Tell me what you want from me. I’ll do whatever you want, except leave without talking about this.”
I close my eyes, unable to look at him without crying. His image is etched on the back of my eyelids, though, so the tears are unstoppable. “Damn it,” I mutter. “Damn you.”
“I know,” he says resignedly. “I made a fist of it last night. And I’m not saying this to excuse it, but I’ve been under so much strain at work of late.” His voice moves closer to me, but I keep my eyes closed. The dryer vibrates soothingly against my lower back.
“Why are you under so much strain?” I ask, figuring this is just as good a place as any to start.
He pauses. When I open my eyes to see why he’s not answering, he opens his mouth, then closes it before saying, “I really can’t discuss that.” Before I can object, he continues, speaking louder to drown out
