Page 115 of Her Ex-Husband's Brother

Fuckface’s car is indeed parked out front of Lennon’s house.

Pure hatred chokes me.

I drop down where I stand and start doing pushups, to put the fury somewhere so I don’t cross the lawn between us, rip open that front door, and choke my brother out.

THIRTY

LENNON

Knowing August is out there—noteven a hundred feet away across the back fence, close enough that if the wind shifted right I might be able to smell his cologne through the open window—is the only thing keeping me sane right now.

Not close enough to touch.

But close enough to feel like there still is another human being out there tethering me to themethat I was during those shining six weeks of freedom.

The migraines have never really gone away since I moved back in. Neither has the nausea, or the bone-deep weakness that makes getting from the bed to the bathroom feel like summiting a mountain.

I know this feeling well. I’ve known it since almost the beginning of my marriage, on and off. The migraines would flatten me for a week and then let go just as suddenly as they came. Clearly some innate, stubborn part of my body has always known enough to want to escape Jake, even when the rest of me refused to listen.

This time it isn’t going quiet. The flare-up is screaming and not quitting.

I get maybe an hour a day where I can manage the laptop, prop myself against the headboard, and message August.

It’s the one bright spot carved out of each gray, aching day, and I spend most of that hour convincing him I’m fine so he doesn’t do something we can’t undo.

He asks about carbon monoxide detectors, about symptom timelines, about whether it’s worse in the mornings or after. I think his anxiety turns clinical because clinical is the only shape he knows how to put fear into.

I stop telling him the worst of it after the second week. Not because I don’t trust him. It’s just because I know exactly what he’ll do if I tell him about the shit I feel, and I can’t let him ruin the rest of his life over me. Not after everything that’s already happened.

One morning, I finally drag myself into the shower. I’m back to having to use the little plastic shower chair because my legs won’t hold me standing. When I run the shampoo through my hair, a clump of it comes away in my fingers.

I scream.

My hair has never done that. Migraines don’t do that. Whatever’s wrong with my nervous system, whatever my body and my mind are supposedly doing to each other, it doesn’t explain a fistful of hair coming out in the shower like something out of a horror movie.

And that’s when the thought arrives, fully formed, ugly and enormous, in a voice that doesn’t even sound like mine.What if August is right about something poisoning me?

Could Jake be doing this to me?

I laugh. Actually laugh, sitting there dripping with that chunk of my own hair in a shower chair, because it’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever thought in my life. Jake. Poisoning me.Yes, he’s cruel. Yes, he’s controlling, and cold, and he’s turned humiliating me into something like a hobby. But poisoning me? That’s a different category of monster than the one I married. I know this man. I have known him for nine years, slept beside him for nine years, packed his lunches and memorized his moods and learned every version of his voice there is. I know him better than his own mother does, and she raised him.

I don’t tell August. He’ll panic, for one. And for two—I still feel insane for thinking it. Like accusing Jake of something that dramatic says more about how far gone I am than it does about him.

So that night, when Jake comes home and sets a plate in front of me, I don’t say anything about the hair. I tie it back so he won’t notice how much thinner it looks, push his precious pot roast around my plate until he leaves the room, and flush the whole thing down the toilet.

I do the same with the glass of tea. And the next morning, after his car finally pulls out of the driveway, I get up, brew my own pot of coffee, and pour his down the sink.

Then I set my phone up underneath the little tiered spice rack in the corner, angled so it can see the whole kitchen. I check the frame twice to make sure it catches the counter, the stove, all of it.

Then the paranoia hits. He bought me this phone himself the week he brought me back home, all smiles about how the old one was practically an antique.

What if it syncs straight to some cloud account he can open from his desk at work?It takes me almost twenty minutes, hands shaking, to find the setting and kill the sync.

Then I set the phone back underneath the rack to hide it, hurry to my room on legs that barely hold me, and am asleep before I even mean to be.

He wakes me that evening with soup. Jake doesn’t cook. I’m fairly sure his mother made it and dropped it off, which is somehow worse, the two of them out there fussing over how to keep me fed like I’m a dying pet.

He sits on the edge of the bed and spoons it into my mouth himself, murmuringthere’s a good girlevery time I swallow, and I look into the eyes of a man I used to love and think, quite calmly,Are you killing me? Is that why you brought me back? Because a dead wife humiliates you so much less than one who left you?