Page 61 of Two Couples

“Yup.” He twisted off the cap and took several gulps of water.

“Take off your shirt so we can see if there’s bruising.”

“I’m fine.” He took another swallow of water.

“We should look. He hit you really hard. I could hear his punches.” I shuddered. “It’s so… I don’t know. I want to be sure you’re okay.”

“I said, I’m fine.”

“You don’t know if he did internal damage. We should go to urgent care.”

“And tell them a good friend punched me several times? I thought we were trying to lock ourselves and everything that’s happening inside the walls of this house.” His sneering tone made me cringe.

“I don’t want you to have permanent damage. I’m worried about you.”

“Stop smothering me. There’s nothing wrong. That guy is too weak to do any real damage.”

“Don’t say that.”

“What part? That he’s weak? It’s the truth.”

“Do you know why he attacked you?”

“Of course I know why. Because you’re all covering up a murder.”

“We’re not! What I meant was, I wondered if there was something else going on with you and him. Because he was so… vicious.”

“Stop wondering. What’s going on is people are covering up a murder. That kind of guilt eats at most people.” He gave me the side-eye. “It disgusts me how they’ve pressured you into going along with their crime. Buying a home with them was a monumental mistake. We need to talk to someone to find out how we sell our share. I want out.”

“No! Please don’t say that. We can work through this. Emily’s my best friend, I know she and I will figure it out.”

“There’s nothing to figure out. It was a mistake. We need to correct it.”

“If we all get a good night’s sleep… maybe go to the beach tomorrow, or on a hike? We could rent a motorboat. If things can get back to normal, then we’ll be okay.”

“There is no normal here, Samantha! This is not normal. We’re so far from normal I feel like I’m in a waking nightmare. And I’ll never understand why you’ve been so willing to go along with it.”

I opened my bottle and took a few sips of water. He knew why. Of course, the reason I’d given was not the truth. It was a partial truth, absolutely, but not the main point. Did Patrick recognize that? Maybe he sensed I was telling a story with pieces didn’t quite fit together.

“We’re playing with fire.” Patrick walked across the room and leaned against the closed door, as if he wanted to put as much space as possible between the two of us. “Jordan is definitely bothered by something.”

“You keep saying that, but you don’t even know her. How can you know she’s bothered?”

“When I put those rabbits in the hole we’d dug, she was behaving weirdly. She was mumbling, as if she wasn’t talking to me, but also not concerned whether I heard her. She said death is so final. Death takes something alive and filled with energy and turns it into something hopeless. It sucks all the beauty out of a living creature. There’s nothing more terrible than seeing something that was alive and vibrant turn into a stiff, ugly thing that you want to be rid of. Stuff like that.”

“She was talking about the rabbits.”

“Yes. But there was more to it.”

“Did she say she’d seen the man in the pool?”

“Of course not. But it felt like she wanted me to think she was talking to herself, wanted me to think I was overhearing something she’d intended to keep secret.”

“You’re imagining that.”

“I don’t think I am. And the way she gushed over me? She wants me on her side when this gets uncovered.”

I screwed the cap onto my bottle and placed it on the nightstand. I wasn’t going to say anything about Jordan’s behavior after Patrick released her foot from the crevice. I wasn’t going to show my jealousy, because it had nothing to do with him. He hadn’t encouraged her, he hadn’t responded. He might have enjoyed being treated like a hero, but I couldn’t be upset about that. I wasn’t upset about that. Now that a few hours had passed, I wasn’t even sure I felt jealousy anymore. Just helplessness. I did want things back to normal. I knew our situation was anything but that, yet I still longed for it. Couldn’t we make it normal if we wanted to? Couldn’t we move on from this?