She doesn’t know what she’ll do when he does, or what he’ll do.
Why would a contract killer return to the scene of a triple homicide twenty-five years later? Has he been following her all along? Or has someone in the organization been watching the house and tipped him off that there are new residents?
It makes no sense. Even if that were the case, no one could know who they are. Who she is. Only two people in the world were privy to the new identity she adopted after leaving Brooklyn twenty-five years ago. Her father is dead. Teddy would never betray her confidence.
She’s kept the truth from everyone else in her life, telling herself that it was as much for their protection as for her own. She fully intended to live a quiet life in relative solitude before Keith came along.
She’s been thinking about that a lot lately. About how their relationship began, and evolved—not so much a whirlwind romance as an opportunistic tornado that swept her away from the aching loneliness, grief, regret. If he hadn’t popped up when and where he had, she’d likely still be alone.
Yet she does love him, and the girls. For a long time, she’d thought they would be enough; that being a wife and mother could fill all the dark, empty places inside her.
“Only you can do that. And you can’t expect to heal if you deal with pain by running away,” Teddy had told her, early on.
“What else could I have done? Three people were dead. If I hadn’t run away, I would have died, too.”
“I’m speaking figuratively. Physically, yes, sure, you saved yourself. You escaped your friend’s fate. But you were wounded.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Figuratively, Nora. If you broke a bone, would you ignore it?”
She shuddered, thinking of her nose. “That’s a horrible analogy, Teddy.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“No, I know.”
“Let’s just say . . . say you stepped on a rusty nail. If you fail to treat it properly, it’s going to hurt more in the long run and leave you with ugly scars. You dread the sting of peroxide in an open cut, but without it, the wound can fester and get infected. Do you see what I’m saying?”
She just stared down at the dirt. They were working in Teddy’s garden; always in the garden in those days.
“You have to face your injury and tend to it, Nora—seek professional help, get it stitched up, get medication . . . that’s how you will heal and move on.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You don’t know—”
“About survivor’s guilt? Believe me, I’ve been there. I told you about—”
“This is different. I didn’t survive a volcanic explosion that killed a colleague.”
“Two colleagues,” Teddy corrected her. “And what you survived was equally terrifying and tragic, my love. You need help processing this ordeal and putting it behind you.”
“It’s already behind me.”
“Maybe that’s how it seems, but you can’t just close the door on it like it’s an unwanted visitor. It’s going to barge back in whenever you least expect it. You need therapy. That’s the only thing that saved me from myself.”
“I can’t go to therapy. I can’t tell anyone what happened.”
“Haven’t you ever heard of doctor-patient confidentiality? Whatever you share will be safe.”
“I’m safe now. But whoever killed them is still out there,” Nora managed to say, heart machine-gunning her ribs. “Please . . . if I tell anyone, even a doctor, I’m going to be looking over my shoulder again. I’m going to feel like I need to run again.”
“Don’t run again. Don’t go anywhere. You’re home.”
For a long time, it felt that way. California. With Teddy. And with Keith. Then New York came along, yet another opportunistic tornado that whisked her right back here.
All these years, the house had been waiting for her.
But so, it seems, had Jacob.
Her phone lights up in her hand with a text from Keith.
Leaving the office in five minutes, barring last-minute disaster.
She writes back, Good luck. See you soon. Dinner will be waiting, barring same.
He sends a thumbs-up emoji. She responds with a red heart, then pockets her phone.
Weeknights are just a matter of getting through a family meal before everyone scatters—the girls to their rooms, Keith to the recliner in front of the television. Typically, by the time she changes her clothes and returns to the living room, he’s dozed off, allowing her to escape back upstairs alone.
On weekends, though, he’s rested and expects to spend time with her. He’d talked her into joining his health club so that they could work out together and do couples yoga on Saturday. That evening, they’d had dinner on the Upper East Side with his college roommate and his wife.
They were a nice enough couple, but it was one of those meals where the men talked mostly to each other and expected their wives to do the same. While Keith and Andrew reminisced about their good old days at Columbia, Nora struggled to find common ground with Marla, a high-powered television network executive who has no children.
Nora asked her about her job and braced herself for the inevitable “What do you do?” in return. When it came, Marla seemed taken aback that Nora had given up her career for marriage and motherhood.
Nora did her best to spin that decision in a positive way, stressing that it had been the right choice for their family at the time. But the discussion dredged up another unresolved fragment of the past.
Ever since, she’s found herself resenting Keith for building a successful career while expecting her to put her own ambitions aside. And yes, she may resent Stacey, too, for being such a difficult child, depleting Nora’s energy and ambition.
“Maybe you can get back to horticulture now that your girls are grown,” Marla had suggested.
“I’m planning to.”
Amid an inopportune lull, Keith overheard. “Planning to what, Nora?”
“Start thinking about my career again.”
He’d chuckled and asked Marla about her job, leaving Nora feeling like a little girl who’d been patted on the head and told to run along while the adults talked.
She spent the rest of the evening imagining the conversation they needed to have when they were finally alone together. But during the ride home, he was caught up in a discussion with the driver about a tight ball game unfolding on the car radio. He turned on the TV to watch the end in extra innings, while Nora went upstairs and dipped into her dwindling sleeping pill supply.
Potential quarrel averted, though the strain remains, at least for her.
She’s not a shell-shocked twentysomething who needs someone to take care of her. She wants more. She does.
And now, more than ever, Keith wants things to go on just as they have. He wants her to depend on him, wants to keep her at home, the dutiful wife and mother. Because he thinks she had an affair.
This isn’t the time to pour peroxide into her wounded marriage. Because if things start to fall apart, if she starts to fall apart . . .
No. She won’t let that happen.