River takes a deep breath and finally lifts his head up so he’s looking at each of us. Since the shooting, I believe this is the first time he’s made eye contact with any of us aside from Evan. I know they’re close, but this entire time I’ve felt like he’s hiding something from us. If he tells us that he knew how sick his wife was I’ll make sure he’s sharing a cell with Lawson.
“I knew something was wrong when we came home. We all did,” he starts. “But for each of us it was different. I didn’t write her as much as the rest of you wrote home because I didn’t have a lot to say. The shit we saw out there—it’s not something you tell your newlywed wife. And honestly, after being gone so long, I wasn’t sure I was even in love with her. She didn’t know I was coming home because I hadn’t told her. In fact, after being gone so long, the last letter I sent her told her to find someone else. Six years is a long time to go without moving on and letters do not serve our families justice.
“I know I said this before, about how I thought it was weird that Frannie had my favorite beer in the refrigerator, and my first thought was she never threw it out, but the expiration dates were dates that hadn’t even happened yet, which lead me to my second thought—she had started drinking. So I watched her for a few days at lunch or dinner when I’d have one and she wouldn’t touch them. I then thought she had done as I asked and moved on and the guy just happened to like my beer. Not uncommon.
“When I got to our house, I knocked, half expecting someone else to answer. When she did, she said, ‘Hey, glad you’re home’ as if I had only been gone a few days and not six years. There were no tears, no slap in the face for me telling her to move on, just a very nonchalant greeting. She was making dinner and there were fresh flowers and the table was set for two. I immediately asked her who she was expecting and she said, ‘You’.
“If she knew we were coming home, why didn’t she tell the other wives and why didn’t she meet us at the airstrip? Those questions immediately started plaguing my mind. While she finished preparing dinner, I went upstairs and started unpacking, and that’s when shit got weirder. Clothes hung in my closet that weren’t mine and I was okay with that. I had told her to move on, but my clothes were there as well and my shoes had been recently polished. In the bathroom I found a pregnancy test on the counter in broad daylight, and on the wall I found a calendar. The best I could ascertain is that the days she marked with a star were the days her and her boyfriend were together. The sad face was a failed pregnancy test since according to the calendar she had taken one that day and the x’s were when her period had arrived.
“I wasn’t mad, but overly confused. She welcomed me home, albeit somewhat coldly, kept all my stuff but was trying to get pregnant. She was also eerily quiet, like she’d pop up and scare the shit out of me. I’m a SEAL, I should be able to sense stealth movement, but I just couldn’t detect hers.
“That night, I sat at the table and she talked as if I had been home the whole time. Asking how my day was, wanting to know if we wanted to go to Ryley and Evan’s for a bar-be-cue this weekend, and wondering if we should have Tucker and Penny over one night for dinner. It’s only the next day that I find out what everyone was going through.
“But that night, after dinner, I felt odd. There wasn’t anything I could do about it except lie down. I was in and out of consciousness for most of the night, riddled with dreams about Cuba, the fighting, and sex. In the morning I kept having these flashbacks about watching someone having sex and couldn’t place them. This happened the first few nights and I had finally had enough so I didn’t eat what she cooked because each night I didn’t feel right afterwards. I pretended to act the same nonetheless that night only to find out that my wife was having sex in our bed with me next to her.”
The collective gasps aren’t lost on me. I think at this point I’m so desensitized about Frannie that nothing shocks me these days.
“Oh, River, I’m sorry,” Ryley says, reaching for him.
“I’m not because it opened my eyes, I just couldn’t tell anyone. The one mistake I made was letting Evan move in. Everything stopped, and I think it’s because she couldn’t drug you.”
“Lucky me,” he mutters.
“Yes, lucky you because you weren’t subject to spying on your wife. I asked her over and over again whom she was seeing and the answer was always the same, ‘I’m not seeing anyone.’ But I knew differently so I’d follow her and she’d end up at different hotels, in the backs of cars, and even in parks. It wasn’t bad enough that she was blatantly cheating and lying about it, but she acted as if we were this perfectly happy couple in front of everyone.