*
There is a moment after the police have gone and the crowd has started to disperse that she wonders why Hoskins came to her, she has her arms folded across her stomach as if she’s cold, or in pain, and then she sees Dean, standing off to one side, watching her. Watching her as she was watching Hoskins be led away, and in the few steps it takes for her to reach her husband she wonders how long he’s been there and what he’s seen, what Dean saw on her face, and for some reason she feels guilty, although she’s not sure why, because she was standing in Hoskins’s arms, and although it wasn’t the embrace of two lovers, it might’ve looked that way. It probably looked that way.
“What are you doing here?” she asks. “You never visit me at work.”
He holds out a bouquet of flowers. Red roses. Love triumphant, she thinks. But the way he’s looking at her, it doesn’t look like love. He looks wearily disgusted, like he’s smelling something bad.
“I wanted to surprise you,” he says dully. “I got a promotion. And a raise.”
“You never mentioned it before.”
“I wanted to surprise you,” he says again.
“I didn’t know.”
“You don’t know a lot,” he says bitterly. “You don’t know half the things I’ve done to try to make you happy.”
He pushes the flowers into her hands.
“I’ll see you at home,” Dean says.
He doesn’t kiss her goodbye.
*
She’s afraid to go home. Not afraid of Dean, because she doesn’t think he’d ever hurt her, but afraid of what he’ll say. She’s spent the last seven years swearing to her husband that she’s not been in touch with Hoskins, and for most of that time it’s been true. But this makes her look like a liar, and she could tell Dean the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but she’d still look a liar, because she’s kept it from him. She never told him about following Hoskins to Simms’s house, or going to dinner with him, and if he hadn’t been watching she never would’ve told him about Hoskins coming to her work. And withholding information isn’t lying, or maybe it is, and she’s just trying to pull a fast one.
So she doesn’t go home. After work she finds a table in the food court and nurses a cup of lukewarm coffee. There are still plenty of customers, the smell of French fries and hot pizza is thick in the air. A person might think it’s impossible to be lonely while in the center of such a crowd, but that’s wrong. You can be lonely anywhere.
“What’s wrong?” Ethan says, pulling out the chair beside her, not lifting so the legs scrape across the floor, making a horrible sound that makes her teeth come together in a snap, and she realizes that she feels the same way she does when she’s sick, or when she hasn’t had enough sleep. Like the world is made from exquisitely blown glass, and she wants to put her fist through every last piece of it.
Stay the fuck away from me, she almost says, viciously. Go back to making sandwiches and cleaning tables, and leave me the fuck alone.
But instead her mouth drops open and she finds herself telling Ethan everything. She has to talk, to get it all off her chest, she doesn’t have anyone else to speak to, and one person is as good as the next, as long as they’ll sit and listen, nod their head at the appropriate places and look sympathetic. Ethan’s so young and he can’t possibly understand, but she tells him anyway, about Corbin not wanting her latest article, about Weber being a better reporter than she is, about visiting Seever and seeing Gloria, about Dean, about her job. She keeps her voice low, and speaks quickly, barely pausing for breath between one word and the next, because if she does she’s going to cry, she’ll break down in the middle of all these people and that’s the last thing she wants. To have people looking at her, wondering at her tears, nudging one another and whispering. Look at her, they’d say. Can’t hold it together.
“Detective Hoskins, the cop I told you about, he was arrested earlier, right in front of me,” she says, shaking her head slowly. “I’m sure he’s not the Secondhand Killer, but maybe I ignored all the signs. I guess he could be—”
“Tell me about the guy working for the paper,” Ethan says. “Weber, is that his name?”
“Yeah. Chris Weber. God, I hate him. If he wasn’t around things would be going a lot smoother.”
“I’m sorry you’re having a tough time,” he says, and clasps his hand on top of hers. He’s trying to be nice, thoughtful, but his hand is moist and warm, and she wishes he wasn’t touching her, so she pretends that her nose itches and pulls away, then drops both her hands into her lap.