My Duplicated Husband novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Pancakes

Lydia wakes to pancakes and a gentle man at her stove wearing her husband's face.

I came down the stairs one step at a time, holding the rail.

The kitchen was full of sun.

A man stood at my stove with his back to me, flipping pancakes.

He was tall, with Lorne's shoulders and Lorne's brown hair.

The hair was too long, and it curled over the collar of a gray flannel shirt hanging off him.

I knew that shirt.

I hadn't seen it in three years.

"There she is," he said, and turned around.

I gripped the doorframe.

It was Lorne's face, right down to the dent in his chin.

But the face I had buried hours ago had been red and hard and sneering.

This one was gray with tiredness and very thin, with shadows under both eyes.

And it was smiling at me like I was something he had been afraid he'd never see again.

"I made too many," he said. "I always do. I hope you're still hungry in the mornings."

I couldn't speak.

My own kitchen floor was clean.

Every crumb of the cake was gone, and the hearth in the next room was scrubbed.

I had done that myself at dawn.

I knew exactly what I'd done.

"Lyddie?" he said.

Nobody had called me that since our wedding.

It had been his name for me, and mine for him was Lorne-o, and we both thought it was funny.

The man who died on my floor had never said it once.

"You look like you've seen a ghost," he said gently.

He put the spatula down and crossed the room slowly.

He stopped an arm's length away.

His eyes went to my cheek, and his whole face changed.

"Who did that?"

"I fell," I said.

"You didn't fall."

His voice had gone very low.

"Somebody hit you. That's a handprint."

I put my hand up to cover it, and he saw my split lip too.

He looked at it as if I had hit him.

"Lydia. Tell me who did this, and I swear to God."

"Where have you been?" I said.

It came out of me before I could stop it.

He blinked.

"I don't know," he said.

"I've been trying to work it out since I woke up."

"I was somewhere dark, and then I was at the end of our road, and I walked in."

"The door wasn't locked."

He rubbed his wrists, one over the other, and I saw the skin there.

It was raw and ringed, healed pink in places and freshly scabbed in others.

"I'm sorry," he said. "For whatever I've done to you. I can tell it's bad. I don't remember it, and I'm so sorry."

He said it like a man who really didn't know.

Or like a man who was very, very good at lying.

I sat down because my knees gave out.

He put a plate in front of me with three pancakes and a thin slice of butter, just the way I liked them.

Then he set down a mug of tea with a spoon of honey.

"You still take it this way?" he asked. "Or did that change?"

"No," I said. "It didn't change."

The man in the grave had never made me tea in his life.

He had told me tea was for old women.

I forced down a bite.

It tasted like flour and ashes.

He sat across from me and ate nothing.

He just watched me eat, with his hands flat on the table.

"Are you allergic to anything new?" he asked suddenly.

"I thought I'd put shrimp in the omelet for lunch, but then I remembered."

"Shellfish. That's still true?"

"Yes," I said.

It was a small thing.

Anyone who lived with me would know it.

Anyone who had read my medical folder, which the dead man had kept in a drawer.

"I need to get some air," I said.

"I'll come."

"No." It came out too fast. "I mean, the roses. I haven't watered the roses."

He nodded.

"Take your time," he said. "I'll do the dishes."

I went out the back door with my heart slamming.

The morning was cold and bright.

The yard was wet, and a little trail of flattened grass ran from the porch steps to the garage, where I had dragged a man.

I'd missed it in the dark.

Anyone could see it.

I walked around the garage to the rose bed.

The bushes stood in their rows, shining with dew, looking exactly as they always had.

The soil between them was dark and fresh.

I looked back at the kitchen window.

He was standing at the sink with his back to me.

I knelt down by the third rosebush and pushed my fingers into the soft dirt.

I dug down past the roots, past the cold wet clay.

I told myself I would find nothing.

I told myself I had made a terrible mistake in the dark, and he had walked out of that hole on his own.

My fingertips touched something hard and smooth.

I brushed the dirt back.

It was the sole of a man's shoe.

The one I had thrown in after him.

Down there in the dark, it was cold and wet and absolutely still.

He was still in the ground.

So who was in my kitchen?

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