The Wife They Burned novel · Chapter 15 of 32

Chapter 15: First Night

"What had you seen?" I said.

"A heater." The nanny's mouth twisted. "She said, the little black heater, the one Junie liked for her cold feet. You remember it, don't you, dear? You must have left it on."

"And you said yes."

"I'd just watched the roof come down on your baby." She looked at her hands. "She said it so kindly. She said it three times. By the third time I could almost see it."

"Then the marshal came up."

"At nine. With a coffee. He asked me about the heater before I'd said a word about heaters."

Her sister put a hand on her shoulder.

I stood up.

My legs worked. I was surprised.

"I won't ask you to do anything," I said. "Not yet. I just needed to know you went back for her."

"I'd go back a hundred times."

"I know you would."

I kissed her cheek and walked out to the truck.

Abel looked at my face through the windshield and started the engine without a word.

I held it together through Bridgeport.

I held it together on I-95, with the brake lights stretched out in front of us.

Sarge put his head over the seat and rested it on my shoulder, and I let him.

Abel didn't ask what she'd said.

At the Greenwich exit, he put on the blinker for Lantern House.

"No," I said. "Not there."

He looked at me.

"There are nine families in that house," I said. "Every one of them will look at me and need me to be fine. I can't be fine tonight."

"Okay."

"Take me somewhere nobody needs anything."

He drove past the exit and got off at the next one.

His house was at the end of a dead-end road in Cos Cob, right on the water.

It was small and gray-shingled, with a porch that sagged on one corner and a woodpile under a tarp.

I'd never been inside.

He'd never asked me.

He opened the door and turned on one lamp.

It was a plain front room with a woodstove, a couch and a lot of books about fire.

There was a dog bed the size of a mattress.

He knelt and lit the stove.

He didn't take his jacket off, and he didn't ask me to sit down.

I stood in the middle of his floor in my coat.

"She sat with her," I said. "Marshall's mother. In the morning room, before the marshal came. She held her burned hands and told her she'd seen a heater."

Abel stayed very still by the stove.

"She told her three times," I said. "Kindly. Until she believed it."

Then something in me just went.

I didn't decide it.

My knees folded and I sat down on his floor in my coat.

The sound came out of me that hadn't come out at the grave, or the lunch, or the gate.

It was ugly.

It went on and on.

Abel came across the room and got down on the floor with me.

He didn't say it was okay.

He pulled me into his lap and wrapped both arms around me, coat and all, and held on.

Sarge pressed himself against my back from the other side.

I cried until I was empty.

Until it was dark outside the windows and the stove was ticking.

He never once let go.

When I finally lifted my head, his flannel shirt was soaked through at the shoulder.

"Sorry," I said. "About your shirt."

"I have others."

"How many?"

"Four. They're all this one."

Something came out of me that was halfway to a laugh.

He wiped my face with the cuff of his sleeve, rough and careful.

I looked at him in the stove light.

The gray at his temples. The burn scars running up his left forearm where his sleeve was pushed back.

The brown eyes that had sat outside my house for three weeks of nights and never once asked me for anything.

"You haven't kissed me since the truck," I said.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because you were still married. Then you were signing papers. Then you were carving Thunder." His thumb moved on my cheek. "I wanted you to come to me when there wasn't anything else going on."

"There's always something else going on."

"I noticed."

I took his face in both my hands.

His beard was soft under my palms.

"I'm not here because I'm sad," I said. "I need you to know that. I've been sad for two months. I'm here because I want you, and I'm tired of waiting to deserve it."

He went very still.

"Ada."

"Say yes or say no, Abel. Don't say my name like it's a warning again."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Yes," he said.

I kissed him.

This time nobody climbed over the seat.

He stood up off the floor with me still wrapped around him, and the coat finally came off somewhere between the stove and the hall.

He stopped in the bedroom doorway.

"Sarge," he said, over his shoulder. "Bed."

The dog sighed and lay down on his mattress by the stove.

Abel pulled the door shut behind us with his foot.

He crossed to the bed and I stayed against the door, watching him.

The room was small.

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