I Hunted His Mistress for Three Years, But She Was My Best Friend novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: A Gift for Sleep

Dario brings Carina a pearl earring; Mirella brings her sleeping pills; the old pill bottle has Mirella's name on it.

I got home before Dario did, and I was in bed with the lamp off when his key turned in the lock.

He undressed in the dark and lay down on his side of the bed.

For a while neither of us moved.

Then his arm came across my waist, and I let it.

"I'm sorry about Sunday," he said into my hair. "I shouldn't have done that to you in front of the men."

"It's all right."

"It isn't. You've been frightened, and I made it worse."

I lay and counted the cracks in the ceiling plaster.

I thought about where that hand had been in the afternoon, and I did not pull away.

"Mirella's out Thursday," he said. "The doctors say it was her stomach, nothing serious."

"I'm glad."

"She's lucky to have you."

I nearly said something then.

I said, "She is."

In the morning there was a flat blue box on my pillow.

Dario stood by the window in his shirtsleeves with his coffee, watching me open it.

Inside lay a single pearl earring on a white cushion, a teardrop with a small gold cap.

It was a twin of the earring I had found in his car, and the real one was at the bottom of the river.

"I saw you looking at pearls last month," he said. "I thought you might like these. I'll have the other one made to match."

He put a hand on my shoulder.

"A gift," he said. "No questions."

I looked at him and I understood what he was doing.

He was giving me a new earring to put over the lost one, so that whenever I mentioned the old one it would be a sign of my illness.

He did not know that I knew.

"It's beautiful," I said. "Thank you, Dario."

He smiled, relieved, and kissed my forehead.

I put the earring on at the mirror while he watched.

My hands did not shake, which surprised me.

Thursday afternoon Mirella came to the house with a paper bag and a bunch of white tulips.

She had lost a little weight in the hospital and she looked lovely, which I hated.

She hugged me on the front step and held on for a long time.

"I missed you," she said. "They had me on some awful drip and all I could think was that I wanted to be home with you."

"You gave us a scare."

"Oh, it's nothing. It's always my stomach." She laughed and tucked her hair behind her ear. "Look at you. You've got a new earring."

"Dario's gift."

"Beautiful," Mirella said. "He has good taste."

She said it so lightly that I might have imagined the pause before it.

In the kitchen she unpacked the bag onto the counter.

A loaf of the bread I liked, a jar of her mother's fig jam, and a small orange bottle with a white cap.

"I got these for you," she said. "My doctor gave me too many, and I thought of how badly you've been sleeping."

She slid the bottle across the counter to me.

"They're gentle. Half a pill, no more. I take one every night and I swear by them."

I turned the bottle in my fingers.

The label had been peeled off and the plastic underneath was clean.

"Where's the label?" I said.

"Oh, it came off in my bag, the glue's rubbish. Don't worry, I know exactly what they are."

She smiled at me with her whole face.

She was the girl who had sat on my bed at fourteen and cried until she fell asleep with her shoes on.

"Thank you," I said. "You always take care of me."

"Always," Mirella said.

When she left I carried the bottle upstairs and put it on the shelf of the bathroom cabinet, behind the aspirin.

I would not take one, and I would not throw them out.

I wanted to see what they were.

Then, because I was thinking about pills, I went to the nightstand on my side of the bed and opened the bottom drawer.

Under a folded scarf lay the empty bottle from three months ago.

I had never let anyone throw it away.

I do not know why.

Perhaps I wanted to keep the proof that I had not been imagining how bad it had become.

I picked it up and turned it to the light.

I had never read the label, not once, because in the hospital I had not wanted to know anything about that night.

The pharmacy was one in Park Slope.

The prescription was for sleeping tablets, thirty count, and the date was five months old.

The name on the label was not mine.

It said, M. Santoro.

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