My Husband's Smart House Only Listens to Her novel · Chapter 14 of 24
Chapter 14: My Wife Is Struggling
By noon Neil's post had forty thousand views.
Colleen read it to me from her phone, standing at her kitchen counter with a bagel going cold in her other hand.
"'My wife is struggling,'" she read. "'Please respect our family's privacy while she gets the care she needs.' And then he thanks everybody for their love."
"Is there a picture?"
"Not a picture."
She turned the phone around.
It was doorbell-camera video, grey and fish-eyed, shot from above the front door.
A woman in wet scrubs sat on the step of a white house with her knees pulled up and her forehead on them.
Her shoulders were shaking.
It took me a second to understand it was me.
"That's from the fall after Mom died," I said. "He told me the house was locked because the battery was dead. I sat out there an hour."
"Hearth's own logo is in the corner," Colleen said. "He put a watermark on your worst night."
"Episode seven."
"What?"
"He labeled it. It's in the deck." I took the phone from her. "Look at the comments."
There were eleven thousand of them.
Some were kind, with little hearts, wishing me strength.
Some were worse.
[She needs to be home with him.]
[Imagine being married to a saint and doing this to him.]
[That poor man.]
A woman had written, [My mother had episodes. He is doing everything right.]
My hands were cold.
"I'm going to throw up," I said.
"Do it in the sink."
"I'm not going to throw up." I set the phone down. "I'm going to answer."
Colleen's eyebrows went up.
"With what? A statement?"
"With the log."
At two o'clock I stood in the parking lot of the animal clinic on Mineral Point Road.
I had chosen it on purpose.
The clinic's sign was behind me, and so was the window where the woman from the front desk had her face pressed to the glass.
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