Perfect Husband Act: Now My Wife's Sorry novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: The Wife Who Remembers

Ethan's POV

She lived in a small brick house on the east side, with a porch light left on in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.

She opened the door before we knocked.

The receptionist had changed out of the gray cardigan.

Without it she looked younger, and more afraid.

"Come in," she said. "Wipe your feet. Don't touch the photographs."

We went in, Audrey first, then Susie, then me.

The living room was clean and bare.

There were rectangles on the walls, paler than the paint around them, where frames had hung.

"Where did they go?" Susie asked.

"I took them down," the woman said. "Look at one."

She took a single frame from the mantel and held it out to Audrey.

It was a wedding photograph.

A bride in a plain ivory dress, laughing, on the steps of a courthouse.

Beside her, in a dark suit, there was a smudge.

It was a man-shaped smear of gray, with no face and no edges.

Audrey drew a sharp breath.

"That's him," the woman said. "He's in every picture. He's in every picture and none of them show him."

She put the frame back on the mantel, carefully.

"I can't say his name out loud without it slipping. I wrote it on a card once, and the ink wouldn't hold. I remember a hundred other things. How he took his coffee. The scar on his knee. The way he sang off-key in the car."

Her voice thinned.

"But I can't tell you what he looked like. Not anymore."

I stood very still.

"When did he go?" I said.

"Two winters ago. The twenty-eighth of December. I was late with the payment."

"You were paying, too."

"For three years," she said. "Eleven hundred a month. It was all I could afford. Then my hours got cut, and I missed one."

"And he vanished that night."

"At midnight. I was holding his hand."

She said it with no tears left in her voice.

"I went to the police the next morning. They asked me who. I opened my mouth and I could not say who. I told my sister. She told me I never married."

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