My Husband Framed Me for His Mistress's Crash novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Marital Address

Laurel argues her own bail, wins it with an ankle monitor, and shocks the room by choosing to go home with her husband; she hides his nightly pill in her cheek, and Melanie arrives with a suitcase to move into the guest room.

The judge turned to me. "Mrs. Kershaw, you may respond."

I had two minutes, and I used them the way I used to.

"Your Honor, I have never been convicted of anything. I have lived at one address for eight years."

"I am not a flight risk. I'm the only person in this room who wants this case tried."

I turned to the State's table.

"Mr. McGowan has a bottle with my name on it and my husband's word."

"That is the whole case."

"I would like to see it tested, in public, as soon as the court can set a date."

Duncan McGowan didn't look at his notes.

"The State does not oppose a reasonable bail," he said. "We withdraw the request to hold her."

Marshall's head turned toward him, fast.

The judge set bail at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, with an ankle monitor.

"Where will you stay, Mrs. Kershaw?"

Frances Whitaker, my old partner, would have taken me. Her office had a couch.

Marshall stood up in the front row before I could answer.

"Your Honor, she'll come home with me," he said. "Where she belongs."

He said it softly, for the cameras, and a few people in the back said aw.

"The marital address, Your Honor," I said.

Melanie's hand slid off his arm.

Marshall looked at me for the first time that morning, and he didn't like what he saw.

Everything I needed was in that house. My files, my mother's jewelry box, Wren's room.

And the two of them would have to keep smiling at me.

An hour later a deputy locked a black strap around my left ankle.

Marshall posted the money in the lobby, in front of three cameras.

He did not let go of my hand the entire time.

"My wife is innocent until proven otherwise," he told the reporters. "I'll be at her side for every day of it."

A woman in the front asked me for a statement.

"I'm glad to be going home," I said.

It was the first true thing I'd said all morning.

Marshall was trying to work out what I meant by it.

He drove me himself, in the gray SUV, with the sun still up.

Neither of us spoke until we reached Alder Lane.

Our house sat at the end of it. White shutters, a flag, a campaign sign in the grass.

"You scared me in there," he said, with his eyes on the road.

"I scared you at the table first."

"Let me do the talking from here. People are watching you, Laurel. They're deciding what you are."

"Then I'll give them something to look at."

He parked in the driveway and didn't say anything else.

The kitchen smelled like lemon cleaner.

Someone had been in it.

The coffee mugs were lined up in a new order on the shelf.

Wren's drawing was still on the refrigerator, under its magnet. A yellow house with a very large sun.

I stood and looked at it until Marshall cleared his throat.

At nine o'clock he came downstairs in his shirtsleeves with a glass of water in one hand.

In the other he held a small white pill.

"Take your pill, sweetheart."

It was the same voice he used in the car, and the same voice he'd used every night for two years.

I had been clear-headed since the jail, and for the first time I noticed how carefully he watched me swallow.

I took the pill from his palm and put it on my tongue.

I drank the water with the pill tucked in my cheek.

He watched my throat move.

"Good girl," he said. "Go on up. I'll turn off the lights."

In the downstairs bathroom I spat it into a tissue and folded the tissue four times.

It went into the toe of my left sock, under the black strap.

I looked at myself in the mirror.

For the first time in two years, I was awake enough to be afraid.

Then I heard the front door open.

Heels crossed the hall, quick and light, four inches of gold.

Melanie stood in the kitchen doorway with a rolling suitcase and a garment bag over her arm.

"Marshall thought you shouldn't be alone through the election," she said. "So I'm staying in the guest room."

She smiled, and she was still wearing my mother's pearls.

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