My Husband Pretended to Love Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Midnight at the Gate

Stanley kneels in the rain with her ring and cannot say whether any of it was real. At midnight the guard at the gate has never heard of her, her phone has forgotten her, and the only person still shouting her name is her husband.

I got the key in on the third try.

The engine caught, and the headlights lit the wet gravel and the long white fence that ran down to the gate.

Stanley came out of the dark at a run, with the ring still in his fist.

He didn't stop at my window.

He ran around the front of the car, dropped to his knees in the middle of the drive, and stayed there in the headlights.

The rain came down on his good suit and his bare head.

I rolled the window down two inches.

"Tamara, please." His voice cracked on my name. "Let me explain. It was never supposed to be like this."

"Like what?"

"I can explain Lydia, and Darryl, and why."

"I heard why. So did a hundred and twenty guests."

He held the ring up between us, and it caught the light.

"Did you ever mean any of it?" I asked. "One night, one pancake, one time you took my hand?"

His mouth opened.

Nothing came out.

I had asked him a plain question, in front of nobody, and he couldn't give me a plain answer.

That was my answer.

"Remember this tomorrow," I said. "Remember how I looked, and what I said."

I rolled the window up, put the car in gear, and drove around him.

He didn't move.

In the mirror, he stayed on his knees in the rain with the ring held out to nobody.

The gate was a quarter mile down the drive.

I had driven through it thousands of times, and the guard in the booth had waved me through every time.

I looked at the dashboard clock as I coasted toward it.

11:59.

The lights in the big house flickered, all of them at once.

The music from the lawn cut off in the middle of a note.

Then the clock changed to 12:00, and something went out of the air.

My ears rang.

I braked at the booth and sat there with my hands on the wheel.

The guard slid the window open.

He was a heavy man in his fifties, and he had once carried my groceries in from the car during a snowstorm.

He looked at me, and then at the car, and then back at me.

"Ma'am, can I help you?" he said. "This is a private road. How did you get past the gate?"

"It's me. It's Tamara."

"I'm sorry, ma'am. Do I know you?"

He wasn't joking.

There was nothing in his face at all, only polite worry.

I pulled out my phone.

My hands were shaking again.

The lock screen had been a photo of the two of us at the lake, Stanley laughing, my head tipped against his shoulder.

Now it showed Stanley alone, laughing at the water.

There was empty air on his shoulder where my head had been.

I opened my contacts.

There were four names, and none of them were mine to call.

My bank app asked me to create an account.

I looked at the passenger seat.

A thick brown envelope lay on it that I was sure had not been there a minute ago.

It had a key inside, taped to a card.

An address in Waukegan was printed on the card, with a room number.

There was a debit card in the name of Tamara Kerr, and a state ID with my face on it, and a birth date that was mine.

The balance on a slip of paper said thirty thousand dollars.

Under it, in plain type, someone had written: Start again.

I put my forehead against the steering wheel.

"Ma'am," the guard said, kinder now. "Do you need me to call someone?"

"No," I said. "Thank you. I'm leaving."

"Tamara!"

The shout came from far back up the drive, hoarse and furious.

"Tamara! Tamara!"

I looked in the mirror.

Stanley was running down the gravel, soaked through, the ring in his hand.

The guard stepped out of his booth and peered up the road.

"Who's he yelling for?" he said. "There's nobody here but you."

He didn't know the name.

The man who had waved me through that gate for ten years had never heard it.

The whole world had stopped knowing me.

All except one man, running down a wet driveway, who still knew exactly who I was.

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