She Trusted a Fake Lie Detector, So I Left Her the Truth novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Dog's Dinner

After three days arranging the funeral alone, Flynn returns home to find Dane in his shirt and his cooking eaten by Dane's dog; Dane falls two steps and Joanna blames Flynn.

For three days I arranged my son's funeral alone.

Joanna did not call once to ask how it was going.

I chose a small white urn myself, and a photo of Milo with his gap-toothed grin.

I told myself she was angry, and that anger would pass.

Then I remembered the mountain.

Last spring I got lost on a hiking trail when my phone died, and I spent a freezing night under a rock.

Dane told Joanna I was lying about being lost, because I just wanted a night alone outdoors.

She switched her phone off and went to sleep.

At dawn I walked down with a swollen ankle, and wolves had been howling all night.

By now Dane had surely invented some new story about where I was.

I no longer cared, because I only wanted to say goodbye to my son properly.

On the fourth day I went home to pack.

I opened the front door, and a pillow hit me in the chest.

"Joanna, you're hopeless at this!" Dane shouted from the living room.

He was holding something out at arm's length.

It was a sex toy, still half in its box.

"It has no heat setting," he complained. "And it's the wrong size. Did you even read what I wrote down?"

"You asked me to buy it, and now you're yelling at me for buying it?" Joanna said.

She was smiling at him, a warm, easy smile I hadn't seen in years.

Dane was wearing a white shirt I had ironed for Joanna that week.

I looked at it for a while.

Once, I had asked if we could swap shirts for a morning, just for fun.

"You're not twenty," she had said. "People will laugh at you. And you'll stretch the collar."

She had never had a problem lending one to Dane.

They both noticed me then, and the room went still.

"Don't stop on my account," I said. "I only came for my things."

I started up the stairs.

Joanna followed and caught my sleeve on the landing.

"You vanished for three days, Flynn, and I haven't even asked where you were," she said. "What right do you have to sulk?"

I pulled my arm free.

Dane's dog was crouched at the top of the stairs with its face in a bowl.

It was one of my own casserole dishes, and it was my short ribs in the sauce she liked, the same ones I'd left in the fridge every Sunday.

"My dog adores your cooking," Dane said, coming up behind me with a grin.

He draped his arm around my shoulder.

"Keep sending it, Flynn. It's the only thing you're good for."

I turned and looked at Joanna.

She studied the carpet.

I had burned my hands for weeks learning that recipe because she said she liked it once.

All this time I had been cooking for the dog.

Everything inside me went dull and cold.

I shrugged his arm off my shoulder, hard.

Dane flew backward, and he took exactly two steps down the staircase on his backside.

He lay at the bottom clutching his ankle and howling.

"I didn't do anything!" he cried. "Joanna, it hurts so much!"

Joanna ran down and knelt beside him.

When she looked up at me, her face was dark.

"You pushed him? That is how you treat your brother-in-law? Apologize right now!"

Dane peeked at me over her shoulder, and he smirked.

I was too tired to play his game.

I turned and climbed the stairs without a word.

"What kind of man is this cold?" Joanna shouted after me. "How are you supposed to teach Milo anything?"

I heard her soften as she lifted Dane to the couch.

I heard her humming to him, low and gentle.

I had heard that same tune at Milo's bedside once.

Milo had died believing his mother only loved him some of the time.

In the bedroom I pulled a suitcase from the closet.

I packed Milo's pajamas, his dinosaur, the blue cup he liked, and then my own few shirts, one at a time.

Behind me, the bedroom door swung open.

Joanna stood there with her arms folded.

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