Beneath a Transparent Dream novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Dare
At a party in the glass house on the bay, Zach draws a dare and kisses Cora over a plate of spaghetti, so Matilda takes off her ring and leaves; Eli texts her to check the bakery's line of credit.
Zach lost the last round of the card game, and forty people cheered before anyone read his forfeit.
Matilda stood by the glass wall with a tray of her own lemon bars.
She had baked for the party because the hostess asked, and nobody had told her she could stop working.
Behind the glass the bay was black and the whole room showed in it twice.
The host had written every forfeit card by hand that afternoon.
He held the last one out to Zach, and Zach plucked it from his fingers with a grin.
The host did not laugh when it was read aloud.
"Recreate the spaghetti scene from Lady and the Tramp," Zach announced. "With one of the women in this room."
"Pick your wife!" a man shouted. "It's her bakery, she'll know the noodles."
Zach looked across the table at Matilda and smiled at her.
"Where's the fun in that?"
The room laughed.
The hostess, Cora Penhallow, had been Matilda's best friend for nine years.
She crossed the glass floor in her green dress, took the tray of lemon bars out of Matilda's hands, and set it down.
"Hold my wine, Tillie?" she said, and pressed the glass into Matilda's palm. "It's only a dare. You know he would never."
Matilda nodded, because she did know him, and he was her husband.
Zach walked straight to Cora and did not look back at the wife who was holding her drink.
Somebody set a plate of spaghetti between them on the long table.
They each took one end of a single noodle in their mouths.
Forty phones came up.
Matilda watched them, numb.
Their lips met in the middle, and Zach did not pull back.
The cheering went on, and Cora laughed against his mouth.
Then Cora wiped the sauce from his chin with her thumb, and Zach caught her wrist and held it a moment too long.
Nobody else in the room saw that.
Matilda saw it, and she remembered the night four weeks ago when she had woken at three in the morning.
Her husband had been asleep beside her, one arm flung over the pillow.
He had said Cora's name into the dark, low and rough, the way he used to say hers.
Matilda had lain still until it was light.
She had not left the porch light on for him since.
She had stopped driving across town to collect him from bars when he drank too much.
Tonight she had baked sixty lemon bars for the woman who was now licking marinara off her husband's lip.
Matilda set Cora's wine glass down on the table.
She walked to the middle of the room, and the cheering thinned out as people noticed her coming.
"Tillie," Zach said. "It's a game."
She twisted her wedding ring over her knuckle.
It was loose now. She had lost weight she had not noticed losing.
She laid the ring on the rim of the plate, in the red sauce, between the two of them.
"I heard her name in our bed, Zach," she said. "Four weeks ago. You can have the rest of the dare."
Somebody's phone was still recording.
Cora's face went white, and then it went soft and wet.
"Matilda, honey, no, you've got it wrong," she said. "He's been drinking. We all have."
"I haven't," Matilda said.
She fetched her coat from the hall by herself.
Nobody came after her, until she reached the front step and found the host there, Cora's husband Eli Harcourt, with her scarf over his arm.
He had come out the side door to beat her to it.
He did not say he was sorry, and he did not say he was shocked.
He held the scarf out, and she took it.
"Aren't you going to go back in there?" she asked him. "It's your wife."
"In a minute," Eli said. "Drive carefully."
She drove the whole length of Shore Road with both hands on the wheel and the heater turned up high.
At the stop sign by the lighthouse her phone lit up with a number she did not know.
It said: This is Eli. Check the bakery's line of credit tonight, before you speak to Zach. Don't let him see you do it.
She had never told Eli there was a line of credit.
She had barely known it herself, except that Zach had said last spring it was only for the new oven.
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