He Massaged My Legs While Marrying Another Woman novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Rehearsal
Lydia crosses the city alone to surprise her husband and finds him rehearsing his wedding to his assistant; she cancels the card paying for it, and the hotel's owner tells her she killed his brother.
Four days before my husband married another woman, I crossed the city alone to surprise him.
Preston had told me he had a board lunch at a downtown hotel, then a flight out of town, back on Friday.
That morning he had knelt beside my bed and rubbed my legs before he left, working down from the knee.
I couldn't feel it. I watched his hands.
"It's the least I can do," he said, the way he said it every morning.
Six months ago, Preston told me, I had driven us into a guardrail on Route 9 in the rain.
I remembered none of it.
He said the other car only lost a fender and the insurance paid.
He kept the police report in his office safe, because he said reading it would put me back in the hospital.
I believed him. He had stayed when most husbands would have left.
By one o'clock I had taken two lift buses and rolled the long way around a broken curb.
I did it without a nurse, without Preston, without asking anyone.
I wanted to see his face when I told him.
The woman at the front desk pointed me down a hall toward the grand ballroom.
Its doors stood half open.
Inside was a white floral arch taller than the doorframe.
Preston stood under it.
Skylar stood facing him, holding both his hands.
Skylar Treadwell was his executive assistant.
She had brought me soup the week of the crash and every week since.
She wore a cream dress and a thin pearl bracelet that looked like one that went missing from my hospital bag.
I thought, plenty of bracelets look like that.
There were thirty folding chairs, a quartet tuning up, and a woman with a clipboard.
His mother sat in the front row with her coat folded on her knees.
An easel by the door held a card in gold script.
Preston and Skylar. Friday, 4 p.m.
The officiant said, "Repeat after me."
"I, Preston, take you, Skylar," my husband said.
I rolled one wheel forward, and the push rim squeaked.
Skylar saw me first.
She dropped his hands and pressed her fingers to her mouth.
"Lydia," she said. "Oh, no. Preston, she's here."
Every head in the room turned.
Somebody in the third row had already lifted a phone.
Preston came down the aisle fast, and he knelt in front of my chair, the way he did every morning.
He took both my hands in his.
"Lyd. Sweetheart. You're tired and you shouldn't be out alone. This is not what you think."
"Then tell me what it is."
"We talked about this in August. You signed the papers and we sat up for an hour. Don't you remember?"
I remembered a stack of insurance forms and a pen he had put in my hand.
"I signed medical forms," I said.
"You signed the divorce," his mother said from her chair, quietly. "Preston has been so patient with you."
Preston squeezed my hands. "The doctors said your memory would come and go."
"Friday at four," I said. "That's a wedding."
"It's a family matter," he said. "We can talk at home."
Skylar knelt down on my other side and laid a hand on my arm.
"Let me take you home, Lydia," she said. "I'll make you tea. You never should have come alone."
Her voice was kind. Her bracelet touched my wrist and I took my arm back.
The woman with the clipboard stepped forward, red in the face.
"Mr. Aldous, I'm sorry to interrupt. The balance for the hundred and twenty guests is due Wednesday, on the card ending 4471."
I knew those four digits.
It was the card on my account, the one Preston carried in his wallet to pay my medical bills.
My father's money had paid for the flowers, the quartet and the arch.
I let go of Preston's hands.
So I called the bank.
I put the phone on speaker and held it where the whole room could hear.
"I need to report the card ending 4471," I said. "Cancel it now. Every charge from today on is fraud."
"Lydia," Preston said. "Give me the phone."
I rolled back two feet.
The woman on the line said, "Done, Mrs. Aldous. Is there anything else?"
"Yes. Lock the account to everyone but me."
"Locked."
Nobody in the ballroom spoke.
The woman with the clipboard looked at Preston and waited for an answer.
Preston stood up, brushed his knees and lowered his voice.
"You have no idea what you've just done."
"Thirty people know exactly what I've done," I said.
I turned my chair around and rolled out through the doors.
Behind me his mother, Judith, said, "Somebody make her stop," and nobody did.
In the corridor a tall man in a charcoal suit stood at the elevator with one hand holding the door.
He had gray at his temples and his eyes were on my face.
"Mrs. Aldous," he said.
"Do I know you?"
"I own the Oakridge Hotel. My name is Knox Hartigan."
He did not step aside to let me past.
"Six months ago my brother Teddy died on Route 9," he said. "The car that hit him was yours."
I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.
"Preston told me the other driver walked away," I said.
"My brother didn't walk anywhere," Knox said. "You were driving the car that killed him."
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