The Secret That Broke Us novel · Chapter 5 of 32

Chapter 5: What She Took

On Thursday the doctor said I could go home, if home was a place where I would lie on my left side and do nothing.

I said I knew exactly the place.

Lena's house was two doors down from mine.

First, we had to go to mine.

I couldn't lift anything, so I sat in a kitchen chair in the middle of the room I had painted myself and pointed.

Lena packed.

Ben carried.

I hadn't asked him.

He had shown up at nine in jeans and a gray sweatshirt, with a stack of flattened boxes under his arm, and said Lena had called him.

Lena said she hadn't.

She had.

"The crib stays," I said, when he came to the nursery door.

"You don't want it?"

"I want it. I'm taking the mattress. Nate built the frame."

Ben looked at the room.

It was yellow, with a small shelf of board books and a lamp shaped like a moon.

Everything in it had been bought by me or given to me at the shower that was coming on Saturday.

I had imagined this room for four years.

"I'll take the mattress," he said, and lifted it as if it weighed nothing.

I watched him carry it out.

I noticed his forearms.

I noticed that I'd noticed.

Then I noticed I'd been staring at the doorway for a long time.

"Don't," Lena said, kneeling by a box of kitchen things.

"I wasn't."

"You were looking at a man's arms while your husband's at the hospital with another woman."

"He's not my husband in any way that counts," I said.

"Then look all you want," said Lena, "but not today."

Through the front window I saw a neighbor on his porch pretending to rake.

Another one stood at her mailbox.

Everybody on our street had heard the call by now.

In a town this size, the police scanner doesn't stay on the scanner.

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