Chapter 7: Three Years Inside

Stanley's POV

Lydia didn't speak to me for the whole drive home.

She waited until we were through the gate, and then she turned in the passenger seat with her arms folded.

"You stood up for a waitress against me, in front of my friends."

"She was being treated like dirt."

"She was being treated like staff. There's a difference." She looked out at the water. "Why were you staring at her?"

"I wasn't."

"Stanley. I've known you since I was nineteen."

That was the one thing about the new world I couldn't argue with.

In the real one, she had known me since she was nineteen too.

I parked, and she went upstairs without waiting for me.

I poured a whiskey and stood in the kitchen where my wife had stood, and I thought about the way Lydia had said my wife's name back to her.

Tamara. Pretty. Very plain.

That wasn't a woman who had just forgotten something.

That was the person who had been hiding behind the person I knew.

I kept turning it over.

She had picked out Tamara's wedding dress and held Tamara's hand at Tamara's mother's funeral.

She had been the first one at the hospital door the year Tamara almost died.

Every one of those memories had gone out of Lydia's head at midnight, and nothing in her face had changed to show it.

The part I couldn't understand was how little she'd seemed to miss.

I carried the glass upstairs and found her in the sitting room off the bedroom, in her robe, brushing out her hair.

"I want to ask you something," I said.

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