Chapter 2 - The Confession
Demi crossed to the door, opened it a few inches, glanced both ways down the corridor, and drew it firmly shut. Then she came back and looked down at him, and the face she wore now was not the one the nurses saw.
That face was drawn with worry, brave in its grief, the devoted young wife keeping vigil. This one was smooth and cool and faintly amused, as though she had finally set down something heavy she’d been carrying a long time.
“There,” she said. “No audience. Just us. Isn’t that nicer?”
He tried to answer. His throat produced only a dry rasp, a sound with no words in it. His hand moved a few inches across the blanket and stopped, too weak to do more.
“Don’t strain yourself, sweetheart.” She pulled the visitor’s chair close and sat, crossing her legs, settling in as if for a chat. “You don’t have to say anything.
For once you can just listen.”
She let the silence stretch, watching his face, enjoying it.
“Your factory,” she said at last, ticking the items off lightly, almost fondly. “Your properties. The stock, the accounts, all of it — mine. Well. Mine and Gareth’s.
We’ve already picked out a house in San Diego, right on the water. You’d hate it. Too much glass, too much sun. You always liked things dark and serious.”
She smiled. “You worked your whole life like a dog for that money, and Gareth and I are going to spend every last cent of it enjoying ourselves. I thought you’d want to know.”
Gareth. Roderick turned the name over. He knew it — a personal trainer she’d hired two years ago, a broad, handsome man of thirty who had seemed to Roderick like a harmless indulgence, a way for a young wife to fill her afternoons.
He felt something twist in his chest that had nothing to do with his heart.
Demi watched the understanding cross his face and seemed satisfied by it.
“You’re wondering how,” she said. “You’re lying there doing the math, because that’s what you do, you do the math. All right. I’ll tell you, since you can’t repeat it to anyone.”
She leaned in, lowering her voice to something almost tender. “Those heart supplements I brought you every night. The ones I was so good about, so wifely — here’s your vitamins, darling, take care of yourself.
Digoxin. It’s a real cardiac drug, that’s the beautiful part. In the right hands it helps a failing heart keep time. In mine, given the right way over enough months, it does exactly the opposite.
And no one looks twice, because a fifty-six-year-old man with a bad heart who dies of a bad heart is just a sad, ordinary story.” She sat back. “You never questioned a single pill.
You trusted me completely. That was always going to be the easiest part.”
The monitor beside the bed climbed, the intervals between beats shortening. She glanced at it and laid a manicured hand flat on his chest, over the racing of his heart, the way a wife might to soothe a frightened husband.
“Shh,” she murmured, and smiled at the cruelty of it. “Don’t go before I’ve said goodbye. That would be rude.”
Roderick lay pinned under her hand and her voice, unable to shout, unable to rise, unable to do anything but understand. And what he understood, more than the fear, more than the fury, was the loss of four years.
Every embrace. Every whispered word in the dark. Every time she had cupped his face and told him he was hers. All of it a performance, rehearsed and delivered by a woman who had been measuring out his death by the spoonful the entire time.
“The funeral will be short,” she said, standing, smoothing her skirt. “Private. Tasteful. There’s no sense wasting good money on a dead man when I’ve got a new car to buy.”
She took a compact from her bag, checked her lipstick, snapped it shut. Then she bent and pressed a light kiss to his forehead, the way she had a thousand times.
“Goodbye, Roderick. Try not to drag it out.”
She walked to the door, opened it, and rearranged her face into grief between one step and the next. By the time she was in the corridor she was the grieving wife again, murmuring something soft to a passing nurse.
Roderick stared at the ceiling. His eyes filled and spilled over, and the tears ran down into his ears, and he let them, because there was no one to see and nothing left to protect.
He was not crying because he was going to die. He had made his peace with that in the gray hour before dawn. He was crying for the four years, and for the particular loneliness of learning, at the very end, that the person who had held your hand had been holding it only to feel your pulse.
What Demi did not know — what she had been far too pleased with herself to notice — was that the smartwatch lying on the bedside table, the one Roderick still wore out of habit even here, had been recording since the moment she leaned over the rail.
May you like
He had turned it on that morning, after the doctor’s whisper in the hall, because some old instinct born of forty years of contracts and handshakes and men who smiled while they lied had told him to.
He had not known what he expected to catch. He had caught everything.
