The Heiress(48)

“You brave girl,” he murmured, and it cracked something open inside me.

Not a monster. Not a murderess, a liar, a lunatic.

Brave.

The love I felt for him overflowed from that crack in my heart, the understanding in his face a balm I hadn’t known I needed, and I felt almost drunk with gratitude, with the freedom that came from saying it all out loud.

Like I said.

Soft. Stupid.

Stupid enough to get greedy, to want that same love and understanding poured over Hugh’s death as well, for both of my darkest sins to be washed clean.

If I hadn’t been so giddy with the relief of it all, maybe I would’ve found better words or known to soften the story. But it felt so good, you see, spilling all this darkness into a welcoming vessel, and so I didn’t catch the shock—the horror—that I had been waiting for when recounting Duke’s death slowly slide into his eyes as I described Hugh’s.

I didn’t notice how the fingers of his left hand, resting on the back of the couch near my head, began curling tightly inward like he was afraid he might touch me accidentally.

I didn’t realize I’d lost him until it was too late.

The silence stretched between us once the story was over, and he tried to smile at me, but it wobbled on his face. He cleared his throat and said, “What things to keep in your heart.”

Then he sat back, his book sliding off his lap and hitting the floor, pages bending. He didn’t pick it up. He only rubbed a hand over his mouth, and muttered, “What things to keep in mine.”

I knew then that he’d never tell anyone.

I want you to understand, that’s not what I was afraid of. I didn’t think he’d go running to the police or the press. I didn’t think he’d leave me, either.

Honestly, I wish he’d done either of those things. That would’ve been better. It would’ve been easier.

Instead, we went on as before, like nothing had changed, but everything had, of course. I’d catch him watching me, and the look in those eyes that I loved so much––the very first thing I had noticed about him––became worse than any prison sentence. Worse than a hangman’s noose.

I hope you never have to watch the one person you love most in the world, the person who loves you just as fiercely in return, lose that love, day by day, bit by bit, a steady draining away until there’s nothing left. Until they’re just a person who sleeps inches from you at night, and eats meals across a table from you, and reads books at your side, even smiles at you or laughs with you, but whose heart has shut you out forever.

Andrew was a good man. Truly. I think he loved me very much, and even after he knew the worst of me, he still wanted to love me. I think he tried.

But he couldn’t.

And if he couldn’t, I realized, no one could. No one ever would.

I waited for him to leave me. I would’ve let him go. I want you to understand that, before we get to this next part. If Andrew had only left, if he’d only told me he couldn’t stay married to me knowing what I’d done, I would have signed any papers he wanted, given him all the money in the world.

But he didn’t leave.

Not physically, at least. Spiritually, emotionally, mentally … oh, he left me in those ways. But he stayed in the house, stayed my husband, and the longer that went on, the more unbearable it started to feel.

Even now I ask myself why he stayed. I’ve had over thirty years to wonder over it, and I think he was waiting to get past it. To love me again. Or maybe that’s just what I want to believe.

At the time, however, those darker thoughts crept back in. Duke had wanted my money and my body and my fear. Hugh had wanted some idealized version of me, a woman on a pedestal. Andrew had, I believed, wanted me for me. But what if I’d been wrong? What if it was the money, the easy life in Ashby House, the heightened attention on his art that came from being the husband of a wealthy woman?

When I first started slipping the ant killer into his morning tea—just the smallest amount, never enough to kill—I didn’t actually want him to die. I just wanted to bring an end to the torture for us both.

Surely, he’d realize what was happening, and he would tell someone. Part of me even hoped he’d call the police, and I’d be forced to face some punishment for my sins. At the very least, he’d finally leave me, end the charade that we were both stuck in.

As he got sicker, thinner, I waited. For him to drive down that mountain and never return, to tell someone what I’d done to Duke and Hugh, what he now thought—what he must have known—I was doing to him.

But instead, I watched Andrew sit there in Dr. Donaldson’s office, nodding as he said the symptoms might be from all the years of exposure to his paints and their chemicals. Or, perhaps it was some kind of rare infection, or an autoimmune disease they had yet to detect. There were all kinds of ideas and theories thrown his way, charcoal tablets prescribed, sleep studies scheduled, and never once did Andrew say, “Or, perhaps my murderous wife is killing me.”

Not once.

I’ve never understood that. Even when he was retching in agony, even when I got more and more reckless––with bigger doses in his lukewarm tea and oatmeal, the only things he could keep down––he never said a word, never took those fucking tablets that might have saved him.

He just looked at me with those sad eyes of his, and I wanted him to die and I wanted him to live and I wanted someone to stop me, to march into Ashby House with handcuffs, a straitjacket, even, and finally—finally—put an end to it.