I stand up now and watch as the guard escorts Ben into the visitors’ area, trying to imagine how different I must look to him after only one week. I caught a glance of myself in my hallway mirror as I was leaving to visit the prison: the life has flushed back into my cheeks, like someone dripped red dye into water and let it expand, creeping to the edges. Turning everything pink. My eyes are wider, brighter, more alert, and the shadows beneath them are beginning to fade like a healing bruise.
But Ben: He looks different, too.
“How are you doing?” I ask, tilting my head as we both take a seat. I can see it now, finally, what everyone else had seen in me: The exhaustion etched so deep in his face and the new wrinkles that have practically appeared overnight. The way his skin looks sallow and pale, like something slowly dying. “Are you getting any sleep?”
Ben looks at me and runs his hands down his cheeks, his fingers pulling at the stubble. I can’t help but stare at the handcuffs on his wrists, pinching his skin.
“Isabelle,” he says at last, his voice hoarse. “I didn’t do this.”
I think back to that morning at Valerie’s. To standing up, looking around. Her lifeless body beneath me, and the gravity of what I had done settling over everything. To blinking my eyes, trying to clear the dark spots from my vision and the spinning in my head. The realization that it would come back to me—that it would always come back to me. The scorned wife, the desperate mother. The crazed woman who simply lost it in a frantic quest for answers.
“They found your ring beneath her couch,” I say now. “Right next to her body. Your DNA was all over her, Ben. Beneath her nails. It doesn’t look good.”
“Because we were together that morning,” he says, frustrated, ripping his hands through his hair like he’s repeated that same statement so many times before.
I remember the twitching of my fingers as the last bits of adrenaline left my body, like an overworked muscle starting to give out. How they had snaked their way beneath the collar of my shirt as I stared down at her, thinking, twisting Ben’s ring between them like I had done so many times before.
The ring with his name etched across the surface. The ring nobody even knew I had.
“That ring,” he says now. “I don’t know how that ring got there, Isabelle. I have no fucking clue. I don’t even wear it anymore. Maybe she took it from my condo or something, I don’t know.”
“Did you find out what she did to Mason?” I ask, my voice soft. “Because if you did, I wouldn’t blame you. I would have done the same thing.”
“No,” he says. “Jesus, Isabelle, I swear. I had no idea. Look: I’m sorry, I am. I’m sorry for everything. But I didn’t kill anybody.”
I look at Ben, my husband, and marvel at how well it all came together: the story I created, woven into reality as I stood in Valerie’s living room, rubbing the ring against my shirt and rolling it across the floor. As I picked at the evidence, the facts, and pieced together a narrative to explain it all away. I knew how it would look once the police found it there, ripped off in a struggle and lost in the dusty corners beneath the couch.
A married man and his mistress. I knew how the story would unfold.
“It’s easy to blame the boyfriend,” I say, Waylon’s voice pulsing in my ears like the steady thrum of heartbeat: I want him to pay. “Just like it’s easy to blame the mother. But you know what still doesn’t make sense to me, though? What I can’t figure out?”
“What’s that?” he asks, irritation dripping.
“How did Valerie know the baby monitor was dead?”
I take in the sharp clench of his jaw; the subtle clank of the chains as his leg shifts beneath him. The bob of his throat as he swallows, readying himself for a lie.
“She knew it was there,” I continue. “She had been to our house before and she never once went into his nursery. I would have seen her on my phone.”
“I don’t know,” he says, his voice low. “I have no idea.”
“But she had to have known it wasn’t recording that night. It’s almost like someone mentioned it to her.”
Ben is silent across the table, his eyes on mine.
“Like someone told her which night to show up.”
I can feel the heavy air between us, and I know, in my gut, that I’m right about this, too. I can picture them lying in our bed together during one of my nights away. I can hear Mason’s cries erupting from beneath the door and Ben sighing, leaving, muttering something about how I had let the batteries die and couldn’t be bothered to change them. Valerie, stretched out alone, the wheels in her mind starting to spin, and his voice the grease they needed to keep turning.