“No,” I say, letting the silence stretch out for a beat too long. Then I turn toward him and take a deep breath. “She died.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Ben hadn’t come into the office for three straight days.
I was starting to worry, wonder if maybe it had something to do with me. Maybe someone had found out—but found out about what, exactly? We hadn’t done anything wrong—or maybe he was having regrets, avoiding me. Trying to figure out how to end whatever it was that we had started. He wasn’t answering my texts; he hadn’t told me about any upcoming vacations. He didn’t have any work trips on his calendar.
All I knew was that on Monday, he was there. And then he wasn’t.
“Did you hear?”
Kasey shuffled past my desk, a pencil tucked behind her ear. I peeled my eyes from his closed office door, the darkness of his windows, and moved them over to her, alarm creeping into my chest. Kasey always had that look about her: easy to read. Her emotions were scribbled between the lines of her face like notes on a scrap of loose-leaf paper, and right now they were telling me something was wrong.
“No,” I said. “Hear what?”
“Allison died.”
“What?”
“Allison Drake,” she said. “Ben’s wife. She died.”
“What?” I gasped, my hand shooting to my chest like I’d been shot.
“Yeah. She died.”
“How?”
“Suicide,” she whispered, her mouth on my ear. Her breath was warm and earthy, the way it always was when she drank her coffee black. I wondered if this was what she had been doing all morning—chugging caffeine, making her rounds, spreading the latest office gossip like a jacked-up journalist, reveling in the fact that she knew first. “Or accidental overdose. Either way, it was pills. Like, a shit ton of them.”
I felt the words clot in my throat; I opened my mouth, tried to speak, but nothing came out. Kasey raised her eyebrows, tilted her chin down.
“I know, right?”
“That can’t be right,” I finally said. “Why would she—?”
“I know,” she said, shaking her head. “I have no idea. I guess she had a problem we didn’t know about. That happens with housewives sometimes. Too much time on their hands.”
I conjured up the only real memory I had of Allison: the two of us, standing close on that rooftop, her fingertips on my forearm as Ben stood to the side, watching us both. The way she had leaned into me, shared a secret and a wink. Made me feel like I was suddenly on the inside of something special.
“She seemed happy.”
I felt stupid the second I said it. I knew that one moment we shared together couldn’t possibly be enough to know her—to really know her—but what I was really thinking was: How could she not be happy? She had Ben.
Kasey shrugged. “We all have secrets.”
I watched her walk away, taking a few steps to the next row of desks and leaning down, whispering again. Then I glanced back at Ben’s office, thinking about all the times I had imagined them together: Ben and his wife. Every night after we’d parted ways, I would walk into my apartment, the emptiness making it feel even lonelier than normal. I would sit at my kitchen counter or slump over in my too-small bathtub, lukewarm water barely grazing my chest, and wonder what they were doing together at that exact moment: having a cocktail on the porch, maybe, or cooking something sophisticated for dinner while I would be reheating a coagulated Lean Cuisine I had neglected for too long in the freezer. I would imagine them fucking on expensive granite countertops, water boiling over and spilling onto the floor. It made me want to scream.
But in that moment, a realization settled in my stomach like swallowed vomit, putrid and sour: I knew nothing about her. I knew nothing about them. The inner workings of their lives were a complete mystery to me, and now Allison was dead. Ben’s wife was dead. Which meant that Ben was now a widower.
We all have secrets.
I wondered what Kasey meant by that, what she was suggesting. I wondered if she meant that Allison had secrets—a pill problem, an addiction, that steered her in the direction of taking her own life; a depression that had spiraled out of control, guiding her hand as she tipped the bottle back while Ben was at work—or if she meant that someone else had secrets. Secrets that perhaps she had unearthed.
Secrets she could no longer live with.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
There’s an atmospheric shift in the air at the mention of Allison, her death. Like the way dogs start to whimper when a storm is near, sensing the impending danger. The electrical charge.