Dara reached out for the wall, her legs shaking. Thinking of the broken slat, Marie’s face peeking through.
Marie, she thought, her mind racing, Marie, you gave it all away. You gave us all away.
* * *
*
That’s the greatest trick women ever pulled on us,” he said. “Making us believe they’re different.”
He was halfway down, the old steps groaning beneath him.
“She’s using you,” Dara called out, running to the top of the stairs. “She’s using you and when she’s done, she’ll come home to us.”
Derek stopped, turned.
“Come home to you?” he said. “Is that what you think is gonna happen? That poor kid. That poor goddamned kid.”
Dara felt a sharp pain in her back suddenly, profoundly. “What does that mean?” she asked, her voice gritty and strained. “What did she tell you?”
“Family secrets,” Derek said, his parting shot, “are the very worst kind, aren’t they?”
* * *
*
She watched from the hallway window until his truck pulled away, like an oil slick spreading.
When she was sure he was gone, she stood in the bedroom doorway where he’d stood. The Big Bad Wolf. She wanted to see what he’d seen. That most private space. That space of countless intimacies.
But all she saw was the shabby blond dresser and the bunkbed, which took up nearly the whole room, its footboard glinting from the hallway light.
Is this, she thought, what it looks like from the outside?
Is this all it looks like?
But then she couldn’t sit with the thought. The idea.
So she let it flit past and focused instead on what was in front of her: the gleam of Derek’s smeary palm print on the bunkbed, on its headboard.
* * *
*
Her fingers fumbling over the keys, she texted Charlie and he called immediately. He was nearly home, only blocks away, but he called, the sound of him clambering for a dropped phone on the other end.
* * *
*
What?” Charlie said, rushing through the front door, his breath still fogged from the night air. “I don’t . . .”
“He was in our bedroom.”
“Our bedroom?”
“No, our bedroom,” Dara said, confusing herself. “Marie and me. But he could have been everywhere.”
“How did he get in here? I mean—”
“Marie,” Dara said.
His coat half off, Charlie’s arms dropped.
“Is that what he told you? Does she even still have a key?”
“Of course. We didn’t force her to surrender her key to us.”
Then she remembered Marie earlier that evening, her head twitching when Dara explained to Madame Sylvie that Charlie wouldn’t be joining them that night.
“She thought we’d both be at the Ballenger. She gave him her key.”
“Dara, I don’t . . .” Charlie started but then stopped.
“He wasn’t getting anywhere with us on partnering to sell the house,” Dara said, “and now he’s got a new angle. She’s filled his head with crazy ideas.”
“Like what?”
“Like we took advantage of her. Like we stole the house out from under her.”
“Dara,” Charlie said, hands on her shoulders now, “we’ll fix this. We’ll . . . I’ll fix it.”
“We have to fire him,” Dara said. “Tomorrow.”
“Of course,” Charlie said, but he wouldn’t quite look at her.
How tentatively he walked, his back arched, his coat dragging behind him. His gait strained, stilted. His body stiff, like—as they used to joke years ago when it all still felt like it would go away soon—Frankenstein’s monster.
“I just need to think,” he said, heading for the stairs.
* * *
*
She waited for him to come to bed, but first he took a bath. Then she heard him moving through the house, checking all the locks, attaching the door chains.
Finally, late into the night, Dara crept downstairs and found Charlie sitting at the kitchen table. His back curved, the whiteness of his shoulders hunched. His legs spread wide and, before him, a plate of blobby pasta, untouched, spattered up the napkin tucked in his undershirt.
Something was wrong. He shouldn’t sit like that, not with his injuries. His half-broken body. But also a dancer—especially a dancer like Charlie—never sat like that, crooked, humped.
“I figured it out,” he said, not even turning around, his angel-blond head bowed.
Dara stepped inside, her eyes on the stove, red-spattered, broken sticks of stale spaghetti scattered across its top. Spaghetti that likely dated back more than a decade, her father’s love of Mueller’s with canned clams, or a pat of butter, ten raps from the grated-cheese can, emerald green and jumbo-size.