You'll Thank Me for This by Nina Siegal (top novels txt) 📗

the branch around in the sky. “Who dares challenge me?”

Chapter 6From There to Here

Grace drove herself home, wishing she’d remembered to bring her earbuds with her so she could call her friends immediately and catch up. As a passenger with Martijn at the wheel on the drive down, she had determined that she would use this weekend to discover her inner Zen, take a bath and unwind with a good book. But now that everyone was gone, and she was on her own for the first time in actual months, she felt a kind of rare exhilaration. She could do anything, go anywhere, make all her own choices. No one to answer to for a full twenty-four hours.

It had been so long since she’d seen Krista, Nicolien, or Thomas, or even any of the mothers from school, for that matter. Before they’d married, this circle of friends had been such close confidants, but lately Grace had felt increasingly closed off from them. Maybe it was her embarrassment about how badly things were going with Martijn. All the rest of them were so happily settled. And they’d been so happy for her, especially after losing Pieter, that she’d found this new situation. Or maybe she’d reduced her contact with them out of a sense that Martijn disapproved of her turning elsewhere for comfort, relying on anyone other than him.

She had this sneaking suspicion that whatever was wrong with them wasn’t the normal kind of wrong. It probably couldn’t be fixed with a little extra sugar or salt or milk. She feared it was somehow more fundamentally flawed, like an instant yeast that simply doesn’t rise. What was it? Was it really his work that was making him so distracted?

In the beginning, Grace had jumped into the relationship with both feet; she had ached so badly to have a new partner after losing Pieter that it was possible she had not been sufficiently circumspect. Two years of stellar sex with this absurdly handsome man who was a good earner and a responsible father had seemed like enough. Let’s take this check to the bank and cash it was her attitude. Why muddle around?

But what did she know about him, really, before they tied the knot? She knew his body and his emotional seasons, his daily ablutions and how he took his coffee (with a surprising amount of milk for a European, she felt). She understood his basic morality, if you could call his modern belief system such. She never had asked him much about his work—accounting wasn’t exactly a topic that invited inquiry, and he was never particularly forthcoming about the daily dramas of his job, if there were any. But what did he do up there, in his office?

She’d met Martijn’s estranged father and his wife, but only about a week before the wedding, because they lived “far away” by Dutch standards, up in the Frisian Islands, about two and a half hours by car. The man seemed polite, if extremely reserved, and the wife appeared to have taken over all the social tasks for the both of them, responding rather loudly to any question directed at him, in a thick Frisian accent that Grace found incomprehensible.

Martijn didn’t have siblings; his mother had died when he was just five, and he’d grown up with his dad and a Jack Russell terrier named Hanro. He barely spoke about his early years, but Grace got the feeling they were lonely and drearily metaphysical, like a George Eliot novel, a boy wandering around in the wet northern heath.

Grace could still remember the time she’d met Martijn’s first wife, Lila, introduced in the narrow hallway of her Amsterdam apartment, on the top floor of a titled canal house, converted from an attic. The woman had given her a dour look that spoke volumes of a Dostoevskian length. Had Grace stopped to try to decipher the meaning behind her eyes she might have prepared herself for this marriage differently—how, she couldn’t really imagine—but she hadn’t taken the time to translate even one sentence of that manuscript. Exes always had grievances, though. Grace, for her part, had been light and easy, carried on the butterfly wings of lust. Sure of everything.

No more. Now she was decidedly unsure.

When she finally reached their house—she couldn’t even remember any part of the scenery during the forty-five-minute drive, so deep in her head had she been—she walked up the front stairs, unlocked the front door, went inside, shut the door behind herself, and felt, in a sudden rush of unreality, as if she had entered a home where she was a stranger.

She walked into the empty kitchen, dropped her handbag on a chair she had never noticed was quite so red, took out her phone, and dialed Lila’s number. She had it because they were technically co-parenting—the boys were with her just now—but she had never once used it before. She wanted to ask Lila something, a question about Martijn and his nature, or about his history and the way he operated. About whether there was something she needed to know that she was missing. She wanted to ask Lila, essentially, what was happening with him.

As she heard the phone ring, she realized the absurdity of this mission. What on earth did she think she was going to ask Lila over the phone right now? How would Lila even have an answer? Whatever she knew about Martijn was then, not now. When she heard Lila pick up, Grace clicked END.

Hm. That was a bit of a ridiculous thing to do with everyone on mobile phones, Grace thought. And then there was Lila, calling back.

“Hey, sorry, I picked up just a second too late,” Lila said. “Everything okay?”

That was the natural question. Lila and Grace were not likely to converse unless there was some kind of family emergency, and if Martijn was unreachable.

“Oh yeah,” said Grace, trying to think fast. “I was just thinking maybe the boys had forgotten…”—she looked around