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

to be in a calm enough state to make the call. She would. First, though, she would pack.

It was hard to know what to pack when your head wasn’t attached to your body. Grace’s head seemed to be floating above her, like a kind of drone, looking down on her life, taking inventory, and trying to make sense of it all. She was just a single piece in a giant puzzle, and the pieces were scattered all over the place.

Martijn was her husband, the man she shared a bed with every night, and whom she kissed on the lips and told about her day and shared the details of her daughter’s life. Her home, this house, was a place where she filled wooden bowls with fresh fruit for everyone to eat, where she made sure that each child’s bed had the same matching, paisley-patterned bedsheets that were non-offensive to any age group, and a yoga nook where there were soft meditation cushions and brass chimes and sculptures of Buddha in case anyone ever felt they needed a time-out.

And yet it was also a place where, upstairs, in a private chamber at the top of the house that she was strictly forbidden to enter, her husband held a collection of information about her former, murdered husband that suggested—perhaps only circumstantially, certainly only circumstantially so far—that, in the extreme worst-case scenario, he was some kind of secret agent or operative or Syrian government spy who had been tracking her husband’s movements. And what if she was right about any of this crazy absurdity? Could he have been involved in Pieter’s death?

No, it couldn’t be true. None of it could be true. It simply didn’t make any sense. Oh, how he would laugh at what she was imagining! How he would hold his belly and laugh at the hilarity of it all. Yes, of course he would be just a little bit irked that she had gone through his stuff and drawn conclusions based on some random bits of information. But he would be sensible about it.

Grace started grabbing clothes off the hangers in her closet and just stuffing them into a suitcase lying on her bed. It didn’t matter what she brought with her, as long as it would serve as clothing. Then she went over to her bureau and seized handfuls of underwear and socks from the top drawer, remembering to take a pair of pajamas and the small box of her mother’s pearls hidden in the back. One after another, she yanked out the drawers and pulled out jeans, pants, shirts, sweaters, and just threw them into her suitcase.

Grace had a fleeting sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. What if her suspicions would prove to be correct? That was the most chilling prospect.

There was enough in this suitcase. She zipped up one side and then tried to zip it closed all the way. There was too much in there, though, and it wouldn’t quite shut. She got up on the bed and sat on the top of it and forced the suitcase to close, and now it did, and she zipped it up while sitting on top. Then she pressed his number and waited. The phone rang only three times before he picked up.

“Honey?” he said. Already that relaxed her. “I’m surprised to hear from you.”

Grace let out a soft giggle, a girlish habit of hers that she couldn’t shake. She laughed whenever she was nervous. “Yeah, I know. I didn’t think we’d need to talk till you were back tomorrow, but something came up.”

“You missed me?” Martijn said hopefully.

Grace, so ready to be assuaged, took this as a comfort.

And then, more formally and brusquely, “What’s up?”

Grace was still sitting on the suitcase, bouncing ever so slightly. “Um,” she said, and then there was a long pause. “I went into your office. Please don’t be mad. I know you really like to have your own private space, and I respect that. I was just hoping to clean it up while you were gone. I was going to surprise you by making it really tidy for when you came back. Wow, it really did need a vacuum, honey.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. All she heard was breathing, deep and long inhales and exhales, that almost sounded like he was not actually paying attention, like he was hauling something over there. Like he was dragging something across the ground.

“Sorry, come again?” he said.

He had not been listening. She repeated herself, nearly word for word, trying to sound even more cheerful and nonchalant than before. “Hm, that’s thoughtful of you,” said Martijn, sounding like he wasn’t exactly buying her act but willing to go along with it for the sake of—something. “I can clean it myself if I want it tidier.” He paused. “But I appreciate the sentiment.”

They were both silent for a moment. How far were they going to extend this particular theatrical performance? If he was trying to hide something, he would probably start feeling worried right now, right?

“I just kind of got curious and I found something—well, I found something I thought was surprising…” There was really no way to make it sound like she had stumbled on this material. Oh, why had she called him? She should have just waited until he came home and asked him about it then.

“Oh, you found something that is concerning to you?” he said calmly. At the same time, however, he seemed to be breathing heavily on the other end of the line. It was as if he was engaged in some kind of sporting activity while talking. “Listen, Grace, I never said you couldn’t go up there. I’m sure we can discuss whatever you found. But could it wait until I’m back home?”

Martijn made a strange and sudden kind of outburst on the line that sounded like a grunt—“Ugh!”—as if he was throwing something heavy, like a big suitcase maybe, into a car.

“What are you