Chapter 5 - The Geography of an Alibi
“You talked about me,” I said.
The words didn't sound like my own voice. They sounded like a recording played back at half-speed on a cheap tape deck.
Marcus dropped his hand from his nose, his fingers twitching against the soft terrycloth of the bathrobe pocket. “Sim, let’s go downstairs. Please. I’ll get my clothes, we’ll check out of this room right now, and we can drive back to Baltimore together. We can talk about this in the car. We can get a counselor—we can talk to Dr. Evans on Monday.”
“Dr. Evans,” I said. We had spent four sessions with Dr. Evans three years ago when Marcus thought his job stress was making him impotent. Dr. Evans had a framed diploma from Johns Hopkins on the wall and a box of mints on the glass coffee table that always tasted like old peppermint oil.
“Dr. Evans can help us sort through this,” Marcus said, his voice rising now, losing that smooth municipal cadence and starting to crack at the edges like cheap plaster. “People make mistakes, Simone. Eight months... I know it sounds like a long time, but things happen when you’re under pressure. You don't know what it’s been like at the firm lately—the restructuring, the partners breathing down my neck—”
“Shut up,” I said.
It wasn't loud. It was just two syllables, dropped into the space between us with the casual weight of a paving stone.
Marcus stopped. His mouth remained half-open, a little circle of pale skin against his beard-shadowed jaw.
“Eight months isn't a mistake,” I said, stepping backward out of the doorway into the narrow hallway where the air smelled of stale carpet cleaner and distant rain. “A mistake is forgetting to put the milk back in the fridge. A mistake is taking the wrong exit off the beltway. Eight months requires a calendar, Marcus. It requires you to sit at our kitchen island every Sunday night and write down your meetings for the week while I make turkey sandwiches for your lunches. It requires you to look me in the eye and tell me you love me before you drive down here to play house with someone who wears my shirts.”
I reached down and picked up the two silver gift bags from the carpet. The weight of the bourbon bottle shifted inside the heavy cardboard, the glass clinking softly against the bottom like a small, hollow bell.
“What are you doing?” Marcus asked, his feet shuffling forward an inch across the threshold.
“I’m leaving,” I said.
“Sim, wait—don't be irrational. Let’s just—let’s talk about the house. The mortgage is in both our names, we can’t just—”
“The house is yours,” I said, my fingers tightening around the silver ribbon handles until the paper cut into my palms. “You keep the house, Marcus. You keep the mortgage, you keep the lawn mower, and you keep the spare wool blankets in the linen closet that smell like lavender.”
I turned on my heel, my black pumps clicking against the plum-colored carpet of the ninth-floor hallway with a sharp, clean rhythm that sounded like a door slamming in an empty house.
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“Simone!”
His voice followed me down the corridor, high and ragged, stripped of all the dignity he had spent twenty years building up in boardrooms and suburban committee meetings. But I didn't look back. I didn't slow down until I reached the elevator bank, where the little brass arrow above the door was already glowing red, waiting to take me down to the lobby, out into the rain, and back to a house that was suddenly, terrifyingly my own.
