My Husband's Other Name

Amara set the table three times before she was satisfied. The first time, the candles were too close to the flowers. The second time, the plates looked too formal, like a business dinner rather than an anniversary. The third time, she stepped back, folded her arms, and decided it was perfect. One year. She smoothed the front of her green dress and glanced at the clock on the wall. 7:40. Daniel was late. That alone was strange. In twelve months of marriage, Daniel Hart had never once been late. He was the kind of man who arrived ten minutes early to everything, who ironed his shirts on Sunday nights, who kept a spare umbrella in the car and a spare key under the third flowerpot. Dependable. That was the word she used when her friends asked what he was like. Dependable, quiet, and mine. The lamb had been in the oven for two hours. She checked it again, then checked her phone. No messages. She typed Where are you? and deleted it. She typed Dinner's getting cold and deleted that too. Finally she put the phone face down on the counter and told herself not to be the kind of wife who panicked over twenty minutes. At 7:52, she heard the key in the door. "I know, I know," Daniel called from the hallway. "Don't say anything." He appeared in the kitchen doorway with his coat still on, his dark hair damp from the evening drizzle, a bouquet of white roses in one hand and a small velvet box in the other. He looked slightly out of breath, as though he had run the last block. Amara's irritation melted before she could stop it. "You're late," she said anyway. "I'm very late." He crossed the room and kissed her forehead. "Traffic on the bridge. And then I went back for these because the first shop had nothing but sad carnations." "You went back for roses?" "You said once that white roses were your favorite." "I said that on our second date." "And I've been carrying it around ever since." He smiled, the soft crooked smile she had fallen for, and pressed the flowers into her hands. "Happy anniversary, Amara." She buried her face in the petals so he wouldn't see how much it meant to her. When she looked up, he was opening the velvet box. Inside lay a thin silver bracelet with a tiny charm shaped like a key. "A key?" she asked. "To our home," he said. "To everything I have. It's yours." Her throat tightened. "That's a lot of promises for a small piece of jewelry." "Then I'll keep making them until the jewelry catches up." She laughed, and he fastened the bracelet around her wrist. His fingers were warm and careful, and for a moment the whole kitchen seemed to hold its breath around them. They ate by candlelight. The lamb was slightly overcooked, and Daniel praised it as though it were the finest meal of his life. He told her about the building he was designing, a library with a glass roof that would fill the reading rooms with light. He described the way the client had wanted a fountain in the lobby and how he had argued, politely and for forty minutes, that a fountain in a library was a terrible idea. "Did you win?" she asked. "I lost. There's going to be a fountain." "Of course there is." "But a small one," he said gravely. "I negotiated the size." She was still laughing when his phone buzzed against the table. It lay beside his water glass, the screen lighting up the tablecloth. Amara glanced at it out of habit. An unknown number, no name, just a string of digits. Daniel glanced at it too. For one second, less than a second, something crossed his face. It wasn't surprise. It was the look of a man hearing a footstep he had been waiting for. Then it was gone. He reached over, turned the phone face down, and picked up his fork. "Work?" she asked. "Wrong number, probably." The phone buzzed again. And again. He ignored it each time, cutting his lamb into very precise pieces, but Amara noticed that he had stopped talking about the library. His eyes kept drifting to the dark window and the street beyond it. "Daniel." "Hmm?" "Is everything okay?" "Everything's perfect." He reached across the table and took her hand. "It's our anniversary. Nothing else matters tonight." She wanted to believe him. She did believe him, mostly. After dinner, he insisted on washing the dishes, and she insisted on drying. They bumped hips at the sink and argued about whether the good wine glasses went in the top cabinet or the one beside it. At nine-thirty he kissed her neck and said he was going to take a quick shower. "Don't use all the hot water," she warned. "I would never." "You always do." "Then I'm making a lifelong habit of disappointing you." He disappeared down the hall. She heard the bedroom door close, then the pipes shudder awake. She stood in the kitchen with the dish towel in her hands, smiling at nothing, and thought: This is what happy feels like. Then his phone buzzed again. She looked at the table. He had left it behind, still face down, vibrating in small angry bursts against the wood. It buzzed, stopped, and buzzed again. Whoever was calling had no intention of giving up. "Okay," she murmured. "Okay, I'll just silence you." She picked it up. The same number glowed on the screen. Her thumb hovered over the red button. She didn't know why she pressed green instead. Maybe it was the persistence. Maybe it was the strange knot that had formed in her stomach during dinner, the one she had been trying to ignore. Maybe it was simply that she was tired of being afraid of a phone. "Hello?" Silence. Then the faint sound of breathing, and traffic somewhere behind it. "Hello?" she said again. "Daniel's phone. He can't come to the phone right now." "Daniel," a man's voice repeated slowly. It was a low, smooth voice, in no hurry at all, and it made the small hairs on her arms stand up. "Is that what he's calling himself these days?" Amara frowned. "Sorry, who is this?" "Tell me, does he still wear his watch on the right wrist? He always did, even as a boy. Wouldn't let anyone correct him." Her eyes dropped, without her permission, to the photograph on the fridge. Daniel in a gray suit, laughing, his watch on his right wrist. "I think you have the wrong number," she said, but her voice came out thin. "No. I don't believe I do." The man exhaled, something close to a chuckle. "A whole year. Do you know how long it took us to find him? We checked three countries. And he was here the whole time, hiding in a little house with a little wife." "I'm hanging up." "Mrs. Hart, isn't it?" Her blood went cold. She had not given her name. "You sound like a kind woman," the voice went on, almost gently. "So I'll be kind too. Give Julian a message for me." "There's no one here named Julian." "Tell him the debt is due. Tell him Friday." "I don't know what you're—" "He'll know." The line went dead. Amara stood in the middle of her kitchen with the phone against her ear, listening to nothing. The candles had burned low. The roses sat in their vase. Somewhere in the house, the shower was still running, and she could hear Daniel humming under the water, off-key, the way he always did when he thought no one was listening. Julian. She repeated it silently, like a word in a language she was only beginning to understand. It was a stranger's name. It was a prank, it was a mistake, it was some awful coincidence. But the man had known about the watch. The water shut off. She heard the bathroom door, then bare footsteps in the hall. She set the phone back on the table exactly as she had found it, face down, and gripped the dish towel until her knuckles ached. Daniel walked into the kitchen in a gray T-shirt, his hair wet, smiling. "Did I leave any hot water for you—" He stopped. She hadn't said a word. She wasn't holding the phone. She hadn't moved. But he was looking at her face, and whatever he saw there drained the color from his own. "Who called?" he asked quietly. It was a simple question, the one any husband would ask. But it was the way he asked it, flat and careful, with his eyes on the phone and not on her, that made Amara's heart begin to pound. Because he hadn't asked if someone had called. He already knew.