His Borrowed Wife

Chapter 4 — Evan Comes Home

Kia

I didn't sleep again.

This was becoming a pattern and I knew what sleep deprivation did to cognitive function. I had seen it in myself during residency, the way your decision making gets soft around the edges after thirty six hours, the way you start second guessing things you would normally be certain about. I could not afford soft edges right now. So I lay in the dark and ran through every possible scenario instead and told myself that was productive.

By five in the morning I had done three things. I had moved Nigel's breakfast tray from the east wing back to the main kitchen and washed it. I had checked on him and told him in very clear terms that starting now there was no movement, no sound, and no exceptions. And I had gone back to my room and changed into something that looked like I had slept fine and was simply up early because that was the kind of woman I was going to be today.

Calm. Normal. His.

I hated how easily I could still put that on.

Evan's car came through the gate at half past ten. I heard it from the kitchen where I was standing with a coffee I wasn't drinking and I took one slow breath the way I used to before walking into a trauma bay and then I went to the front of the house.

He came through the door looking like he always did when a trip went well. Relaxed in the shoulders, color in his face, that particular quality of ease that Evan only carried when he felt like he had won something recently. He was in a grey suit, no tie, top button open. He was a handsome man. I had never been able to deny that even when everything else about him made me feel like the walls were closing in.

"There she is," he said, and smiled at me.

I smiled back. "Good trip?"

"Very good," he said, and crossed the entrance hall and put his hands on either side of my face and kissed me in the way that was more about possession than affection. I had learned to distinguish between the two a long time ago.

"I missed you," he said against my mouth.

"I missed you too," I said, and the words came out perfectly and I hated that they did.

He pulled back and looked at me the way he sometimes did, like he was checking something, running some internal scan I was never supposed to notice. Then whatever he was looking for didn't show up and he relaxed again.

"I brought someone back with me," he said, stepping to the side.

I had not noticed the second man in the entrance. That told me how tightly I was wound, because I noticed everything usually, it was a habit left over from emergency medicine, you walk into a room and you assess it. But I had been so focused on Evan's face that I had completely missed the man standing two steps behind him near the door.

He was tall, pale, colorless in the way of someone who did not spend time out in the sun. Light eyes, light hair, a face that was not memorable on purpose. He was carrying nothing. No bag, no briefcase. Just himself.

"This is Carl," Evan said, in the easy tone he used when he was telling me something without telling me something. "He's going to be with us for a few days."

"Nice to meet you," I said, and looked at Carl and Carl looked at me with those light eyes and nodded once.

He didn't say it was nice to meet me too.

We had lunch, the three of us, in the dining room that was too big for two people and was not improved by three. Evan talked. He was in a good mood and when Evan was in a good mood he filled the room with himself, stories about the trip, observations about people he had met, plans he was moving forward. Carl ate quietly and said very little. I smiled and responded and kept my hands relaxed in my lap under the table and thought about Nigel on the other side of the house lying completely still.

At one point Evan reached across the table and tucked a loose braid behind my ear.

"You look tired," he said, studying my face.

"I didn't sleep great," I said, which was true.

"Couldn't sleep without me?" he asked, smiling.

"Something like that," I said.

He seemed satisfied with that and went back to talking and I picked up my fork and cut my food into smaller pieces and chewed and swallowed and performed lunch for another forty minutes.

After the table was cleared Evan went to his office for calls and Carl disappeared somewhere in the house and I stood in the kitchen and gripped the edge of the counter and let myself feel the full weight of the last few hours for exactly sixty seconds. That was all I allowed. In the emergency room you don't get to stand in the corner and process. You move to the next thing. You deal with what is in front of you.

I moved to the next thing.

I found Carl twenty minutes later by sound. He was moving through the east side of the ground floor. Not the east wing where Nigel was but the lower level, the utility corridor and the staff rooms. Methodical. Room by room. I stood at the end of the corridor and watched him for a moment and understood with complete clarity what he was doing even before Evan appeared at my shoulder.

"Just a routine thing," Evan said, reading my face or thinking he was. "I like to sweep the property when I've been away. Carl's good at it."

"Of course," I said. "Do you want me to show him around?"

Evan looked at me and something moved behind his eyes. Something that might have been surprise at the offer. Or something else.

"No," he said. "He knows what he's doing. You don't need to worry about it."

I nodded and went back to the kitchen and stood at the window over the sink and looked out at the garden and breathed.

He knows what he's doing.

So did I.

That evening Evan came to the bedroom and was affectionate in the long slow way that he was when he had been away and was reminding himself of what was his. I lay there afterward and stared at the ceiling and felt the difference in a way that was almost unbearable. Not just the difference between Evan and someone else. The difference between being looked at and being seen. Between someone asking how you are and someone asking who you are.

Nigel had asked me about my residency. About my grandmother. About the worst night of my career and the coffee I used to drink at three in the morning to get through a double shift.

Evan didn't know where I did my residency.

I was almost certain he didn't know.

I turned onto my side and listened to him sleep and thought about Carl moving through the ground floor with those light empty eyes.

Tomorrow he would do the upper floors.

The east wing was on the upper floor.

I closed my eyes and thought like a doctor, not like a woman who was scared.

There was a storage room adjacent to Nigel's room. Behind the shelving unit on the west wall there was a secondary door I had found by accident three months ago when I was looking for extra linen. It opened onto a narrow maintenance corridor that ran along the back of the east wing. The corridor had its own access point through the utility stairs.

I had thought it was just a quirk of the old house at the time.

Now I thought it might be the only thing that kept us both alive tomorrow.

I lay there and planned it out, step by step the way I used to plan a difficult procedure. What I needed, in what order, what could go wrong and how I would handle it if it did. By midnight I had a plan that I was about sixty percent confident in.

In medicine sixty percent was sometimes the best you got.

I turned over and closed my eyes and did not sleep.