Twelve Months To Ruin You

His Move

Derrick had been thinking about it for two weeks.

Not constantly. He wasn’t the kind of person who let things run in the background while he was supposed to be doing something else. But in the gaps, between meetings, in the car, those ten minutes before sleep actually came, he’d been working through it. The method. The timing. What would look clean.

He settled on the brakes.

Anne drove herself to her firm three mornings a week. Same car, same route, same time. He’d watched the pattern long enough to be certain of it. A brake line that failed slowly wouldn’t fail dramatically, it would degrade over days, make the car feel slightly off, and eventually on a hill or a sharp stop, it would give. It would look like maintenance failure. Old car. Easy explanation.

He arranged it Tuesday morning through a contact he’d used for other things over the years. Not someone who asked questions. The kind of arrangement that existed in the space between legal and not, where enough money made the details someone else’s problem.

By nine he was in the office running a board prep session and thinking about neither Anne nor brake lines.

****

The board prep ran long. Then something with the Singapore team that should have taken twenty minutes and took fifty five. He got home at seven ten and Anne was on the couch with a case file open across her knees, highlighter in hand, feet tucked under her.

She looked up. “Long day.”

“Very.” He dropped his jacket on the chair and sat in the one across from her. “You?”

“Manageable.” She went back to the file. “There’s food in the oven. I made too much again.”

“You always make too much.”

“I’m optimistic about portion sizes.”

He got up and went to the kitchen and found pasta, of course it was pasta, in the oven dish, he served himself, came back,sat down and they stayed like that for a while. Her highlighting things. Him eating. The television off. The city outside doing its thing.

It was the most comfortable Derrick had felt since before his father died.

He noticed that and refused to give it attention and went back to finishing his pasta.

****

By nine thirty she was losing the battle with the case file. He could tell before she could, her highlighter had stopped moving and her head kept dipping slightly before she caught herself. She did it three times in ten minutes.

“Go to bed,” he said.

“I’m reading.”

“You’ve highlighted the same sentence twice.”

She looked at the page. Looked at the highlighter. “That was intentional.”

“Sure.”

“It was a very important sentence.”

“Anne.”

“I’m fine.” She shifted against the cushions, pulled her feet further under her, and was asleep in four minutes.

He watched it happen. Not in a strange way, he just happened to be sitting there when her eyes stopped fighting and closed, when the highlighter slid sideways out of her hand onto the cushion, when her head dropped and found a comfortable angle against the armrest. The case file stayed open across her knees.

He sat there for a moment.

Then he got up and went to the hallway cupboard and pulled out the throw blanket she’d commented on in the first week, she’d said it looked expensive and he’d said it was then she’d said that explained why it looked uncomfortable and she’d been wrong, it wasn’t uncomfortable at all.

He came back and stood over her for a second. The case file was going to fall if he left it. He picked it up carefully, put the highlighter inside it to mark the page, and set it on the table. Then he put the blanket over her.

He stood there.

She looked nothing like herself. That was the thing. Every version of Anne Wheeler he’d encountered since this started had been assembled, sharp and composed and watching everything. Even relaxed she was still watching. But asleep she was just a person. No performance. No armour. Just a face that was younger than he’d thought and hands that weren’t as steady-looking as they were during the day and a small frown between her brows that might have been the case file chasing her into sleep.

He picked up his jacket. Turned the lamp down and went to his room.

****

He lay awake.

The brake line should have been sufficient. He’d been careful about it, not catastrophic, just enough, the kind of failure that built gradually and gave him time to be elsewhere when it happened. Plausible. Clean. Everything he’d planned for.

But she’d taken a taxi on Tuesday. And Wednesday. He’d checked.

She’d taken taxis because she had back to back client visits across the city and parking was a nightmare, which she’d mentioned to him on Monday night in passing while complaining about the one-way system near her second client’s office. He hadn’t thought to factor that in. He’d assumed she’d drive.

She always drove. Except this week she hadn’t.

He stared at the ceiling.

The plan still worked. He just needed to reset the timing. Wait for her to go back to driving. It wasn’t a failure, it was a delay, and delays were fine, delays happened, he was a patient man.

He’d been a patient man for twenty minutes now and was no longer thinking about brake lines at all.

He was thinking about her face.

Not in a way he’d planned. It had just arrived uninvited while he was lying there being very focused on the logistics. The way she looked asleep. The frown. The fact that she’d been reading a client file on a Tuesday night at nine thirty because she cared enough about her work to push through tired rather than leave it for morning.

The fact that she made too much pasta every time and said it was optimism about portion sizes.

The fact that she’d eaten his terrible eggs and said they were fine and finished every single one.

He sat up.

Picked up his phone. Told himself he was checking emails. Opened his emails. Fourteen unread. He closed them.

Opened a new note instead. Typed one line. Read it back.

The line had nothing to do with brake lines or timelines or anything he was supposed to be thinking about.

It said: *Anne Wheeler asleep on my couch looked like someone I would have wanted to know before any of this started.*

He stared at it.

Then he put the phone face down.

Lay back down.

The ceiling was the same ceiling it always was. Nothing had changed. He had a plan and a reason and twenty years of knowing exactly what the Wheeler name had cost his family and none of that had moved.

He just also had this. Sitting in his chest. Small and inconvenient and apparently not going anywhere.

He closed his eyes.

Tomorrow he’d figure out the timing on the car. Tomorrow everything would be back on track.

He almost believed it.