Visiting Hours

Chapter 2

You were at the party too, Eloise. Stop visiting him, or everyone finds out why.

Outside the window, Houston is still pink and hazy, the refineries breathing along the ship channel like nothing in the world has changed, and my heart does what it does at three in the morning, when I replay every conversation I've ever had and search for the exact moment I said too much. Except I never say too much. I've spent nine years saying almost nothing at all.

You were at the party too. Just like that, I'm seventeen again. It's the last weekend before graduation, and the air on the Henley property smells like cut grass, mosquito spray, and smoke. The bonfire is so big it turns everyone's faces gold, someone is playing George Strait from a truck with the doors flung open, and Tessa Romero is laughing with her head thrown back, her hair glowing in the firelight, so pretty I can't stop looking at her. I remember Jim's hand finding mine in the dark. I remember the sirens. I don't remember much after that, which is exactly what the detective wrote down: Witness intoxicated. Statement unreliable. As if the truth gets cancelled out by a red Solo cup.

I close my eyes and count to four. When I open them, I'm back on the twenty-second floor, my hands are steady, and nobody would ever know.

Nobody knows about Saturdays. Not my coworkers, not my mother, not even the woman at the front desk in Huntsville who has checked my ID forty-one times and still asks me to spell my last name. Every Saturday, I leave at 5:30 in the morning and drive an hour and nineteen minutes up I-45. I sit in booth seven, pick up a phone, and look at the only person in the world who knows exactly who I am. Then I drive home, wash my face, and come back here on Monday to smile.

When people at the office ask about my husband, and they always do, because a wedding ring on a twenty-seven-year-old is an invitation, I tell them his name is James and that he's in Wharton, taking care of his mother, who has Parkinson's. I tell them it's hard, but we make it work. They tilt their heads and say how sweet that is and how he sounds like a good man, and I tell them he is, which is the only true thing I say all day. Nobody asks why James never comes to the holiday party, or why there isn't a single picture of him on my desk, or why I flinch every time the elevator dings. Nobody calls him Jim anymore, except me, through the glass.

"Eloise! Happy Monday!"

Priya from marketing leans over the partition with a breakfast taco in one hand and her phone in the other, and I minimize the email so fast my mouse skids across the desk. She's twenty-five, loud, and so relentlessly kind that I've never figured out how to keep her at arm's length. She asks whether I went to see James this weekend, the way she does every single Monday, and when I say I did, she asks about his mom, and I tell her she's hanging in there.

"Y'all are so cute," she sighs, like I've told her a love story. "I can't even get a guy to text me back, and you've got a husband who drives his mama to physical therapy. Tell him I said hi."

I promise I will, and she disappears behind the partition, humming. The email sits in the corner of my taskbar like a lit fuse. I should forward it to IT. I should report it, or do something. Instead, I do what I always do. I open Josh's board deck and fix the fonts, because if I make everything around me perfect enough, maybe the one thing I can't control will stop mattering. It never works, and I do it anyway.

At 7:58, the coffee arrives, and at 7:59, the elevator dings. I jump so hard I knock over my pen cup, and highlighters scatter across the desk. One rolls off the edge and under my chair, and I'm on my knees reaching for it when I hear him.

"Morning, Eloise."

Josh Calloway stands in the doorway of the executive suite like he owns it, because he does. He's handsome in the expensive way: navy suit, no tie, a watch that costs more than my car, and dark hair that always looks like he just ran a hand through it. He has the kind of smile people trust immediately, wide and warm and a little boyish, and he uses it the way other men use a handshake. But it's his eyes that get me every time. They're storm gray, with a darker ring around the edge, and they're Jim's eyes. I've had eight months to get used to that, and I'm still not used to it. Some mornings, when the light hits him just right, I forget which brother is standing in front of me, and which one is free.

"Morning," I say, and my voice comes out perfectly normal. I've had years of practice.

"You okay down there?"

"Dropped a highlighter."

"Living dangerously." He grins, picks up the coffee from my desk, and takes a sip. "Perfect. You're always perfect."

I don't know why that sounds like a threat. Then his eyes drop to the floor, to my purse sitting unzipped beside my chair, because I was in such a hurry this morning, and to the white laminated card that has slipped halfway out of the side pocket. My visitor badge. TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE. VISITOR. My photo, my name. I always leave it in the car. In two hundred and sixty Saturdays, I have never once forgotten.

I don't breathe.

Josh looks at it for one second, then two, which is long enough to read it and long enough to understand. His face doesn't flicker, and the smile stays exactly where it is. "Can you get me the Midland numbers before ten?" he asks, and when I say of course, he steps over the badge. Not around it, but over it, carefully, the way you'd step over something that might stain your shoes. Then he walks into his office, and the door closes behind him with a soft, expensive click.

I stay on my knees until my legs go numb, my pulse pounding in my ears, and shove the badge so deep into my purse that it bends. My hands start shaking only then, like they finally caught up with the rest of me. He saw it. He had to have seen it. So why didn't he say anything?

The rest of the day is ordinary, and that's the worst part. At 9:45, I bring him the Midland numbers and he thanks me without looking up. At noon, he asks me to order lunch for the board. At three, he stops by my desk to say I look tired, that I should leave early and take care of myself. Then, already turning away, he adds, "How's your husband doing, by the way? James, right?"

I have never told him my husband's name. I'm certain of it, because I've spent eight months making sure Josh Calloway knows nothing about me that I didn't hand him myself.

"He's good," I say. "Thank you for asking."

"Good." He smiles. "Tell him I said hello."

Then he's gone, and I'm alone with the lamps and the throw pillows and a highlighter still lying under my chair. I leave it there. I've learned the hard way that some things are safer where they fall.