Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence Read Online Free Page B

often—was it for Henry? Had he finally decided to deal with that at last?
    Sometimes while working, Catherine let her mind wander, putting Henry in the car instead of Wyatt, putting Henry on the bridge. She again remembered that blustery summer night three years ago, when Henry had shown up at the house unexpectedly. “What are you doing here?” she’d asked. Her heart had pounded at the sight of him on the porch, the wind pushing against him, whipping at his eyes. He blinked back tears and took a step toward her, even as Catherine kept her grip tightly on the door, feeling that if she were to let go of it, she’d fall. She had repeated her question, and thought, Now that would be something if they were real tears.
    â€œI’ve come to talk to Wyatt,” he’d said.
    â€œWyatt isn’t home,” she’d said.
    â€œTell him I’m here, Catherine,” he’d said.
    â€œI will do no such thing,” she’d said, slamming the door and extinguishing the porch light.
    Just as she’d closed the door, Wyatt had emerged from his study and asked Catherine whom she had been talking to. Pressed up against the wood of the door, she felt heavy and weak. “It was Henry,” she said. “He wanted to talk to you. Why would he want to talk to you, Wyatt?” Even as she said this, her husband was already pushing past her. She followed him onto the porch.
    Henry was walking slowly through the yard as Wyatt caught up to him. They spoke quietly for a moment, and then they were both heading back toward the house. Catherine retreated into the bedroom without protest, even though she found the idea of Henry in the house unpleasant. She did not come out again that night, and Wyatt did not come to bed.
    The next morning, she found him on the sofa. She didn’t want to fight. She merely asked, “What was Henry doing here?”
    Wyatt said nothing for many minutes, just sat staring into the empty fireplace. Then he finally said, “The college—my department—hired Swallow. He starts in the fall.” As if overpowered by the ugly weight of his words, Wyatt sank back into the sofa.
    Catherine froze, her eyes fixed on Wyatt. Her chest tightened as the coil of her despair wound tighter and tighter around her heart. “How is that even remotely possible?” she asked, but Wyatt, already passed out, didn’t answer her.
    Over those next few days, Catherine had wanted to ask him about his encounter with Henry, but she knew that pressing him would do no good, just as she had known that nothing positive could have come from a meeting between the two men. Like so many other discussions that should have happened and didn’t, the right moment to ask Wyatt about his conversation with Henry had never come along. Time passed, yet the moment had never left her completely alone, or at peace. Though it had taken her some years to adjust to life in Winslow, she’d always found comfort in the distance that had separated Wyatt and her from Henry. Shouldn’t leaving the city, she thought, have guaranteed that at least?
    Once, a few weeks after she’d learned about Henry’s relocation to Winslow, Catherine had brought up the idea of Wyatt’s looking for a new position at a different college. “Um, go where, and with what exactly?” he’d asked. “Oh, you mean with my best-selling novel that everyone’s reading? No, Catherine, I don’t think so. This is our life. We might as well get used to it.”
    Sometimes as Catherine crossed the bridge and drove past Henry’s house on her way into the mountains, she liked to imagine what might have been rather than what was—that Henry had never taken her on as his advisee, that she had never brushed up against Wyatt in Penn Station. That she had never known what it felt like to hate a man as much as she hated Henry Swallow. Sometimes she liked to believe in a kinder, more