Part 4
Daniel forced himself to ask the next question. “How long?”
“Six months.”
Laura sat across from him. Her coat remained buttoned, and a dark strand of hair clung to the damp wool at her shoulder. She did not look like a woman confessing relief or desire. She looked ill. Daniel mistook that for guilt.
“Do you love him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you ever know with me?”
She flinched. “That isn’t fair.”
“Fair?” His voice rose, then failed him. He put both hands on the table, one rigid, one shaking. “You told me you were trapped. You told me I stopped living. Were you waiting for me to become useful enough that you could leave?”
“No.” Laura’s answer came too quickly. “I stayed because you needed me. And because I couldn’t stand what people would think if I left a sick husband. And because some days I hated myself for wanting one hour that wasn’t about medicine or laundry or whether you could get out of a chair.”
The cruelty of it lay in the recognizable truth. Daniel had made himself the only suffering person in the house. Laura had helped him do it by never saying no.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you were barely here.”
She began to cry, quietly and without asking him to comfort her. Daniel went to the bedroom and shut the door.
Near dawn he remembered the bottle. He found it in the winter boot where he had hidden it. For a long time he stood in the hallway holding it, the house silent around him.
Then he remembered the maple settling onto each stone. The movement had been too small to see unless he watched the gap. It had still been movement.
Daniel put the bottle in a paper bag and wrote TAKE TO PHARMACY across it. He left it beside his keys, leaning against his cane until dawn.
At six, he found Laura at the kitchen table. Neither of them had slept.
“I’m moving in with Michael,” he said. “We can talk to a lawyer after we’ve both had time. You can stay here.”
Laura’s mouth opened, but no sound came.
“If Andrew is what you want, I won’t make you care for me as the price of having a life.”
She lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
Daniel called his brother. Michael drove a regional bus route and lived alone in a small apartment on the edge of Bangor. He listened to the bare facts and said, “I’ll clear the kitchen. Come whenever you’re ready.”
One duffel held Daniel’s clothes, medications, and the hand exercises printed by his therapist. Laura folded his shirts because he could not make them fit. At the door she embraced him with a desperation that confused him.
“I never wanted to hurt you,” she said.
He rested his chin briefly against her hair. “I know. That doesn’t mean you didn’t.”
Michael’s kitchen was barely wide enough for the folding cot. Daniel woke each morning to the coffeemaker clicking on at five and the sound of his brother packing sandwiches. The fifth-floor apartment had an elevator that failed often enough to make every outing a negotiation. Daniel spent his days doing exercises, cooking simple lunches, and relearning the small mechanics of living without someone hovering at his elbow.
On the first night, Michael said Laura had called after the taxi left. She had asked him not to let Daniel stay alone and to help him contact his doctor, but she would not explain why. Daniel dismissed it as guilt. Michael did not. He slept on the living-room sofa rather than close his bedroom door.
He buttoned a shirt with both hands on the fourth day. It took eleven minutes. He wore it until bedtime.
That afternoon Michael drove him to the pharmacy. Daniel placed the paper bag in the medication return slot himself and stood with his palm against the metal door after it closed. Michael did not ask what was inside until they were back in the car.
“The pills I meant to use in the woods,” Daniel said.
Michael gripped the steering wheel. “Do I need to worry tonight?”
“Yes. Not because I have more pills. Because I don’t trust what happens when I stop talking.”
Michael called Daniel’s doctor from the parking lot. They spent the afternoon at the clinic making a written safety plan, reviewing every medication in the apartment, and arranging follow-up care. After that Michael asked plainly each day, without disguising concern as advice, and Daniel answered plainly enough to stay honest.
At night, independence felt less noble. He missed Laura’s footsteps, the uneven hum she made while reading, the way she warmed her side of the bed before turning away. Michael told him to forget her. Daniel could not.
One week after he left, Laura came to the apartment.
Her hair had not been brushed. Purple shadows lay beneath her eyes. She sat at the kitchen table and twisted her wedding ring around her finger.
“I ended it with Andrew the day you moved out,” she said.
Daniel waited.
“Being with him was easy. Coffee. Conversation. A place where I didn’t have to be strong. But when the house was empty, I understood easy wasn’t the same as love.” She reached across the table, then stopped before touching him. “I love you. I loved you even when I was angry enough to disappear. When you came home from the woods, I saw the man I married. I want us to try again.”
Hope moved through Daniel before caution could stop it. That frightened him more than her confession had.
“I need time.”
“Take it.” Laura stood. “I’ll answer when you call.”
Michael returned an hour later and found Daniel sitting in the same chair.
“Don’t do it,” he said after hearing what happened. “Maybe the other guy sent her packing. Maybe she wants her old safety net.”
Daniel bristled, then hated himself for having no better explanation. He nearly called Laura, but any answer would require him to trust the account he was trying to test. In his old work, a disputed crack meant an independent inspection before anyone loaded the bridge again. The comparison was cold, and Laura was not concrete, but it showed him why thought alone kept circling.
Two days later he hired an investigator named Owen Pike, a retired state trooper who worked from an office above a tax service. Daniel asked for only what could be found lawfully: who Andrew was, whether he was married, whether Laura was still seeing him. Pike made him sign a contract that said medical and financial records were off limits.
“If you want someone to break into a phone, you’ve got the wrong office,” Pike said.
The investigation took a week. Laura called each morning and evening. Daniel told her he was still thinking. He did not tell her how.
Pike summoned him on a rainy Saturday and laid a thin folder on the desk.
“The man is Andrew Cole,” he said. “Licensed clinical social worker. Private counseling practice in the mill building. The coffee shop is downstairs from his office.”
Daniel stared at the state licensing printout.
“I watched the entrance, checked public records, and spoke to no one about your wife’s care,” Pike continued. “She met him during posted office hours. I found no hotel, no private residence, no romantic contact. That does not prove an absence. I can’t tell you what their relationship is. That belongs to her.”
“She said he was her lover.”
Pike closed the folder. “If he is her lover, public records and a week of observation did not show it. What they did show is that she keeps going to his clinical practice.”
Daniel looked again at Andrew Cole’s professional photograph—the same gray beard, the same patient eyes from the coffee shop.
Pike’s voice softened. “Mr. Mercer, I found no evidence of an affair. I can’t give you the certainty you hired me for.”
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