Part 4
Grant made himself ask, “For how long?”
“Six months.” Ellen sat opposite him without unbuttoning her coat.
“Do you love him?”
Her gaze dropped to the wet cuff at her wrist. “I don’t know.”
“Did you ever have to wonder with me?”
“Don’t do that.”
He spread both hands on the table. The right one lay flat; the left trembled against the wood. “Were you waiting until I could dress myself before you walked out?”
Ellen’s answer came in fragments. She had stayed because he needed help, because leaving a disabled husband felt unforgivable, and because she no longer knew which parts of their life were love and which were obligation. Some days, she said, she wanted one hour that did not involve medication, laundry, appointments, or watching him surrender another task.
Grant heard the accusation because it was partly true. He had treated his grief as the only emergency in the house, and Ellen had cooperated by hiding every need of her own.
“Why lie to me?” he asked.
“You weren’t really with me anymore.”
She cried without moving toward him. Grant went to the bedroom and closed the door between them.
Before dawn, he remembered the pills. He found the bottle inside the boot and stood in the dark hall with it in his right hand. Then he thought of each block beneath the maple accepting a little more weight than the one before.
He put the bottle into a paper bag and wrote PHARMACY RETURN on the front. The bag waited beside his keys while the windows turned gray.
Ellen was at the kitchen table when he came in. Neither of them had slept.
“I’m calling Ray,” Grant said. “I’ll stay with him while we decide what comes next. You can keep the house for now.”
Ellen stared at the bag beside his keys. “Grant—”
“If Marcus is the life you want, I won’t make caring for me the entrance fee.”
Her face crumpled, but she only said, “I’m sorry.”
Ray Holloway earned his living driving buses between rural towns. His small fifth-floor apartment outside Bangor was his alone. He listened to Grant’s abbreviated account and said he would move the folding cot into the kitchen, offering no advice until Grant asked for it.
One duffel held Grant’s clothes, exercise sheets, and medication. Ellen compressed the folded shirts into it when his hands could not manage the corners. At the door, she wrapped both arms around him with a desperation he could not reconcile with another man.
“Hurting you was never what I wanted,” she whispered.
Grant rested his chin against her hair for one breath. “Wanting isn’t the same as not doing it.”
The cot filled most of Ray’s narrow kitchen. Each morning Grant woke to the coffeemaker clicking at five and his brother packing sandwiches for the route. The building elevator failed often enough to turn every appointment into a small logistics problem.
Ray said Ellen had called after Grant left. She asked him not to leave Grant alone and to make sure he spoke with his doctor, but she refused to explain the urgency. Grant called it guilt. Ray slept on the living-room couch anyway, with the bedroom door open.
On the fourth morning, Grant buttoned a shirt using both hands. Eleven minutes passed between the first button and the last. He wore it the rest of the day, though the collar was crooked.
That afternoon Ray drove him to the pharmacy. Grant pushed the paper bag through the medication disposal opening and kept his palm against the metal flap after it shut.
In the car, Ray asked, “What did you just give them?”
“What I took into the woods.”
Ray’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Am I watching you tonight?”
Grant stared through the windshield. “Yes. I don’t have another bottle, but I don’t trust myself if I start keeping things quiet.”
Ray called Grant’s doctor from the parking lot. By evening, they had reviewed every prescription in the apartment, revised Grant’s safety plan, and arranged follow-up care. After that, Ray asked direct questions once a day. Grant practiced giving answers that were not technically true but actually true.
Living without Ellen did not feel brave at night. Grant missed the soft tune she made while reading and the warmth left on her side of the bed. Ray told him that missing her did not make returning wise.
One week after the move, Ellen knocked on the apartment door. Her hair was uncombed, shadows bruised the skin beneath her eyes, and she rotated her wedding ring as she sat at the kitchen table.
“I ended things with Marcus the day you left,” she said. “I thought being with him was easier because I could talk there without being needed. Then the house went quiet, and I knew easy wasn’t what I wanted. I want to try to repair us.”
Hope rose before Grant could examine it. “I need time.”
“Then take it. I’ll answer when you’re ready.”
Ray came home an hour later and listened with his bus keys still in his hand. “Maybe this Marcus threw her over. Maybe she wants the person she knows will come back.”
Grant hated the suggestion and hated that he could not dismiss it. In his former work, uncertainty about a damaged span meant bringing in someone who had not designed the first inspection. The analogy was unfair to Ellen, but it identified what he lacked: information he did not have to accept from either of them.
He hired Nolan Pierce, a retired state trooper who ran a licensed investigation office above a tax preparer. Grant limited the request to lawful public information and observation: who Marcus was, whether he was married, and whether he still met Ellen. Nolan wrote into the contract that he would not seek medical, financial, or private electronic records.
“If you’re asking me to break into a phone,” Nolan said, “take your check home.”
The work lasted a week. Ellen called morning and evening. Grant told her he was thinking and did not say how.
On a rainy Saturday, Nolan placed a thin folder on his desk. The man from the mill was Marcus Reed, a licensed clinical social worker whose practice occupied the third floor. Ellen’s visits occurred during office hours. Nolan had found no private meetings, hotel visits, physical affection, or evidence of a romantic relationship.
“That doesn’t prove what never happened,” Nolan said. “It proves I didn’t see an affair. What I did see was your wife entering a counseling office.”
Grant looked at Marcus’s licensing photograph and felt the structure of the past month shift beneath him.
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