She slammed the door as she entered the house and a phrase from a poem she’d written in her journal the day she had fully given herself to him, a phrase she’d long ago repeated to him, rose from the released memories: We are bound at the edges, sewn firm down the center: one.

She fled now, step by step, to her husband and children, to those she was now bound to and would never, ever betray.

Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten

Eliza ran a baby blue dishrag under the faucet, squirted pine-scented soap on it, then ran it up and down the kitchen’s speckled black-and-taupe granite counters. She was precise, never wasting a movement. Nick wanted to grab the dishrag from her, tell her to pull her hair out of her damn ponytail and go outside: swim, splash in the lake, run naked down the dock—anything but clean and pack and act as if this were a normal day, as if they were just leaving the lake after another weekend of entertaining.

But how could he despise the same qualities in her that had saved his life, that had made it possible for him to be standing here with children, with a lake house, with a life? Her methodical way of living, along with her family status and influence, were to be praised, not ridiculed.

He wanted something other than his own altered heartbeat to prove that none of this weekend qualified as normal. He reached across the counter and grabbed the dishrag from Eliza’s hand, flung it across the room. It landed with a squashed-slug sound against the far wall.

The kitchen clock ticked one second, then another.

She clenched her teeth; he saw it in her jawline as she spoke. “What are you doing?”

“I am going outside to say goodbye to our guests. What are you doing?”

“Cleaning the kitchen. Not anything you would know about.” She turned and glared at him. “You were right. You shouldn’t have come.”

He lifted his hands in the air. “A no-win situation there, Eliza. It was wrong for me to stay home and wrong for me to come.”

“No, I was wrong. You shouldn’t have come.” She turned away.

He’d hurt her; he hadn’t meant to, as his pain now entered the space they occupied together.

“Go say goodbye to our guests,” she said.

He walked out the door, timing each step to the clock he’d never noticed before. She mumbled, but he couldn’t hear what she said. He shut the screen door on her words, on the clock, but he couldn’t shut out the hunger that rose inside him.