Elizabeth George - I, Richard

She worked her way into one of the hard-backed pews. She sat. There was a kneeler that she could have used to pray from, but she was beyond casting petitions heavenward. There was no help-divine or otherwise-for what ailed her. This was something Eric had known the moment she confessed to him the depth to which her suspicions about him had taken her. And she'd had to confess-had felt the need to confess-once he'd come home triumphant from “the biggest sale in my whole career, Char, wait'll you hear about the bonus, how does a cruise sound to you for a celebration? Or even a complete lifestyle change? We can have that now. We can have it all. Hell, I'm sorry I've been so out of it lately.”

She'd known then that her fears had been groundless, that there was no other woman in his life. And, knowing this and seeking absolution for her sin of doubting him, she'd told him the truth.

“Char, God, we went through this once already, didn't we? I'm not having an affair!” He'd said it all with an earnestness that, combined with the joy with which he'd told her about his impending good fortune, had made it impossible to disbelieve him. “You're the only one… You've always been the only one. How could you think anything else? I know I've been preoccupied. And in and out at weird hours. And taking phone calls and disappearing. But that all was because of this deal and you can't ever think… Hell, never, Char. You're the reason I've been doing all this. So that we can have a better life. For us. For our kids. Something more than suburbia. You deserve it. I deserve it. And now that this deal I've been concentrating on at work has gone through… I haven't wanted to talk about it because I didn't want to jinx it. I never thought it'd get you all upset. Come here, Char. Hell. God. I'm sorry, babe.”

And she'd known from the sound of his voice that he meant it. And from the sound of his voice and the look in his eyes, she'd drawn the comfort that told her her fears were groundless. So she'd given herself up to his love that evening and later, at dawn, she'd confessed the rest of her sins. She owed him that confession, she thought. Only by telling him how low she had sunk would she be able to forgive herself.

“I finally stopped it all when I spilled medicine all over the floor in your bathroom.” She laughed at herself and at all of her fears, groundless now. “It was like I regained consciousness all of a sudden, standing in a pool of Robitussin.”

He smiled and kissed the tips of her fingers. “Robitussin? Char. What were you up to?”

“Insanity,” she said. “I was so sure. I thought, ‘There's got to be evidence somewhere. Of some thing.' So I was searching through everything. Even your medicine cabinet. I broke that bottle of cough syrup on your bathroom floor. I'm sorry.”

He continued to smile but in Charlie's mind's eye-now, in the chapel in San Juan Capistrano-she could see how fixed that smile had become. She could see how he'd attempted to clarify what she was telling him.

“There wasn't cough syrup in my bathroom, Char. You must've been in-”

“You've probably forgotten it. The label was old. It's actually just as well it got thrown out. Don't they say medicine over six months old isn't right to take?”

Had his lips looked stiff? Had that smile stayed fixed? He said, “Yeah, I think they do say that.”

“Sorry I broke it, though.”

Had he averted his eyes, then? “How'd you clean it up?”

“On my hands and knees, doing penance.”

Had he laughed? Weakly or otherwise? “Well, I hope you wore rubber gloves, at least.”

“Nope. I didn't want anything to get in the way of me and my sin. Why? Was it not really cough syrup? Have you been disguising poison in a medicine bottle just in case you decide to off your wife?” And she'd tickled him to force him to answer. And they'd laughed and begun to make love again.

He hadn't been able to.

“Getting old,” he said. “Everything goes to hell after forty. Sorry.”

And it had got worse from there. He'd been gone more; he'd become preoccupied once again-more than ever this time-he'd closeted himself away and spent hours on the phone; he'd invested days, it seemed, on the Internet “doing research,” he'd told her when she asked him. Finally, when the phone had rung one evening, she'd overheard him say, “Look, I can't make it tonight, all right? My wife's not well,” and she'd suffered a rebirth of all her suspicions.

It was two days later that he'd come home from work and found her under a blanket on the sofa, dozing off a combination of headache and muscle pain that she'd assumed she'd brought on herself with a lengthy hike on the slopes of Saddleback Mountain. She'd been asleep and hadn't awakened upon his entry. Only when he dropped to his knees beside the couch did she stir with a start.

“What is it?” he'd asked her. Was it fear in his voice and not concern as she'd thought at the time? “Char, what's wrong?”

“Achy all over,” she replied. “Too much exercise today. Got a headache, too.”

“I'm going to make you some soup,” he told her.

He'd gone into the kitchen and banged about. Ten minutes later, he brought a tray into the living room where she lay.

“Sweet,” she murmured. “But I can get up. I can eat with you.”

“I'm not eating,” he said. “Not right now. You stay put.” And he'd lovingly and gently fed tomato soup to her a slow and patient spoonful at a time. He'd even wiped her mouth with a paper napkin. And when she'd laughed a little and said, “Really, Eric, I'm all right,” he hadn't made a reply.

Because he'd known, Charlie thought. The process had begun.

First the sudden onset marked by headache and muscle pain. A slight fever to accompany them. Chills and an inability to eat hard upon the heels of the fever.

And after that? What she'd marked as mourning first and denial second, both of them made manifest in her body: sore throat, dizziness, nausea, and vomiting. But she hadn't been reacting to her husband's death. She'd been reacting to what he'd done in his life. Or what he'd tried to do and what he would have done had she not broken the bottle in which the virus was sealed before he had the chance to give it to its purchaser.

How torn he must have been, she realized. There he was: caught in the middle of something gone terribly wrong, the best-laid plans come to nothing. With nothing to give in exchange for the down payment he'd received for the Exantrum, with a wife fatally exposed to the virus he himself had stolen. And knowing that that wife was going to die, as surely as he must have known thousands-millions-of others would have died had fate, in the person of Charlie's jealousy, not stepped in to prevent that from occurring.

He'd fed her the soup and studied her face as if such a study would allow him to take the image of her into the grave and beyond. When she was finished eating, when she could swallow no more, he put the spoon in the bowl and the bowl on the tray. He'd leaned forward and kissed Charlie on the forehead. He'd adjusted the covers up to her chin.

“Remember, I'll always love you,” he'd said.

“Why're you telling me that? Like that?”

“Just remember.”

He'd taken the tray from the room. She heard the sound of it being set on the counter in the kitchen. A moment later he returned and sat opposite her, in an easy chair, with a pillow behind his head.

“Do you remember?” he asked.

“What?”

“What I said. Remember. I'll always love you, Char.”

Before she could respond, he took the revolver from within his jacket. He put the barrel in his mouth, and he blew off the back of his head.

So this, Charlie thought, was what it felt like to know you were going to die. This sense of drifting. No panic as she'd once thought she might panic if handed a death sentence like pancreatic cancer. But instead a numbness and a going through the motions: getting up from the pew in the mission chapel, approaching the altar, pausing at a statue of a yellow-and-green-robed saint to light a candle, then standing deep in the sanctuary and knowing there was nothing to ask God for or about any longer.