Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

“So why...?” He narrowed his eyes at one of Brian’s plane tickets, the receipt from the shop in Covent Garden, a photo she’d printed up of the selfie Brian had “taken” outside the Covent Garden Hotel, the VHS of Since I Fell for You .

Caleb took a pull from his drink and looked across at her.

“You wrote the date wrong.” She pointed at the receipt.

He gave her a confused smile.

“You wrote it as month, day, year. In Britain, it would read day, month, year.”

He glanced at the receipt, then back over at her. “I have no idea what you’re—”

“I followed him.”

Caleb took another drink.

“To Providence.”

Caleb was very still.

The building was just as still around them. Trust Fund Baby was definitely not home; she would have heard his footsteps. The other tenants on fifteen weren’t there either. It was as if they sat atop an aerie in a forest at the far reaches of the earth.

“He has a pregnant wife.” She poured herself more wine. “He’s an actor. But then you knew that. Because” — she pointed her wineglass at him — “you’re an actor.”

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“Bullshit. Bull shit .” She downed half her wine. At this rate, she’d be peeling the foil off a second bottle soon. But she didn’t care, because it felt good to have focus for her rage. It gave her the illusion of power. And at this point she’d take illusions if they beat back the terror.

“What do you think you know?” he said.

“Don’t you fucking speak to me in that tone.”

“What tone?”

“The condescending one.”

He held up his hands like a man being robbed at gunpoint.

She said, “I saw Brian go to Providence. I saw Brian at Alden Minerals. I saw Brian go to a camera store and buy flowers and go to a bank. And I saw Brian and his preg—”

“What do you mean, he went to the camera store?”

“He went to a camera store.”

“The one on Broadway?”

She didn’t know how she’d managed to strike a nerve, only that she had. Caleb scowled at his reflection in the marble countertop, scowled at his glass before draining it of bourbon.

“What’s in the camera store?” After a minute of silence, she said, “Caleb—”

He held up a finger to silence her and called someone on his cell. As he waited, she could hear the rings on the other end. She was still back to the finger he’d raised to silence her, the contempt in it. It reminded her of Dr. Felix Browner; he’d dismissed her in the same way once.

He pressed “end” on his cell and immediately tried another number. No answer there either. He pressed “end” again and then squeezed the phone so hard she expected it to shatter.

He said to her, “Tell me some—”

She turned her back on him. She retrieved the bottle of wine from the counter beside the oven, kept her back to him as she refilled her glass. It was petty of her, but that didn’t make it feel any less sweet. When she turned back to him, the glare on his face vanished a half second after she noted it and he smiled a very Calebesque smile — boyish and sleepy.

“Tell me some more about what you saw in Providence.”

“You first.” She placed her wine down on the counter across from him.

“There’s nothing for me to tell.” He shrugged. “I don’t know anything.”

She nodded. “Then leave.”

His sleepy smile turned into a sleepy chuckle. “Why would I do that?”

“If you don’t know anything, Caleb, then I don’t know anything.”

“Ah.” He unscrewed the cap on the bourbon and poured himself another two fingers. He put the cap back on, swirled the liquor in his glass. “You’re one hundred percent sure you saw Brian enter the camera store.”

She nodded.

“How long was he in there?”

“Who’s Andrew Gattis?”

He gave that a touché nod as he took a drink. “He’s an actor.”

“I know that. Tell me something I don’t know.”

“He went to Trinity Rep in Providence.”

“The acting school.”

Another nod. “It’s where we all met.”

“So my husband’s an actor.”

“Pretty much, yeah. So the camera store. How long was he in there?”

She looked across the counter at him for a bit. “About five minutes, tops.”

He gnawed the inside of his mouth. “He come back out with anything?”

“What’s Brian’s real name?” She couldn’t fucking believe the words left her mouth. Who in her life ever expected to ask that about her husband?

“Alden,” he said.

“Brett?”

He shook his head. “Brian. Brett was his stage name. My turn.”

She shook her head. “No, no, no. You’ve been withholding information from me since we met. I just started tonight. You get one question for every two of mine.”

“What if that isn’t good enough?”

She wiggled her fingers at the door behind him. “Then fuck off, my friend.”

“You’re drunk.”

“I’m buzzed,” she said. “What’s at the offices in Cambridge?”

“Nothing. It’s never used. A friend owns it. If we need it — like, say, you’re coming over and we have warning — we dress it. Just like a stage.”

“So who are the interns?”

“You’ve already had your two questions.”

But in that moment she saw the answer, as if it had descended from the heavens decked out in neon.

“They’re actors,” she said.

“Ding!” Caleb checked an imaginary box in the air before his eyes. “Gold star. Did Brian leave the camera store with anything?”

“Not that I saw.”

He checked her eyes. “Did he go to the bank before or after the camera store?”

“That’s a second question.”

“Be kind.”

She laughed so hard she almost threw up. Laughed the way flood victims and earthquake survivors laughed. Laughed not because something was funny but because nothing was.

“Kind?” she said. “Kind?”

Caleb made a steeple of his hands and placed his forehead to their point. A supplicant. A martyr waiting to be sculpted. After no sculptor arrived, he raised his head. His face was ash, his eye sockets dark. He was aging as she watched.

She swirled her wine but didn’t drink it. “How’d he fake the selfie from London?”

“I did it.” He rotated his glass of bourbon on the countertop a full three-sixty. “He texted me, told me what was up. You were sitting right across from me in Grendel’s. It was all just hitting buttons on a phone, snatching an image here, an image there and running it through a photo program. If you’d looked at it in hi-res on a decent computer screen, it probably wouldn’t have held up, but for a selfie supposedly taken in low light? It was easy.”

“Caleb,” she said, the wine definitely hitting her now, “what am I part of?”

“Huh?”

“I woke up this morning, I was someone’s wife. Now I’m... I’m, what, I’m one of his wives? In one of his lives? What am I?”

“You’re you,” he said.

“What’s that mean ?”

“You’re you,” he said. “You’re unaltered. Pure. You haven’t changed. Your husband’s not who you thought he was. Yes. But that doesn’t change who you are.” He reached across the counter and took her fingers in his hands. “You’re you.”

She pulled her fingers free of his. He left his hands on the counter. She looked at her own hands, at the two rings there — a round solitaire diamond engagement ring sitting atop a platinum wedding band with five more round diamonds. She once took them to be cleaned at a jeweler’s on Water Street (one, she now realized, Brian had recommended), and the old man who owned the place whistled at them.