Lisa Unger: Under My Skin

Leaning against it, I slide down and sit on the floor, the long hallway that leads to the rest of the apartment dark, lined with photographs—his, mine, us together. The only thing I’ve managed to do since moving here is hang those photographs. Sitting on the hardwood, I think tears will come, but they don’t.

Instead I notice that one of the photographs lies on the floor, surrounded by broken glass.

I haul myself up and walk over to it, the apartment unnaturally quiet. The thick-paned windows on the twentieth floor keep most city noise at bay. The glass crackles beneath my feet as I retrieve the picture. Me and Jack, on our honeymoon in Paris. What a cliché! he’d complained. He’d wanted to go Thailand, lie around on some isolated beach, sleep in a thatch hut. But a Paris honeymoon was my only girlhood fantasy and he complied, because he always did. He always wanted me to have the things that I wanted. I can’t even tell where we were, a selfie so close that everything behind disappeared, our faces so goofy with love that it’s almost embarrassing to see.

I hold the shattered frame. The picture hanger is still on the wall. And the photo seems too far from its original space to just have fallen somehow.

My breath comes heavy. I should move back slowly toward the door and run downstairs to Detective Grayson. Instead, I turn and walk toward the living room.

It takes me a moment to notice it, but when I do my stomach bottoms out. Sitting on the low coffee table between the couches is an orchid in a pot. A fat, snow-white bloom drips heavily from a bowed stalk. There’s a single white card tucked into the thick green leaves at its base, a note in black scrawl.

I remember you.

Don’t you remember me?

“Let’s go over this again,” says Grayson.

He sits on the couch across from me, leaning forward, his dark gaze pinning me to my seat. I know that look; he’s been watching me like that for a year. As though he might still suspect something dark just beneath the surface of what he sees.

Layla’s already here, ministering. She’s gotten me a blanket, which I’m not using, brewed coffee that I’m not drinking. Now she’s hovering, sitting on the couch beside me, leaning in so close that her thigh is fused with mine. Her foot is tapping in that way it does when she’s nervous or annoyed. She’s staring at that white blossom as it quivers in front of us, at Grayson, around the apartment, with a kind of narrow-eyed suspicion.

“You entered your apartment—” he leads.

This is another thing he does, asks me to repeat what I told him, once, twice, three times. Looking for the inconsistencies of lies, I suppose.

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