Page 18 of Stranger in the Lake

His pained expression, the way his voice goes raw and real... My heart cracks wide open, and I stop pushing.

He thanks me with a thin smile, then opens a door at the far end of the closet, pulls out a backpack and leans it up against the wall. It’s the big one he uses for multiday hiking trips, the one he once lugged two thousand miles up the Appalachian Trail. He yanks open some drawers and shoves in clothes much like the ones he’s wearing—waterproof pants, a thermal shirt and socks, hats and gloves and fleece neck warmers. He stuffs his feet into his brand-new leather clodhoppers, leaving them untied. The laces slither like bright red snakes across the hardwood floor.

A dull pounding starts up behind my eyes. “Paul, why does it look like you’re going camping?”

“I realize the timing’s not ideal. That I’m leaving you to deal with all this.” He swipes a hand in the general direction of the lake. “But I’ll only be gone a day, maybe two. Three at the most.” He closes the backpack with one smooth tug on the string, picks it up and slings it over a shoulder.

“Paul.” I pause, trying to pull my shit together. Failing. I press two fingers to my temples. “You have got to be kidding me. You’releaving? Where are you going?”

“Walk with me, will you?” Paul brushes past me, moving in long strides through the bedroom and into the hall, so fast I have to jog to keep up. “With the storm blowing in, they’re going to have to push Pause on the investigation anyway. I probably won’t miss much. I’ll be back before they even notice I’m gone.”

Like hell. I rush down the stairs, picturing Paul in that hammock of his, a thin sheet of nylon wrapped around a Paul-sized chunk of ice. “Micah will notice, and you’re going to freeze to death out there. And how are you going to get anywhere? You don’t have a car, remember?”

I don’t offer up my old Honda, both because I don’t want him to go, and even if I did, he’d never get it out of the driveway. There are police cars parked every which way out there, ten tons of metal blocking the garage door. There’s no way he’d ever sneak past.

By the time I make it to the kitchen, Paul is already in the pantry, snatching items off the shelves and dropping them into his backpack in no apparent order. Granola, energy bars, some soups, an industrial-sized bag of beef jerky. Hiking food, enough to last him for days. This is a man who loads the dishwasher with mechanical precision, who after I put away the groceries rearranges the pantry so all labels are facing out. He doesn’t throw anything in anywhere willy-nilly.

A jackhammer starts up in my chest, rushing blood to my head so fast it makes me dizzy. “You know how this looks, right? What am I supposed to say? How do I explain you taking off as soon as a dead woman washes up?”

“I know how it looks, which is why I’m asking you—no,beggingyou—to just sit tight and not say anything. If Micah asks, which he will, make something up. Tell him I’m on a work trip or something.”

I trail Paul back into the kitchen, watching him rummage through a cabinet by the sink, pulling out a reusable bottle and clipping it to a hook on the backpack. “At least tell me where you’re going. What’s so urgent you have to leave right now?”

Now, finally, Paul stops moving. He reaches for my hands, holding them firmly in both of his. “Do you trust me, Charlotte?”

I don’t have to think about it, not even for a second. I nod.

“I’m going to find Jax.” I open my mouth to tell him Jax was looking for him, but Paul stops me. “When I get back, you and I are going to sit down, and I am going to tell you everything. I promise. But right now I really don’t have time.” He releases me, hefting the backpack onto his shoulders. “There’s money in the safe. The code’s 3-0-3-1-9. If you forget, I wrote it on the inside flap of the Le Corbusier book.”

I flinch, and automatically, my hand goes to his ring on my finger. I feel the weight of it, the significance. The day Paul slid it over my knuckle was the day I swore to never give anyone, least of all Paul, reason to think I only want him for his wealth. Yes, I like living in a pretty house. No, I never have to choose between going cold or going hungry again. But there are enough people in this town who think I traded my morals for money, and it would kill me if Paul were one of them.

“Paul, I don’t want your money.”

He stops, turns back. “That’s not what I—Come on, Charlotte. You know that’s not what I meant. What’s mine is yours is ours. You work just as hard as I do for that money. It’s there forbothof us, just in case.”

I ignore the first part, even though I don’t know. Not really. It’s true I work hard, but we both know I wouldn’t have a job if not for Paul. I am a guest here, living off the back of my all-too-generous husband.

But a more pressing point is, what would Paul do if I held out my hand right now? Would he smile and slap some bills in my palm? Would it make me a different person in his eyes? Paul once told me he admired me for the way I worked two jobs at sixteen, paying the bills for Chet and me, pulling us both up by the bootstraps. He said he loved how my penniless past shaped me into a person he wished he could be.

But like I explained to him then, I wouldn’t wish my past on anyone. You have to come from nothing to be like me. You have to suffer. And one thing I know about my husband is that he’s never suffered, not that way. He has no idea what it’s like to eat nothing but ramen noodles for thirteen days in a row, or to have your electricity cut off in the dead of winter. He’s never felt that kind of worry. Privilege will do that to a person, make you blind to the struggles of those who exist outside your bubble.

“In case of what?”

“Emergency. Disaster.” He lifts his hands in the air, lets them fall to his sides with a slap. Money is his love language, and he can’t see a single thing wrong with him offering it to me now in place of himself. “I don’t know. The point is, it’s there for whatever you need while I’m gone.”

“What I need is for you to stay here, with me.”

“I wish I could do that.” He looks sincere enough, but I don’t believe him. There’s too much here I don’t understand, too much he’s not telling me. He might not say all of what he’s thinking, but he’s not supposed to lie.

He presses both hands to my face, his palms cupping my cheeks. “Promise me you’ll sit tight until I get back. Promise me you won’t tell anyone where I’m going.”

“Not even your mother?”

“Especiallynot her. Promise me.”

I shake my head, not because I don’t want to make that promise, but because I’ve already seen the gleam in his eyes, the determined set of his chin, and I know I can’t stop him. It’s the same expression he wears on a build site, where he can look at a pile of bricks and already see the finished walls. For Paul, there is an answer to every problem, a neat and logical path to every solution. In his head, at least, he’s halfway around the lake already.

But I can’t make myself say the words. I can’t make that promise.

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