Page 57 of The Wife Upstairs
Pissed off, I stand up, reaching for the towel hanging next to the bath. “Do you honestly think I have any interest in Tripp Ingraham?”
Sighing, Eddie turns away. “No,” he acknowledges, “but you have to think about how things look. Especially now.”
He moves back into the bedroom and I stand there, still naked, still holding the towel, dripping onto the marble floor and looking after him.
I have worked so hard to present a certain version of myself to Eddie, to everyone, really, but in that moment, it snaps.
“How itlooks?” I repeat, following him into the bedroom, wrapping the towel around myself. “No, Eddie, I didn’t think about how itlooks.”
“Of course, you didn’t. Let me guess, you also didn’t think about how it mightlookfor my fiancée to be handing over wads of money to the guy she used to live with.”
I am frozen standing there in my towel, my stomach clenching. I’m too rattled to even try to lie. “What?”
Eddie is looking at me now with an expression I’ve never seenbefore. “Did you think I didn’t know, Jane? Did it never occur to you to come to me?”
How? How the fuck could he have known? That first time, the money I gave him was mine. The second, yes, that was Eddie’s, but I was careful. I was so careful.
“He called me, too,” Eddie says, his hands on his hips, his head tilted down. “Some bullshit story about people in Phoenix looking for you.”
This can’t be happening; he can’t know. I can’t breathe.
“Did he tell you why?” I ask, my voice barely above a whisper, and Eddie looks up at me again, his eyes hard.
“I didn’t ask. I told him to go fuck himself, which is what you should’ve done the second he called.”
He steps closer, so close I can practically feel the heat radiating off of him. I’m still standing there, not even wrapped in my towel, just holding it in front of me, shivering with more than just cold.
“That’s what you do when people threaten you, Jane. When they try to fuck you over. You don’t give in to them, you don’t give them what they want, you remind them that you’re the one in charge, you’re making the rules.”
Eddie reaches out then, taking me by the shoulders, and for the first time since I met him, I stiffen at his touch.
He feels it, and the corners of his mouth twist down, but he doesn’t let me go. “I don’t give a fuck why someone in Phoenix is trying to find you. What I care about is that when he came to you with this shit, you didn’t trust me enough to tell me about it.”
I don’t know what to say, so I just stand there, looking down, wanting him to let me go, wanting him to leave, and finally, he sighs and drops his hands.
“You know what?” he says, stepping back and reaching into his jacket pocket. “Here.”
He pulls out a slip of paper and forces it into my hand.
My damp skin nearly smudges the ink, but I see it’s a phone number, one with a Phoenix area code. “This is the number of whoever was calling John.”
I startle, blinking down at the paper. “He gave this to you?”
Eddie doesn’t answer that, saying, “The point is, Jane, I’ve had this number in my wallet for the past month.BeforeI asked you to marry me. And I never called it. Not once. You know why?”
I shake my head even though I know what he’s about to say.
“Because I trust you, Janie.”
He turns, heading for the bedroom door, and then stops, looking at me. “It would be nice to get the same in return.”
With that, he’s gone, and I sink to the edge of the tub, my knees shaking.
But it’s not because of the number I hold in my hand. It’s not knowing that Eddie’s had it all this time, that at any point over the past month, he could’ve called it and learned… everything.
It’s because of what he said. How he looked.
That’s what you do when people threaten you, Jane.
