“Because our girls are Cabbats?” I asked, trying anyway. My voice was low. Quiet. Not at all angry. “Trey, you’re a Cabbat. And you were there. You tried the drugs. You wanted the experience. It could happen to Ann—”

“Oh, fuck you,” he said, flushing even darker. “How can you say these things, in our own house? In our bedroom. You know me. You know me.” He paced all the way to the door, waving his arms. “Why are you asking me these things?” It was like he was asking the ceiling or God. He finally looked back to me and said, “You think it’s my fault Robert almost died. You think it’s my fault Spencer—”

“No! Not at all. Not at all, I swear,” I said over him. “That’s all on her. I would never blame you. And we can get through this, I promise. I love you. You’re a good husband, a good father, a good man. Nothing in the past can erase the good I see in you. I love you so much. I’ll stay with you and support you. But you cannot keep on lying to me and to yourself. You have to face it.”

My words had begun to mollify him, right up until the end. Then he hit a level of rage I’d never seen in him. It was worse than the yelling, this ice-white stoic fury. The dark blood color leached from his face. His blue eyes went vacant and cold.

“Are you actually fucking threatening to leave me? Over a thirty-year-old picture of a passing fucking gas pain some shitty girl felt for a fraction of a second in the middle of her own damn orgy?”

It was the “shitty girl” that got me. He didn’t even hear himself say it. I kept my voice calm and repeated, “You have to face it.”

He came back toward me, fast, looming over me, and in his icy glare I understood that tearing up those pictures had not banished her. Lexie was here. She was in me; I was her. A shitty girl from Eastern Jesus, Georgia, who grew up in a tiny ranch house. A shitty girl who never would have earned his second glance. A girl Coral had recognized as one of her own. I put my hands up, defensive, scared. He stopped short, bare inches from me, breathing hard.

“I’m done,” he said. He swiped a furious hand at the tattered pictures sprinkled across our area rug. “Clean this up. Burn those goddamn pieces. I don’t want our nosy, innocent daughters playing jigsaw puzzle with them.”

His fury was a wall. On the other side of that wall I stood, a truth he would not face. I could feel it between us, implacable and unbreachable. He would not look. His whole life had made it easy not to look. No one had ever asked him to before.

Lexie had changed him. He’d distanced himself from Spencer, married Maura. He’d been done with “shitty girls” forever. He was still done, staring me down like I was one of them.

“That’s the last time you threaten to leave me, Bree. If you love me so little, trust me so little, then pack a bag. See how that goes for you.” He said it cool and furious, with all the weight of his family money and his name, and then he stood looking down at me, waiting to see what I would say.

I couldn’t speak. Tears welled in my eyes. My whole body was shaking, love and fear and sorrow all at war. He seemed to see all that. It seemed to soften him. He walked away toward the bathroom door, rubbing at his forehead.

“I need a shower. I need to wash this conversation off me. Then I’m going down to watch movies with the girls and hold my son. I’m sleeping in Robert’s room tonight, on the daybed, so you can get some rest. Take one of my Ambien. You’ve been sitting up all night every night since Sunday. You’re a wreck. That must be where this is coming from.” He paused, as if waiting for an answer. I didn’t have one for him. Not one he would hear right now. He swallowed and nodded, as if my silence were confirmation. “We’ll talk tomorrow, okay? Because if I let you keep on tonight, you’ll break us. I don’t want that. We have three kids. We love each other. I’m not going to let you break us. We will not put our girls through the ugliest divorce this city has ever seen. Think about it, Bree. You don’t want to publicly accuse their father of being a rapist. You know what that will do to them. You’ll tear us apart and make them hate you, and for what? An imaginary story you made up from a photo. You know me. And I know you. I honestly think you only need to get some sleep. Real sleep. It will all look different. We’ve had the most hellish week any parents could ever live through. Let’s not make things worse.”

He went into the bathroom, closing the door deliberately and gently behind him. I heard the lock turn, and then I heard the water running. I knelt down, weeping, and started picking up the pieces of the pictures. He was wrong to worry about the girls finding them. The photographs were shreds and specks. Some things were too broken and too torn to ever again be mended.

26

I didn’t take the Ambien. I’d never tried it before, and I was afraid. Not because of the black label warnings about sleepwalking and memory loss. I was afraid that if the flesh-and-blood Lexie Pine came for us, her will as implacable as her mother’s, her anger more direct and righteous, I would not wake up.

Trey would not make peace with her. Trey refused to be sorry, and I was irrationally fearful that she had somehow heard him say all those awful things, same as I had. In my mind her fury honed itself against his words and his willful denial, sharpening.

I lay all night in our king-size bed, alone. I’d never realized how wide it was, the white expanse of sheets going on seemingly forever. I stared out the window, the drapes pulled open and the backyard floodlights on, listening through the baby monitor to Trey and Robert breathing. I slept in snatches, my mind too busy and worried and unhappy to let me rest.

I did not think that Trey had lied to me. I believed he had told me the story the way he remembered it. He believed every word he’d said. That was the problem. Belief and memory couldn’t make Lexie Pine any less a victim of rape, couldn’t justify his refusals to give that damning picture more than a glance. His belief and his memories also didn’t make me into the girl he’d first seen and fallen for at the High. I’d known him seventeen years, and all that time didn’t make my early history any less like Lexie’s.

A little after four, Robert woke up for his bottle. I listened to my husband feeding his son. He talked so soft and sweet to him, saying, “Is that good, Bumper? Yeah, buddy, there ya go,” and then hummed in a soft rumble. After, the familiar thump of his hand on Robert’s back. “Let’s get that extra burp out.”