Chapter 3

The clock read 3:00 and neither of them had turned on another light.

He had sat down across from her at last, in the stiff chair by the window, elbows on his knees, the note back in his hand. Not raised now. Just held. The rain had thinned to a mist that caught the parking lot lamps far below.

"I didn't tell you," she said, "because I know what you do with the truth about Simon."

"What I do."

"You cut it off. You cut him off eighteen months ago over six hundred dollars and you didn't say his name once until tonight." She kept her voice even. It was the only thing she had left to keep even. "He stole from you. I'm not saying he didn't. He was using. He's not using now."

"You don't know that."

"I do know that. I've known it for eight months." She let that land. "I've been going to his meetings. I sat in the back the way he sat in the back tonight. I helped him get a bed at a halfway house on Cleveland Avenue. I've driven him to it. I did all of that and I didn't tell you, because the first time I said his name, I was afraid you'd make me choose."

"You chose anyway. You chose the secret."

"I chose him living." Her chin trembled and she stopped it. "I'd do it again."

He looked at the note. His thumb moved along the fold he hadn't made, the one three years old.

"Why was he at the chapel."

She picked up her phone again. This time her hands weren't steady. She turned the screen to him. A photo, the time stamped across the top from that very evening, barely four hours back: Simon in the borrowed gray suit at the end of the last pew, half in shadow, looking toward the altar.

"I invited him," she said. "I know I shouldn't have. I wanted one person in that room who was mine before he was ever yours. I wanted him to see that someone from the center turned out all right." She set the phone down. "He left before you could be put in the position of throwing him out at your own wedding. He thought he was protecting you. He's always thinking he's protecting somebody."

Colin was quiet a long time. Somewhere below a car door shut and an engine turned over and faded.

"You should have trusted me," he said.

"And you should have trusted me. You saw him and you said nothing. You set a test and you let it run all night." She leaned forward. "That's the same thing, Colin. Yours just looks cleaner because you call it honesty."

That reached him. She saw it reach him.

"So what do you want," she said.

"I want you to come with me. Nine o'clock this morning. Cleveland Avenue. You sit with your brother for one hour and you listen, and you don't decide anything until the hour's done." She held his eyes. "If after that you still want to be done with him, I won't stand between you. But I won't be the wall he hits either. I'm not going to spend our marriage lying about where I've been on Tuesday nights."

"And if I say no?"

"Then I'll know what kind of man I married, and so will you."

The mist had stopped. The window held the first gray edge of the sky over the rooftops. He stood, and for a moment she didn't know which way he would go.

He picked up the car keys from the dresser. Then he took the note and folded it, slow, matching the worn crease fold for fold until it was the small square it had been for three years, and he slid it into his shirt pocket, over his chest.

"Tell Simon we'll be there by nine."