Read Online A Small Fortune by Audrey Braun - Free Book Online Page B

have his phone at the table, Jonathon shuts me down with that smile of his. I’ve dismissed everything, chalked it all off to my stress and the importance of Jonathon’s work. His ever-important work. Because it is important, isn’t it? People’s lives are at stake, their life savings, investments, direct deposits, and bill pays, all happening on Jonathon’s watch. But that smile. I can see it as clear as if he’s standing in front of me now. It’s menacing. How have I not seen that? Oliver saw it. He once commented after Jonathon got up from the table with his BlackBerry that if he ever gave me a look like that he’d be grounded for a month.
    There are other things. The way he eagerly puts away his luggage and washes his clothes after every “business” trip. I’ve always thought he’s just being neat and organized, and I’m grateful he’s so considerate. It never occurred to me that he’s hiding something. But he also keeps his passport, all our passports, locked inside a home safe, the combination of which I’ve never even asked about. I’ve thought the safe was silly, a bank toy, small enough to carry out of the house if someone really wants it. And besides, if I were leaving the country, it wouldn’t be without Jonathon. Let him open the thing and get the passports out. Which is exactly what he did. But that isn’t the point, is it? The point is to keep me out of the safe. What else does he keep in there? I’ve never even thought to ask.
    I lie there bearing the brunt of the fact that all of this could have been avoided. In this very moment Oliver and I might be at home, going about our day, completely unaware of an alternate life where something so terrible could happen to us. If only I’d opened my eyes and not been so afraid to feel around in that vapor of nothingness that had become my marriage.
    I think about what I gave up years ago. The breathless chases up the stairs to Seth’s apartment. I felt so alive then, so happy—falling onto his unmade bed, having sex in the daylight, curtains wide open, long wispy shadows from the giant willowlike fingers stroking the walls, the bed. Seth’s smooth body suspended above me, inside me. Just days before I left him, he’d put his mouth to my ear and whispered that he loved me. And even though it was right before he came, I didn’t doubt it was true. I’d pulled his mouth onto mine to keep from hearing it again. But now I wondered if it wasn’t to stop myself from uttering the same.
    I suppose I haven’t been a very good husband. That single sentence had managed to reach inside and tear away my heart. Tear away everything that made up who I was or might have been. That single sentence allowed Jonathon to have control, to lead the way, to somehow convince me we needed to stay together. All I had to do was glide through the days and years without questioning, without feeling, without wanting for a single thing outside of what I had. And if I did all that, the world, Oliver’s world, would remain intact.
    But Jonathon never said any of those things. He didn’t even suggest them. All he said was that he hadn’t been a very good husband, and he asked me to stay. How is it then, that I’ve devised all the rest?
    I gaze at the beams and caress the dried blood on the inside of my wrist, a place once marked by perfume, by cold rain, and by Seth’s warm lips. I nearly laugh at what I sacrificed in order to keep the world intact, a world that in the end has abandoned me and Oliver down a well so dark and dangerous that before today it could have only existed outside the realm of my imagination.
    I glance at Benicio as if he might be reading my thoughts. He appears lost in a world of his own, making a fist and flipping open a finger at a time, counting something out.
    Forces of chaos beyond my understanding or control swirl beyond this room. But here, closed up inside, my mind is becoming a stream of icy calm clarity.
    Isabel opens the door and slides in