In the dream, the girl was her daughter.

  “Something this week… my wife got freaked out. She said I should tell you.”

  “Should you?”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  I waited.

  “When I woke up from it, I didn’t know Mindy.”

  “How so?”

  “I went into her room, and I knew the room and all the stuff. But the kid sleeping there? I was like, who is she? She was a stranger.”

  “How long did that last?”

  “A minute… maybe ten. Molly came into the kitchen and was like, ‘Are you going to wake her up for school or what?’ and then I came to.”

  “So you’d describe it as a fugue state? Did you have the feeling you were half asleep?”

  “I was… I forgot the entire thing after not knowing Mindy.” She shrugged, and that wasn’t a normal reaction for someone who’d lost a bunch of time.

  “Is that the first time it happened?”

  She looked away. “Yeah. I told Molly I really didn’t want to talk about this.”

  I wasn’t letting her off the hook. We had four minutes, and it was hers to use to talk or not. Her decision, not mine.

  “When I was a kid, I lost some stuff. Few hours here and there.” She shifted in her seat. “My dad used to come to my room and do things. It was… I knew he did it, but I would forget the actual thing if you know what I mean.” She made a nervous laugh, and I held onto a non-judgmental, non-enraged, almost inhuman detachment.

  “I want to pause for a second. I heard both parts of that, and if you—”

  “Is it time to go yet?”

  “We have a couple of minutes”

  “I don’t want to talk about this right now, okay?”

  “Okay, but you’re safe here. Any time.”

  She stood. “I should get going.”

  I adjusted her sleeping pill dosage and asked her to keep a log of any more feelings that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be, or that she didn’t know the people around her. She agreed, apologized profusely, and left.

  I hurt for the little girl she had been, and promised myself I’d do everything I could to help the woman who came to my office.

  I briefly made the connection between Leslie Yarrow’s dissociation and my husband’s. It was a symptom of PTSD and needn’t be a personal betrayal.

  That realization was my medicine for the rest of the day.

  It was dark by the time I went back up to the house. Everything was perfect. He hadn’t left a crumb behind. Not a note or a rumpled sheet.

  Calling got me his voice mail. I beeped him, but he didn’t call back right away. I heated up dinner. Got into my pajamas. Put on the TV. Shut it off. Listened to the traffic outside. Went to the bathroom.

  His clothes were in the hamper. Underwear. Slacks. A pale blue shirt that brought out the depth of his eyes. I gathered it in my hands and pressed it to my face, expecting to smell fresh coffee grounds in stale sweat.

  I got something much more floral.

  Feminine.

  This is not cologne.

  My blood took a second to boil. In that pause, I checked again. Definitely perfume.

  Oh, fuck no.

  No no no.

  I was out the door so fast I didn’t change out of my pajamas and almost forgot to put on shoes. I stuffed my feet into Keds, put on a long coat, and caught a cab at Columbus Circle.

  Because, no. We had a deal and the deal included fidelity. Non-negotiable.

  Deep breath.

  People cheated for a reason. Either it was personal, and they were just cheating assholes. Or it was situational, and a cheating asshole was in a situation where it was easy to cheat. Or it was us. And that last option stuck in my craw, because even after years of talking to people about why they found themselves betraying or betrayed, it was now me. And if it was the relationship, it was me, my fault, what I delivered or didn’t deliver.

  I’d come to a strange life in a strange city to be with him. Maybe that was the problem. Or maybe we didn’t work as a couple outside a war zone. Or maybe he liked it hotter than I was used to.

  Fuck this. It wasn’t my fault.

  He owed me better than touching another woman. Saying sweet things to her. Those were my kisses and sweet words.

  Or maybe there was none of that. Maybe it was all warm holes and quick spurts.

  The disloyalty was bad, but not knowing the exact terms of the betrayal was eating every brain cell not occupied with breathing.

  My phone rang on the way. I flipped it open.

  Him.

  Was his dick wet with her? Or was he on his way there?

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hey, you called?” Flat flat flat. Why hadn’t I seen it before? How blind had I been?

  “Where are you? I was thinking of bringing you dinner.”

  “Ah, that would be great, but I’m assisting in an hour and I need to scrub in.”

  So that’s what you sound like when you lie?

  “Oh, all right then. When do you think you’ll be home?”

  “I came home today and you were in your office. I didn’t want to bother you.”

  You knew I’d be in session.

  “Yeah. Hey, the other line’s beeping. I have to go.”

  “I love you,” he said before I cut the call.

  “Thanks for the aspirin.”

  Wilhelmina was at the front desk of cardiac. She confirmed Caden was scrubbing into an emergency open heart procedure. I told her I needed a key and he had it in his bag. I didn’t like lying, but I was past sense. I was cussing up a blue streak in my head and smiling on the outside as if showing up at the hospital in Keds and a long coat was the result of an annoying misplaced key.

  She led me into a row of large grey lockers and left me alone.

  I tipped his padlock up to see the numbered dials. It was the same lock he’d had in Iraq, and I knew the combination.

  Every marriage has boundaries, and going into his locker had a thick red line around it. My thumbnail in the grooves, I clicked the number sequence, paused with the weight in my hand.

  Just ask him.

  The mature thing to do would be to ask. Just say flat out, you’ve been different. You’ve been unavailable. You’ve got perfume on your shirt.

  Fuck that.

  I snapped the padlock open and slid it out quickly, before I could change my mind.

  The locker was the size of a small closet. He had a suit, shoes on the floor, bag of toiletries on the top shelf, new clothes still in tissue paper in a Barney’s bag, and a plastic bag of dirty things.

  I picked up the dirties. I smelled it before I even opened the bag. Perfume.

  “Fuck you, Caden.”

  I threw the bag back in and slammed the door. Something clicked and fell.

  If one thing is out of order…

  “I don’t care.”

  …he’ll know.

  “I don’t.” I put the lock in the loop.

  You’ll never know if he would have told you the truth.

  “Fuck!”

  I opened the locker and readjusted the laundry bag. I couldn’t find what had fallen. I tiptoed so I could see the top shelf. Next to the toiletry bag, a glass bottle lay on its side. I picked it up. It was from Lyric scent shop, where I got my perfume.

  Before I even turned it over, I knew.

  Scent #6512 - Greyson F.

  Before I opened the top and waved it in front of my nose, I knew.

  It was mine. I hadn’t recognized it mixed with his scent, but once I had the bottle under my nose, it was unmistakable.

  When we were separated, he’d given me one of his T-shirts. His smell had comforted me. I buried my face in it when he called, wrapped it around my neck when I slept, curled around it when I brought myself to orgasm.

  When had he taken my perfume? And why? Did he know he’d be gone for days?

  I put the bottle back and put the padlock back in place, touching the door with my fingertips. “I’m sorry.”

  Across the room, the door opened. I peeked around the lockers to find a cleaning person wheeling in a yellow bucket.

  “Hello?” he called. “Anyone in here?”

  “Just leaving,” I said, smiling stiffly as I walked by.

  “Did you find the key?” Wilhelmina asked blithely, as if nothing was wrong. She could see into my heart and all was well there.

  “I realized I had it.”

  “Ah, better watch, doctor. When the mind starts going, the body’s sure to follow.”

  I laughed a little, but it was more from uneasiness than humor. “Do you know where he is?”

  She slid a clipboard into a cubby. “I think he’s in five.” She took a quick inventory of my posture, my hair, my coat and pajamas, the look of emotional desperation that must have been all over my face, using a skill they didn’t teach in nursing school but a large number of nurses had. “It’s a viewing theater, if you want to take a look.”

  “Um, sure. Okay. Yeah. Yes, I’d like that very much.”

  I didn’t know what insight I expected to get from watching him. Something was still off. My perfume didn’t change that. But Wil led me to the upper floor viewing room where med students watched the procedure. I sat away from them, letting the narration from their instructor fade into the ambient hiss of the air conditioning.

  From above, I saw him and the other attending move together with an efficiency bordering on grace. They cut a woman open and spread her ribs. I flinched. It was hard to watch.

  But still, my husband did his job, isolating a living, beating heart.

  The lead turned away from the table and looked up at the med students. Her voice carried over speakers to the little room as she spoke a language I hadn’t been trained in med school to understand. My eyes were glued to my husband anyway. He was still working, though I couldn’t discern what he was doing. When the lead surgeon said his name, it cut through the jargon.

  “Doctor St. John here is assisting, but he’s been lead on this procedure a few hundred times.”

  Caden looked up to salute the students.

  He saw me and froze.

  We didn’t move as the other doctor continued. His eyes betrayed nothing. I was wrong to be here. Wrong to distrust him. Wrong to worry. He had his hands on a living heart. Of course his detachment bled over.

  I waved and tried to smile.

  He nodded and got back to work.

  He called after one in the morning. I was in bed, watching the clouds cross the setting moon over the brownstones across the street.

  “Did I wake you?” he asked. The vocal deadness was still there. Maybe I’d have to get used to it.

  “No.”

  “Did you enjoy the surgery?”

  “Better than Cats.”

  He laughed a real, true, guttural laugh and I almost burst into tears.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I disturbed you.”

  “You didn’t disturb me.”

  “I missed you.”

  He sighed. It wasn’t an annoyed sigh or a sigh of boredom, but a final exhale of breath after the realization that what was started wouldn’t be finished. It was an acceptance of defeat. “You know how much I miss you? I stole your perfume so I could smell you when I’m on the cots.”

  “You’re not that far away.”

  “I know.”

  He didn’t offer an explanation as to why he couldn’t sleep at home, or why he’d decided to stay away for days. I was owed that.

  “Are you coming home now?” I asked.

  “I need to be here.”

  “You’re pushing it, darling.”

  “I know, baby.”

  “I’ll be at Jenn’s opening tomorrow at five. The masks.”

  “I thought you saw it last week.”

  “It’s been in previews or something. Ask her when you see her. Don’t come if you want to sleep in. But if you sleep in, you sleep here.”

  “Is that an order?”

  It shouldn’t have to be an order, but I couldn’t read him well enough to know if he was being playful or if he was offended at having his leash yanked.

  “Consider it an order.”

  Chapter Ten

  CADEN

  There was no starving it while Greyson was in my life. The Thing hovered back in the ambience until I thought of her, then it smiled. When she beeped me, it made its presence known. And when I recognized her voice, I felt it listening.

  Leaving her was not an option. Cutting her out wouldn’t make me sane any more than pretending the Thing didn’t exist would. I needed her. Before her, I had been made of broken glass in a padded bag. Everything looked fine on the outside, but I’d been cutting myself. She opened the bag and put the shards together.

  I loved her too much to choose this Thing over her. That much I was sure of. But outside the OR, I couldn’t think clearly. Couldn’t create a solution or make a decision in the thick swirl of jealousy and panic. Every thought walked a razor’s edge between sanity and insanity, and the edge kept moving until I didn’t know which side was which.

  Every day, it got worse. Even if the Thing wasn’t fully present, I felt its pressure against the skin of my mind, pressing against the membrane like a fist punching a latex wall. When I woke in a sweat, the pressure increased, and when she called, it burst through. My emotions were getting sucked into the black hole of this nightmare and I couldn’t shake it. The glue got stickier every day.

  The treatment wasn’t a cure, but I craved it.

  It was a perversion.

  To quell the Thing, I had to hurt Greyson. I had to fuck her like a fighter. Mark her like a vandal. Break her like a champion.

  I could make her come over and over while I did it too. That satisfied every part of me and made the Thing howl. It separated me from it. Severed the tie.

  If I could take advantage of that opportunity long enough to talk to her, maybe we could fix this. All I had to do was get over the humiliation of not being in control of my own mind.

  I had a million excuses to avoid the opening and only one reason to go. The reason was Greyson. So I went.

  Seeing my wife in a public place meant I could put off the inevitable long enough to change my mind, chase her away, talk myself into some other course of action. By the time I got there, I had my full mental facilities only by way of making sure my emotions were not engaged.

  When I saw her standing in a little black dress and heels, her fingers curved around a wine glass, I felt something.

  But desire wasn’t an emotion. Possession wasn’t an emotion.

  I kissed her cheek, and as expected, the Thing jumped into the space between us.

  I wasn’t angry as much as I wanted to battle it and win.

  Combativeness wasn’t an emotion either. Or maybe it was. I didn’t care.

  “Congratulations,” I said to Jenn. When I kissed her cheek, I kissed her cheek. No third party slid in on the action.

  Tina approached and introduced herself, as expected. I smiled and shook her hand. Same thing as Jenn. Nothing jumped between where we touched.

  “I’ve been wooing your wife,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “It depends on what kind of wooing you’re talking about.”

  “Professional wooing,” Greyson said.

  “Did they legalize that?”

  Tina laughed. Greyson slapped my arm playfully then looped her hand inside my elbow. The Thing felt good about that but couldn’t find a way in through the fabric.

  “I hope you don’t have to work as hard as I did,” I said. “She drives a hard bargain.”

  Tina clicked my glass. “Thanks for the tip.”

  “I’m sure no one will have to work as hard as he did,” Greyson said.

  “Sounds like quite a story.” Tina sipped her water.

  “Not really,” Greyson said. “My unit went to Balad to assist the combat support hospital. I had to assess their fitness—”

  “She decided I was unfit.”

  “I did not!”

  “You did.” I looked down at her, checking her status. Raised eyebrows. Relaxed mouth.

  I wanted to fuck her everywhere. Hard. Later. I would have to. Nothing was getting starved tonight. Not my hunger for her and not the Thing.

  She smiled. If I wasn’t fooling her into thinking I was all right, I was at least charming her into believing it. Good.

  I turned back to Tina. “She said I was overworked. She said I needed rest or I’d make a mistake.”

  “Which did you do? Rest or make a mistake?”

  “Neither.”

  “Of course,” Greyson chimed in. “He beat the odds. It’s what he does.”

  I nodded, satisfied that she thought that. Winners had an easier time winning.

  Danny came by. I shook his hand. He kissed my wife in an appropriately platonic manner. “It’s like a fucking hospital reunion. I try to get away from you people at night.”

  “Do your patients know you have such a potty mouth?” I said.

  Greyson slipped her hand into mine. I took it away.

  “Half of them can’t figure out how to use a potty. So no.” His orbicularis oris tightened slightly above his left lip. A sneer of a smirk so faint I would have missed it if I wasn’t paying attention so coldly. Or maybe that was the reason for the sneer in the first place.

  “We’re going to look at some masks, if you don’t mind,” I said.

  “Have at it.”

  I took Greyson to the side where we could see a mask painted blood red and clamped with a vise. The patient’s story was typed onto a framed piece of paper next to it, but I was sure I knew it. We slid sideways to the next one. It had been painted by a skilled hand in Islamic geometric patterns.

  “This is nice,” I said, but had no follow-up. I usually had reasons to like things. I couldn’t find one.

  “You should see this one over here.”

  Again, she tried to hold my hand, and again, I took it away.

  “Caden.”

  “Which one? This one?”

  “What’s happening?”