Apples Never Fall

What about me, what about me, what about me?

She’d never wanted his gratitude, just his acknowledgment. Just once. Because otherwise, what had been the point of her entire life? Of all those lamb chops she’d grilled? Of all that spaghetti Bolognese? My God, she despised spaghetti Bolognese. Night after night after night, plate after plate after plate. The laundry, the ironing, the mopping, the sweeping, the driving. She’d never resented it at the time, but now she resented every moment, every single bloody lamb chop.

He said quietly, “I never asked you to give anything up, Joy.”

But that was the point. He didn’t have to ask her.

“If you wanted it, you would have done it,” he said. The anger had gone from his voice. She could see that familiar deathly stillness coming over him. He was removing himself from the situation: first mentally, then physically.

She knew what came next, what always came next. In a moment she’d be alone in this big silent house with her thoughts and regrets.

Stan said, “If you’d really wanted it, nothing would have stopped you.”

She couldn’t speak. Did he not see that the only thing that could have stopped her was her love for him?

Then he delivered his final damning judgment. “You were never going to rank in the top ten, Joy. If I thought you could have got there, I would never have let you stop.”

The air whooshed from her like a fist to the stomach. He would never have let her stop. As if her sacrifice had been his considered decision.

If she had been the one to be injured it wouldn’t have occurred to him to give up his career.

He was wrong, and there was no way in the world that she could go back in time and prove it, to him or to herself.

Instead, she reacted instinctively. “You weren’t good enough to coach Harry. He was better off without you. You would have held him back! He needed a better coach than you!”

It wasn’t true. She believed Stan to be one of the best coaches in the country, maybe the world. She knew what he could have been without the tethers of a family, but didn’t he know what she could have been? How far she could have flown?

He put Harry’s memoir back on the table. He patted the pocket of his jeans, pulled out the car keys.

She dug deep for the most glittering pieces of vitriol she could find. “I was the one who made Delaneys a success. Everyone knows it. If it wasn’t for me, you’d have nothing, you’d be nothing but a washed-up, useless … nothing!”

The words bounced off him. He turned to walk away, and she could not stand it. It was not fair that he got to leave. It had never been fair. It had never been right. And yet she’d endured it, over and over again, and her children had endured it, and it was unacceptable, inexcusable behavior, and she would no longer accept, she would longer excuse. This time he would stay.

She ran after him, and even as she ran, part of herself registered the shame and indignity and inappropriateness of her actions. She floated up to the skylight and observed herself: a small, sweaty senior citizen running out of her nice kitchen and down the hallway toward the front door after her husband, shouting incoherently, alongside an old dog barking confusedly, trying to work out where the danger lay because there were no strangers in the house, so what could there be to fear?

Joy reached for the back of her husband’s checked blue-and-white shirt, the shirt she’d ironed, to wrench him back, to make him stay. Steffi ran in crazed panting circles around them. Stan swung around, and the dog tripped him. He lurched forward, nearly falling. One hand grabbed at the wall, causing the framed photo of Brooke with her Under 8s regional trophy to swing and bang and crack. Joy’s outstretched hand, clawing for his shirt, instead raked down Stan’s cheek, drawing instant blood with her vicious broken nails.

He grabbed her, his fingers painful on her shoulders.

She froze because his face was no longer his. It was an unfamiliar mask of ugly rage.

Her heart stopped. The world stopped.

For the first time in her sixty-nine years she felt the fear: the fear every woman knows is always waiting for her, the possibility that lurks and scuttles in the shadows of her mind, even if she’s spent her entire life being so tenderly loved and protected by good men.

Chapter 54

NOW

“Let’s see it one last time,” said Christina.

Ethan pressed play and they sat, side by side at his desk, transfixed by the jerky but clear color footage from the CCTV provided by the neighbors who lived two doors away in the same cul-de-sac as the Delaneys. The camera had been smashed by a hailstone in the big storm two days after Joy had disappeared and Caro Azinovic’s son, who had installed the camera for his widowed mother, had been getting it fixed. He was the one who had brought police this damning video revealing a fish-eye view of the front of his mother’s house. It captured, accidentally, a pie-shaped sliver of the Delaneys’ driveway.

Christina and Ethan watched Stan Delaney emerge from the front door of his home, at two minutes past midnight on the day after his wife disappeared, struggling to carry an unwieldy, floppy object wrapped in a blanket to his car.

He opened the trunk of his car, dumped the object, leaned in to rearrange it, reached up with both hands to slam the trunk shut, and then he stood—for exactly three minutes and forty-seven seconds—both hands flat on the car, his head bowed, like a man in solemn, reverent prayer, before he finally lifted his head and walked off camera.

It was eerie and powerful to watch.