I tried to remember exactly when things started to go wrong but couldn’t pinpoint any exact date and time. We’d both been excited to move back here; I’ve always loved this place and had told Lauren about it lots of times when we were dating. She used to love hearing those stories.
Sometimes it seemed as if she as reliving her childhood through me. She never really talked much about her own upbringing, having been orphaned at a very young age, and growing up in the foster care system, it was easy to understand why she was so fascinated by my stories of the idyllic town I’d grown up in?
And why am I thinking about this now? What’s the point? I asked myself. Because I’m trying to get a handle on this thing, trying to figure out what went wrong in my marriage that brought this on. I answered.
I looked out the car window as mom and dad drove me back to the house, my thoughts a conflicted mess. I recalled what Jenny had said the last time she was at the house, about Lauren being sick. Could she have been right?
Surely not, I would’ve noticed something before now, wouldn’t I? She couldn’t have kept something like that hidden for all these years, could she? My blood ran cold with the thought. Had I been so neglectful that I hadn’t noticed my wife’s illness? The thought did not leave a good feeling in my chest.
I’ve never seen myself as neglectful if anything I was way too hands-on, especially after the girls were born. Our sex life was fine, our finances were better than ever, and we lived in a great home in an amazing neighborhood, what was there not to be happy and relaxed about?
True we were still young by today’s standards, most people our age were still doing the traveling thing along with parties every weekend and get-togethers with friends while we were stuck at home with the babies. But I’d thought that that’s what she’d wanted. In fact, I’d been pretty sure that she’d purposely not taken the pill to bring that about.
And though I’d been scared shitless when I first found out she was pregnant, not for one minute was I ever unhappy with the news. As I said, I’d already sowed all the wild oats I intended to. But maybe she hadn’t? Is that it? Was it all too much for her? Then why didn’t she just tell me?
We pulled into the driveway, and my eyes went immediately to the spots of blood that were glistening in the sun on the hot asphalt. I relived the moment of impact again and felt my body jerk. What would she have done had I not been there, had Jenny not been there?
The sight of her standing over the crib with that knife in her hand will haunt me for the rest of my life. And Jenny, what if she’d hurt her? I saw her the way she was as a kid following me around with those big innocent eyes that she’d grown into, and the thought of her being hurt because of me did something weird to my system. Something to take out and look at more closely later.
Now I wondered what she’d been doing here. What had made her come here today of all days. I’d sighed a deep sigh of relief the first time she’d turned Lauren down and every time after that. I thought for sure with her out of the picture; things would’ve settled down and gone back to normal.
Though I had moments where she’d just flit into my mind out of nowhere, I put that down to the fact that the girls had seemed to like her. They were much calmer when she was around I’d noticed. I think she talked more to them than to anyone else come to think of it.
The few times she’d been over to babysit without incident, I hadn’t noticed anything about her other than the fact that she was still so quiet, so much so that sometimes it was easy to forget that she was in the house.
There was never any flirtation, no whimsical smiles, and she certainly didn’t dress to catch my attention. In fact, I think she went out of her way, sensing Lauren’s irrational jealousy, to appear as non-threatening as she possibly could.
And apart from acknowledging the fact that she was gorgeous, I never let my mind stray any further than that. I will admit to rehashing our past interactions from when she was a kid and found myself sometimes wondering if she could really still have those feelings for me.
In my head, it was just a passing thing all those years ago. She wasn’t the first girl to have a crush on me, she was the youngest at that point, though, and she hadn’t been the last. Though I’d settled down some at college and more so after marrying and becoming a dad, women still always seemed to gravitate towards me.