He’d highlighted section four of the Woolf entry, DEATH. It summarized her suicide by drowning and contained a transcript of her last note to her husband.
Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again … I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier …
“No, listen to me…” I closed the tab and cleared the browsing history. I shut off his laptop and glanced toward the library. Nate was deliberately not paying attention, his back to us but his head inclined. “Darling,” I whispered. “You can’t look at things like that. They’ll take you away from me. Please, don’t you understand? I need you here with me.” I stroked his face and pressed soft kisses all over it. “Come to bed with me.”
When I led him toward the bedroom, Nate stepped into the hall and eyed us warily.
“Everything all right?”
“Fine,” I said.
Chapter 32
MATT
On Friday morning, Mike, Hannah, and Nate filed into my study.
They brought chairs and sat.
I grimaced and tossed my book onto the desk.
“I was reading,” I said.
“Well, good morning to you, too,” said Mike. He grinned at me, then at Hannah and Nate. “Surprised you’re home at this hour. Is that new?”
“Quite,” said Nate.
“Sort of…” Hannah flushed and I wanted to laugh. I’d been home last night, when, for whatever reason, she’d become determined to have sex. I hadn’t wanted sex in weeks—but Hannah applied her hands and mouth vigorously, and then she rode me like her life depended on it. We came. I fell asleep. Experiment over, I suppose.
But I did grasp her wrists in the heat of pleasure. I did sit upright and meet her gaze and scrape my teeth along her throat. Yes, I enjoyed that feeling, a touch of death, and I missed it.
“I wanted you to see these.” Hannah offered a stack of printed pages to Mike. What were they? I tried to get a look. “It’s a story he and I have been writing. This chapter—”
My hands tightened, nostrils flared.
Everyone looked at me.
Mike said, “You don’t mind if I read this, do you?”
In response, I snatched the pages—Chapter 10 of our untitled novel—crumpled and tossed them on the floor. Hannah laughed. Nate smiled broadly and Mike chuckled.
“The fuck?” I spat. “You look like a bunch of clowns.”
“I’ll give you the gist,” Hannah said. “He has this idea, this belief, ‘deeply held,’ he wrote, that the price of happiness is pain. From what I can gather, he blames the happiness of his early childhood for the loss of his parents.”
I disliked the direction of the conversation.
“Very disordered thinking,” Mike said. “Black-and-white. Typical for him.”
Typical for me?
I felt like a specimen.
I wanted to leave, but for the first time in a while, I also wanted to stay.
“And once, when we were talking about whether or not we wanted children, he said, ‘We have to be careful. We could be too happy.’ Something like that.”
Nate chimed in with some unhelpful bullshit about my childhood.
All three of them began to discuss me openly, encouraging and questioning one another.
“I’m fine,” I snarled into their dumb conversation.
Mike barely glanced at me.
Hannah mentioned Seth, and Nate said, “I’m sure Matt blames himself.”
“He must,” she said. “He probably thinks our engagement and this gorgeous house, all this happiness, somehow relates to Seth’s overdose.”
“That’s a great point.” Mike scribbled notes.
I felt myself rising into the moment, where I had not been for many days. It stung. I wouldn’t be there—couldn’t—in that reality where Seth had died. I couldn’t. That’s it. I couldn’t. I told Mike and Hannah and Nate that I couldn’t, and I nearly took the door off its hinges on my way out.
*
There was excitement in the house.
No one came to tell me what was happening.
Fucking typical. No one cared about me anymore.
Nate didn’t drag me out for walks; Hannah didn’t leave muffins and other treats around the kitchen. How long had my brother been staying here anyway? One night, I returned to the house and found them at the dinner table, Hannah and Nate, the happy fucking couple. Hannah quickly set me a place at the head of the table, but Nate said grace.
After that, I had resumed sleeping at the house. In bed, I pulled Hannah against me possessively. I woke tangled around her.
Shrieks of laughter sounded from outside.
I pulled on my standby layer—a rugged navy blue sweater—and went to the window. The afternoon was gray. I wanted Hannah to come read with me, the way we sometimes did. Instead, she was outside with … a white horse? It wore a saddle and bridle and Hannah held the reins from as great a distance as possible. I snorted. What the hell was she doing?
Nate appeared, jogging across the field to the paddock. He climbed over the fence and tossed an apple to Hannah. She fumbled it, let go of the reins, and squealed when the horse lunged at the apple.
Amateurs …
I tugged on socks and sneakers and checked myself in the mirror—not that I cared what I looked like, just to be sure I looked better than Nate. I did, of course. I’d lost a little weight and needed to gain back some muscle, but I was clean-shaven and clear-eyed.
I bounded down the stairs and out toward the paddock.
Hannah and Nate didn’t see me. He sat astride the horse and she stood on a fence rail, holding Nate’s hand and teetering.
“I can’t!” she said.
“Just throw your leg over. Come on.”
Hannah looked delightful. Her long curls were tied back and she wore a wooly red sweater. A burst of color shone on her cheeks. I wanted to bundle her up.
I stalked into the paddock.
They ignored me until I snagged the horse’s bridle and looked it in the face. It was a mare with a subtle crimp of the mane and tail, completely white and too thin.
“Hey Matt,” said Nate, casual as you please. “Tell Hannah to get on this saddle.”