Jeffrey Archer Presents by Mark Trainer

Author:Mark Trainer
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2010-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

She’d long ago fallen off to sleep when Danny crept to the bathroom. He was counting on the harsh light and the cold tile to jolt sense into him. He’d lain in their postcoital calm feeling that he’d now, in the most literal way, cheated on his wife with this woman who, by every indicator, was his wife. He set aside his welling panic long enough to note that he’d done rather a good job of it, too. His desperation had expressed itself in a vigor he usually had trouble mustering at this time of night. Honestly, he couldn’t have said if it was the appearance of this new wife or the idea of those kids picking on—on his son.

Danny made his way back out into the bedroom. She didn’t move. He stealthily opened their door and pulled it to behind him. He turned the knob of the door down the hall slowly. Opening it made only the lightest sound against the carpeting. Danny winced at a creak that suddenly erupted from the hinges, but nothing in the room moved. He lowered himself gently down onto the end of the bed. The boy was turned toward the wall, his wrists crossed at his face as if he were shielding himself from a blow. Once his eyes adjusted to the moonlit room, Danny could make out the fine, downy hair on the boy’s leg that had found its way out from beneath the covers. There was the gentle scent of perspiration in the close air. Danny laid the flat of his fingers against the arch of the foot next to him. He’d never held an infant before he’d had a child of his own and remembered specifically holding that same foot to extend the newborn’s leg, how it would pull itself back again, how Danny wondered what the baby was thinking. Somewhere nearby, were the fathers of those fifth-grade bullies sitting beside their sleeping sons? Those kids that used to delight in knocking him down—whatever their names were—did their fathers do this?

And where were they now, anyway? Did they think about what they used to do to him? And the people everyone marries and makes children with—where do they fit in, and what are they remembering? Are they the leftovers of someone else’s bullying? Or maybe they aren’t. For all he knew, the woman he’d married might have had the ability to make schoolgirls cry. There might be countless forty-something women wishing his wife ill for the person she once was. It made all this present-tense stuff feel like a pretty narrow wedge. The first kid he hated—Ryan Boyle, that was the kid from second grade—and Staci Jensen, the one he’d seen on the skateboard—they’d had no precedents, and he’d always remember them. Just like almost everything in those fifteen years that were the entirety of his life’s short scope back then. Now, in his forties, fifteen years didn’t mean much more than how long it had been since they’d last bought a dryer.

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