The Marriage Lie: Shockingly twisty, destined to become the most talked about psychological thriller in 2018!

She shifts in her chair, and she glances at my father as if to request a little help. When she doesn’t get any, her gaze returns to me. “Are you asking how Liberty Airlines knows your husband boarded?”

“Yeah. That’s exactly what I’m asking.”

“Okay. Why don’t we just back up a minute, then? All airlines have procedures in place, so mistakes like the one you’re suggesting could never happen. Passengers’ tickets are scanned at the security checkpoint and then again at the gate, right before they board the plane. Technology doesn’t lie. It assures us there are no false positives.”

I hear Will’s scoff, as clearly and surely as if he were sitting right here, right beside me. If he were, he’d tell this lady that technology lies by design, because it is created and controlled by humans. There are bugs. There are crashes. There are false positives and false negatives, too. So Ann Margaret can try to talk me out of beating this particular horse, but as far as I’m concerned, this horse is far from dead.

My flare of fury settles into one of self-satisfaction. If Liberty Air can make a mistake as grievous as neglecting to call me before contacting the media, then who’s to say Will’s name on that passenger manifest isn’t another? A gigantic, life-altering mistake, but a mistake all the same.

“What if halfway down the Jetway, he turned around and went back out? He could have slipped right past the gate agent while she was scanning someone else’s ticket. Maybe she didn’t even notice.”

“It’s possible, I suppose...” Ann Margaret looks away, and she doesn’t bother to conceal her doubt. She doesn’t ask the most obvious question, either—why would anyone turn around and leave? If she did, I’d tell her because it was the wrong flight, headed in the wrong direction. “Perhaps you’d like to speak with someone?”

Now we’re talking. I’m already nodding, assuming she’s referring to her boss or, better yet, the head of security for Hartsfield.

“Religious or secular? We have Red Cross grief counselors on hand, as well as clerics of every major religion. Which would you prefer?”

Irritation surges up my chest, lurching me forward in my chair. “I don’t need to talk to a psychologist. I am a psychologist. What I need is for someone to tell me where my husband is.”

Ann Margaret falls silent. She chews her bottom lip and glances around at her colleagues, stationed at nearby tables and consoling their inconsolables, as if to say Now what? They didn’t teach us this one at Care Specialist training. I’ve stumped her.

“So, what now?” my father asks, ever the planner. “What do we do next?”

Ann Margaret looks relieved to be prompted back on script. “Well, there will be a memorial service this weekend here in town. Liberty Airlines is still working out the logistics, but as soon as I know the time and place, I’ll pass it on. I am available to pick you up at your house and escort you to the service if you’d like. It’s of course up to you, but there will be media there, and I’ll know the way to get around them. And if you’re interested, I can help plan a visit to the accident site.”

My throat closes around the last two words. Accident site. I can barely stand seeing the images on television. The idea of walking among the wreckage, of standing on the earth where 179 souls crashed into it, feels like a vicious punch in the gut.

“There’s no hurry,” Ann Margaret says, filling up the silence. “When and if you’re ready.” When I still don’t respond, she consults her papers for the next item on the agenda. “Oh, yes. Liberty Airlines is working with a third-party vendor to manage the process of returning personal effects to the rightful family members. You’ll find the form on page twenty-three of your packet. The more detail you can provide here, the better. Pictures, inscription texts, distinguishing characteristics. Things like that.”

Will isn’t big on jewelry, but he wears a wedding band and a watch. Both were gifts I had engraved with our initials, and both are things I’d want back.

“Again, you’re assuming he was on that plane.”

My denial, I know, is textbook. I don’t believe, therefore it cannot be true. Will is not buried under Missouri soil. He’s in Orlando, dazzling conference attendees with his keynote on predictive analytics and bitching in the hotel bar about the heat. Or maybe he’s already home, rumpled and tired from wherever he’s been all this time, wondering what’s for dinner. I picture myself walking through the door to find him there, and a bubble of joy rises in my chest.

“Mrs. Griffith, I realize how difficult this must be, but—”

“Do you? Do you really? Because was it your husband on the plane? Was it your mother or father or daughter or son who was blown to bits all over a cornfield? No? Well, then, you don’t know, and you can’t realize how difficult this is for me. For anyone in this room.”

Ann Margaret leans into the desk, and her brow crumples. “No, I didn’t lose a family member on Flight 23, but I can still feel deep sadness and compassion for you as well as everyone else here today. I share in your anxiety and distress, and I’m on your side. Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”

“Give me my husband back!” I shriek.

All around us, tables fall still, and heads turn in my direction. Solidarity, their teary faces say. They want their loved ones back, too. If we were sitting close enough, we’d bump fists. It’s a shitty, fucked-up society, but at least I’m not the only one in it.

Dave presses a palm to my right shoulder blade, a show of brotherly support. He knows I’m on the verge of a meltdown, and I know his newest, most urgent goal is to get me out of here. “Is there anything else?”

“Yes. It would help greatly if you would provide the name and address of your husband’s doctor and dentist. Be assured that all information collected is confidential and will be managed only by forensic personnel under the guidance of the medical examiner. And I’m very sorry to have to ask, but, um, we’ll also need a DNA sample.”

My father reaches for my hand. “Anything else?” he says through clenched teeth.

Ann Margaret pulls an envelope from her packet and pushes it across the desk. “This is an initial installment from Liberty Airlines to cover any crash-related expenses. I know this is a very difficult time, and these funds are intended to, well, take a little of the pressure off you and your family.”

I pick up the envelope, peek at the printed paper inside. Apparently, death has a price, and if I’m to believe Liberty Air, it’s $54,378.

“There is more forthcoming,” Ann Margaret says.

The anger that’s been simmering under the surface since I walked through the door fires into red-hot rage. The flames lick at my organs and shoot lava through my veins, burning me up from the inside out. My hands ball into tight fists, and I sit up ramrod straight in my chair. “Let me ask you something, Margaret Ann.”

“It’s Ann...” She catches herself, summons up a sympathetic smile. “Of course. Anything.”

“Who do you work for?”

A pause. She furrows her brow as if to say Whatever are you talking about? “Mrs. Griffith, I already told you. I work for you.”

“No. I mean whose name is at the top of your paychecks?”

She opens her mouth, then closes it, hauls a breath through her nose and tries again. “Liberty Airlines.”

I rip the check in two, reach for my bag and stand. “That’s what I thought.”

* * *

Ann Margaret is true to her word on one account at least. When we push through the door of the Family Assistance Center, a handful of uniformed Liberty Air agents hustle us through the terminal and out a side door. If any journalists spot us on the way to the car, we don’t see them. The agents act as a human shield.

They pile us into Dad’s Cherokee and slam the doors, backing away as soon as Dad starts the engine. He slides the gear in Reverse but doesn’t remove his foot from the brake. Like me, Dad’s still in shock, trying to process everything we learned in the past hour. I lose track of how long we sit there, the motor humming underneath us, staring silently out the window at the concrete barrier of the parking deck, and it’s not until I feel Dad’s warm palm on my knee and Dave’s on my shoulder that I realize that this whole time, I’ve been crying.

9

All night long, I dream I’m Will. I’m high in the clouds above a flyover state, safely buckled in an aisle seat, when suddenly the bottom drops out of the sky. The plane lurches and rolls, and the motors’ screams are as deafening as my own, as terrified as the other passengers’ underneath and above and on all sides of me. We heave into a full-on nosedive, careening to the earth with irreversible velocity. I wake up right as we explode into a fireball, Will’s terror gritty in my mouth. Did he know what was happening? Did he scream and cry and pray? In his last moments, did he think of me?

The questions won’t leave me alone. They march through my mind like an army on attack, blitzing through my brain and lurching me upright in bed. Why would my husband tell me he’s going one place but get on a plane to another? Why would he create a fake conference with a fake flyer as fake evidence? How many other times has he not been where he said he would be? My heart gives a kick at that last one, the obvious answer like trying to jam a square peg in a round hole. Will wouldn’t cheat. He wouldn’t.

Then, what? Why lie?

I twist around on the bed, groping in the early-morning light for his empty pillow. I press the cool cotton to my face and inhale the scent of my husband, and memories swell in razor-sharp flashes of lucidity. Will’s square jaw, lit up from below by his laptop screen. The way his hair was always mussed on one side from running a hand up it, an unconscious habit when he was thinking about something. That smile of his whenever I came into the room, the one that no one else ever got but me. More than anything, the sensation of how it felt to be whole and to be his, what it felt like to be us.

I need my husband. I need his sleep-warmed body and his thermal touch and his voice whispering in my ear, calling me his very favorite person. I close my eyes and there he is, lying in the bed next to me, bare chested and a finger crooked in invitation, and an empty heaviness fills my chest. Will’s dead. He’s gone, and now, so am I.

The fresh wound reopens with a searing hot pain, and I can’t stay in this bed—our bed—for another second. I kick off the covers, slip on Will’s robe and head down the stairs.

In the living room, I flip the wall switch and pause while my eyes adjust to the sudden light. When they do, it’s like looking at a picture of my and Will’s life, frozen the moment before he left for the airport. His sci-fi paperback, its pages dog-eared and curling up at the corners, sits on the side table by his favorite chair, next to a mini mountain of cellophane candy wrappers I’m always nagging him to pick up. I smile at the same time I feel the tears build, but I blink them away, because one little word is slicing through my memories like a machete.

Why?

I push away from the wall and head over to the bookshelves.

When we moved into the house last year, Will nixed the idea of a home office. “A techie doesn’t need a desk,” he said at the time, “only a laptop with a multi-core processor and a place to perch. But if you want one, go for it.” I didn’t want one. I liked to perch wherever Will did, at the kitchen counter, on the couch, in a shady spot on the back deck. The desk in the living room became a spot for sorting mail, storing pens and paper clips, and displaying our favorite framed photographs—snapshots of happier times. I turn my back to the desk so I can’t see.

But inevitably, home ownership comes with a paper trail, and Will stored ours in the living room built-ins. I kneel on the floor, yank open the doors and marvel at a display worthy of a Container Store catalog. Colorful rows of matching three-ring binders, their contents marked with matching printed labels. Everything is ordered and grouped by year. I pull the binders out, laying them across the hardwoods by priority. Where would be the most likely place to find another lie?

A trio of letter trays are stacked at the very left side of the cabinet, and I flip through the contents. Work-related brochures, a yellowed Atlanta Business Chronicle with a front-page article on AppSec, tickets for the Rolling Stones concert later this summer. A neat stack of unpaid bills is on top, clipped together and labeled with a Post-it in Will’s handwriting: To Do ASAP. My heart revs up, pumping too much blood all at once, and I begin to sweat despite the chill in the room. Will isn’t dead. He’s coming back. The evidence is right here, in his distinct scrawl. A dead person can’t go to concerts or knock out to-do lists, and my meticulous husband never leaves a task unfinished.

I sit cross-legged among the papers, sifting through the binders one by one. Bank statements. Credit cards. Loans and contracts and tax returns. I’m looking for... I don’t know what. A toe-dip into the husband I thought I knew so well, any clue as to why he has suddenly morphed into the kind of man who lies.

An hour and a half later, I come across one. A fresh copy of his will, a version I’ve never seen before, updated only a month ago, and the discovery hits me like a punch in the gut. He revised his will without telling me? It’s not like we have a lot of assets. A heavily mortgaged house, a couple of car loans and not much else. Will doesn’t have any living family members, and we don’t have children. Yet. Probably. Except for the maybe-baby, our situation is pretty straightforward. I flip through the pages, searching for the reason why.

I find it on page seven: two new life insurance policies Will purchased earlier this year. Together with the one he already had, the payout adds up to a grand total of—I have to look twice to be sure—two and a half million dollars? I drop the papers onto my thighs, my head spinning with all the zeros. The amount is staggering and completely out of proportion to his mid-level salary. I know I should be glad for his preparedness, but I can’t help the new questions that poke and prod at me. Why two new policies? Why so much?

“Dare I ask?” I look up to find Dave standing in the doorway. He’s wearing his husband’s Harvard T-shirt and pajama pants, the fabric rumpled from bed, and yawning hard enough to crack his jaw. By now it’s barely seven, and Dave has never been a morning person.

“I’m searching for clues.”

“I figured as much.” He stretches his long arms up to the ceiling and twists, a noisy wringing out of his spine that makes me think of bubble wrap. “But what I meant is, dare I ask if you’ve found evidence of another life in Seattle?”

“The opposite, actually. No unusual payments, no names I don’t recognize. Only more evidence that when it comes to organization, my husband is completely anal.” I pick up the will, flip through to page seven. “Do you have a life insurance policy?”

“Yeah.”

“For how much?”

He rubs a hand over his dark hair, making it stand up in tousled tufts. “I don’t remember. Just under a million or so.”

“What about James?”

“Somewhere around the same, I think. Why?”

“Two and a half million dollars.” I shake the paper in the air between us. “Million, Dave. Doesn’t that seem extraordinarily high?”

He shrugs. “I assume you’re the beneficiary?”

“Of course,” I say, even as another question elbows its way into my consciousness. Who’s to say he didn’t purchase others, to benefit whoever’s in Seattle?

“Then, yes and no. As I recall, the calculation is something like ten times your annual salary, so, yes, the amount Will insured himself for is steep. But he loved you. He probably just wanted to make sure you’re well provided for.”

Dave’s words start a slow leak of grief, but I swallow it whole. Yes, my husband loved me, but he also lied. “Two of the policies were bought three months ago.”

His head jerks up, and his brows slide into a sharp V. “That’s either an incredible coincidence or incredibly creepy. I can’t decide.”

“I’m going for creepy.”

He sinks onto a chair and scrubs his face. “Okay, let’s think this through. Life insurance doesn’t come for free, and an amount that big would have cost him a hundred bucks or more a month.”

I point to the pile of binders, one of them containing this year’s bank statements. “Well, he didn’t pay for it from our mutual account. I combed through every single statement and didn’t find anything but a shocking amount of Starbucks charges.”

“Could he have another bank account?”

“It’s possible, I guess. But if it’s not here, how do I find it?”

“His computer. Emails, bookmarks, history files. Things like that.”

“Will never goes anywhere without his laptop. Ditto for phone and iPad.”

“Can you log in to his email?”

I shake my head. “No way. Will isn’t like us, people who still use the name of their childhood dog as a password. He uses those computer-generated log-ins that are impossible to crack, and a different one for everything.”

“Even for Facebook?”

“Especially for Facebook. Do you know how often social media accounts get hacked? All the freaking time. Next thing you know, all fifteen hundred of your Twitter followers are getting DMs from you hocking fake Ray-Bans.”

Will would be so proud. They’re his words, the ones he preached to me when I told him rocky321 is my password for everything. Now they roll right off my tongue.

I sigh, looking around at the messy piles of papers and binders. There are no more answers in these, that much is certain. I scoot forward on my knees, begin shoving everything back into the cabinet.

“You know the next place I’d look if I wanted to find my husband’s secrets? And I tell you this at the risk of confirming every stereotype you’ve ever heard about gay men.”

I reach for another binder, glancing over my shoulder at my brother, and we say the words in unison.

“His closet.”

* * *

Will’s closet is a neat, orderly world where each item is organized by color and grouped by category. Work shirts, pressed and starched and buttoned. A row of pants with pleats sharp enough to slice bread. Jeans and T-shirts and polos, every hanger matching and perfectly spaced. I pull on the top drawer handle, and it opens to reveal his boxers, rolled into tight Tootsie Rolls and stacked in even rows.

This is Will’s domain, and he’s everywhere I look. I stand here for a moment, drinking him in like wine, feeling a quivering ache take hold in my stomach. I sense him in the orderliness, in his preference for soft fabrics and rich jewel tones, in the scent of spicy soap and mint. Like I could turn around and there he’d be, smiling that smile that makes him look younger and older at the same time. The first time he aimed it at me in a rainy Kroger parking lot, I liked it so much I agreed to a cup of coffee, even though he’d just rammed his car into my bumper.

“You could have just asked for my number, you know,” I teased him a few days later, as he was walking me to the door after our first official date. “Our fenders didn’t have to take such a beating.”

“How else was I supposed to get your attention? You were driving away.”

I laughed. “Poor, innocent fenders.”

“A worthy sacrifice.” He kissed me then, and I knew he was right.

“You okay?” Dave says now, his tone gentle.

I nod, not trusting my voice.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” He searches my face with a concerned gaze. “You don’t have to help, you know.”

“I know, but I want to.” He doesn’t look convinced, so I add, “I need to.”

“Okay, then.” He points back toward the beginning, to where Will’s sweaters are stacked in perfect piles in the cubbies. “I’ll start on that end and you on the other. We’ll meet in the middle.”

We work mostly in silence. We check every pocket on every pair of pants, shorts and jeans. Dave shakes out every sweater, and I dump out every drawer. We peer inside every single shoe, reach into every single sock. It’s a good hour’s work, and in the end, we find nothing but lint.

“I know your husband is meticulous, but this is insane. At the very least, we should have found some trash. Old business cards, receipts, some spare change. Is there a spot somewhere where he emptied his pockets?”

“We keep a spare change jar in the laundry room, but as for the other things...” I lift both shoulders high enough to brush my earlobes.

My brother and I are seated cross-legged on the closet floor, surrounded by messy piles of Will’s clothes and shoes. The closet looks like a tornado came through it, whipping clothes off the hangers and out of the bins and dumping everything onto the floor. I pick up one of Will’s sweaters, a baby-bottom-soft cashmere I bought him last year for his birthday, and hold it up to my nose, inhaling the familiar scent.

In that moment, I feel Will so strongly that it stops the breath in my throat and prickles the hairs on the back of my neck. Hey, sweetness, he says in my head, as clearly as if he’s standing right beside me. Whatcha doing?

I shake the image off, drop the fabric onto my lap. “Now what?”

Dave pauses to think. “His car?”

“It’s at the airport.”

He nods. “Dad and I will figure out how to get it back. In the meantime, what about social media? When’s the last time you checked his Facebook page?”

Dave’s question stuns me. Will and I share a home, a life, a past. Our relationship has always been built on trust and honesty. He gives me leeway, and I give him a long leash.

“Never, and stop looking at me like that. Snooping is not something we do, ever. There’s never been any reason for either of us to be jealous or suspicious.”

Dave inhales, but he doesn’t say the words both of us are thinking.

Until now.

James’s voice comes around the corner. “Hey, Dave?”

“In the closet,” Dave calls out.

James’s laugh beats him to the closet doorway, where he appears clad in head-to-toe lululemon and clutching a white gift bag. His blondish hair is plastered to his forehead with rain and sweat, and his breath comes in quick, hard puffs. “There are so many jokes I could make right now.”

Dave rolls his eyes. “Did your run take you by the mall?”

James looks down at the bag like he just remembered he was holding it. “Oh, right. It’s for Iris, I guess. I found it hanging on the front doorknob. There’s no note.”

I take the bag and pull out a brand-new iPhone 6, one of the big ones with more gigabytes than I could ever use, still in the sealed box.

“Why would somebody give you an iPhone?” James says.

“Because she feels sorry for me, and she knows I broke mine.” I drop the box back into the bag and hand everything back.

“Do you want me to set it up for you?” Dave says.

“No, I want you to take it back to the store, get a refund and then buy me a different one with my own money.”

“Wouldn’t it just be more efficient to write this person a check?”

As usual, my brother is right. I do need a new phone, though I’ll be damned if anybody but me pays for it. “Okay, but you’ll need my laptop to install it. I think it’s in a kitchen drawer somewhere. And while you’re at it, look up what that thing costs, will you?” I’ll have to log on to the school system to find Claire’s address, then I can drop her a check in the mail.

“Sure thing.”

That settled, James leans a shoulder against the doorjamb, taking in the shambles we’ve made of the closet. The rows of askew hangers, the mountain of sweaters and shirts on the floor, the clothes hanging out of the drawers like a half-off bin at Target. “Do I even want to know?”

“We’re snooping,” Dave says.

“And?”

“Nothing. Not even a gas receipt.”

Dave’s tone is heavy with meaning, as is his expression. A hard knot blooms in my belly at the silent conversation that passes between the two men. What kind of person leaves nothing, not even a gum wrapper or a forgotten penny, behind? The kind who doesn’t want his wife to know what he’s up to. Their words come across so clearly, they might as well have said them out loud.