Free The Secrets We Keep by Stephanie Butland Page A

her that he hasn’t understood, and so she has the chance to back up and off this path, but she doesn’t.
    She just takes a deep breath—diaphragm up, diaphragm down—and says some words she doesn’t want to have to use so close to one another. “Mike. That night. I keep wondering, Andy. What would it have been like? To drown?”
    â€œOh.” Andy looks into his glass, and into Elizabeth’s face—her eyes are alert, concentrating, sure—and takes a deep breath too. And he tells her, gently, calmly, simply, the way he knows he should.
    Tears roll down her face and gather in his eyes but he keeps going. What he says is part medical opinion and part thirty years of friendship.
    He says that, once the shock of the cold was over, Michael probably wouldn’t have felt much.
    He says that Michael would have been so focused on getting Kate out that he wouldn’t have been thinking about his own body.
    He says that physical strength and the instinct to save both himself and Kate would have taken over.
    He says that the weight of Michael’s own wet clothes and the weight of Kate and her wet clothes would have been a huge burden.
    He says that Michael would have struggled but there would have come a point when he couldn’t struggle anymore.
    He pauses and looks at Elizabeth, touches her arm, a question: Is this enough? She nods. Keep going. I’m OK. Her eyes say, Despite appearances, this is OK. Her heart screams for him to stop talking, but something stronger in her needs to hear this.
    He says, “Michael probably lost consciousness.” He says—he falters as he says it—“He might not have known. About the dying. We can’t know.”
    â€œNo,” says Elizabeth. “No. We can’t know.”
    Later, in the dark, knowing how well Mel sleeps after a drink, she takes a blanket and sits on the stairs, listening to Mike’s voice on the answering machine, over and over and over until it’s a beloved white noise. She’s consented to the machine being switched off, so that unwary callers don’t have to hear her husband’s voice, but she won’t have the recording replaced. As she said to Mel the last time they talked about it, it’s not as though she isn’t here to answer the phone. Mel had made a face that said, Well, I’ll let this go for now, but this isn’t the end of it.
    Andy’s words have been partly reassuring: she likes knowing that Mike wouldn’t have known, wouldn’t have been thinking about dying, would instead have been focused on getting Kate out, getting himself out. But the conversation has also reminded Elizabeth of what she’ll never know.
    She wonders how he felt, what he thought about, whether he panicked or was calm, whether he thought about her. She goes upstairs and gets into bed and holds her breath, just to see if she can discover how it might have felt, but something more primal even than grief makes her pant and panic before she gets anywhere close.

Mike,
    This morning, by the gate, it was a few crocuses—crocii?—tied with a silver ribbon again. I was out there early—it was barely light—but you’d beaten me to it. I felt as though, if I’d been fifteen seconds earlier, I’d have seen you disappearing around the side of the gate (or through the fence, or dematerializing, or however you do it). It seemed as though the air was still reassembling itself around the place where you’d been.
    I put them in our bedroom, on my bedside table. I opened the curtains, a little bit, so that they would get some light, although I know it doesn’t really matter once they’re picked. Thank you for bringing them for me, today, of all days, when I’ve lain awake all night and thought about drowning.
    I keep telling Mel she can go home, and she says yes, or she could stay here, because she can work anywhere she can plug her laptop in, and