Free The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve

in the weave of the cloth. And when all of the traces of Jack had been cleaned and put away, what would she be left with then?
    She rolled onto her side, looking at the room in the moonlight. Through the small opening in the window, she could hear the water rolling.
    She had a vivid image of Jack in the water, bumping along the sand at the bottom of the ocean.
    She brought the flannel up over her mouth and nose and breathed slowly through it, thinking that might help to stop the panic. She thought of crawling into Mattie’s room and lying down on the floor next to Mattie and Julia. Had she really imagined she could spend this first night alone in the marriage bed?
    She got up quickly from the bed and walked into the bathroom, where Robert had left the bottle of Valium. She took one tablet, then another just in case. She thought about taking a third. She sat on the edge of the bathtub until she began to feel swimmy.
    She thought perhaps that she would lie down on the daybed in the spare room. But when she passed the door to Jack’s office, she saw that the light had been left on. She opened the door.
    The office was over bright and colorless — white, metallic, plastic, gray. It was a room she seldom entered, an unappealing space with no curtains on the windows and metal file cabinets lining the walls. A masculine room.
    She supposed it had its own order — an order known only to Jack. On the massive metal desk there were two computers, a keyboard, a fax, two phones, a scanner, coffee cups, dusty models of planes, a mug with red juice in it (Mattie’s, she guessed), and a blue clay pencil holder that Mattie had made for Jack when she was in second grade.
    She looked at the fax machine with its blinking light.
    She walked to the desk and sat down. Robert had been here earlier, using the phone and the fax. Kathryn opened the left-hand drawer. Inside were Jack’s logbooks, heavy, dark ones with vinyl bindings and smaller ones that fit into a shirt pocket. She saw a small flashlight, an ivory letter opener he had brought back years ago from Africa, handbooks for airplane types he no longer flew, a book on weather radar. A training video on wind shear. Epaulets from Santa Fe. Coasters that looked like flight instruments.
    She closed the drawer and opened up the long middle drawer. She fingered a set of keys that she thought might be left over from the apartment in Santa Fe. She picked up a pair of old tortoiseshell reading glasses that Jack had run over with the Caravan. He insisted they still worked. There were boxes of paper clips, pens, pencils, elastic bands, thumbtacks, two batteries, a spark plug. She lifted a packet of Post-it notes and saw a sewing kit underneath from Marriott Hotels. She smiled at the sewing kit and kissed it.
    She opened a larger file drawer on the right. It was intended for legal-size files, she saw, but in it was a stack of papers about a foot high. She took the pile out and put it on her lap. It was a random set of papers and had no order that she could see. There was a birthday card from Mattie, memos from the airline, a local phone book, a series of health insurance forms, a rough draft of a paper Mattie had written for school, a catalog of books about flying, a homemade valentine Kathryn had given him a year ago. She looked at the front of the card.
Valentine, I love what you do for my mind …
, the front of the card read. She opened it.
    … And the things you do for my body
. She closed her eyes.
    After a time, she propped the papers she had already looked through against her chest and continued to riffle through the rest. She discovered several of Jack’s bank statements clipped together. She and Jack had had separate accounts. She paid for the clothes for Mattie and herself, for food and other household items. Jack paid for everything else. Any money Jack saved, he had said, was going toward their retirement.
    She was beginning to have trouble keeping her eyes open. She made an attempt to