Free The Widower's Wife: A Thriller by Cate Holahan Page A

plate. He’d forward it to the local hospitals on the “off chance” something was “actually wrong” and tell the patrolman to watch for the car, but he wouldn’t take a report until Tom had been missing for at least a full day.
    “Most of the time, guy goes out with his buddies and forgets the hour,” he’d said. I hadn’t explained that Tom no longer had buddies or the money for a bender—or that he’d mused about faking his death.
    I tapped my phone screen. The time showed eleven thirty PM . Was Tom downstairs or was it an opportunistic burglar who’d realized my husband wasn’t home? I got up from the bed and took an instinctual step toward Sophia’s room. The alarm beepedgood-bye. The message on the security pad’s LED screen changed from “fault garage” to a request to arm the system.
    A breathless rage squashed my relief. Tom hadn’t hurt himself. But if he could disable the alarm, he’d been capable of getting to a phone to calm his wife. I readied my body for a fight and watched the door, battling the urge to barrel downstairs and confront my husband.
    My mind played devil’s advocate to my emotions: the Maserati could have had trouble, as Tom had told the daycare staff the other day. Perhaps it had broken down, leaving him stranded with a dead cell phone. Or maybe he’d suffered an accident and the hospital had just discharged him. Even more likely, he could have driven buzzed to some errand, been arrested, and had just been released from the drunk tank.
    I sat on the edge of the bed as the door peeled back. My husband’s broad frame filled the space between the dim hallway and our room. He closed the door behind him, slowly, the way I shut Sophia’s room after putting her to bed.
    “You’re home.”
    He whirled in the darkness. His head turned right and then left. He rubbed his eyes. “Ana? You’re awake.”
    “I couldn’t sleep. I was worried something had happened to you.”
    “I’m a grown man. What could happen to me?” Tom strode past me into our bathroom. He slipped a T-shirt over his head as he walked. I followed him.
    My feet hit the cool marble floor. I flicked on the light. He squinted, as if he’d been in blackness for too long. He unbuttoned his shorts. Clothing puddled around his ankles. He stepped from it and then flung open the glass shower door.
    I talked to the fault line running down his naked back. “A lot of things could happen. I wasn’t sure if you’d been in a car crash or if you’d fallen and hit your head or if you did something . . .”
    Tom closed himself inside the glass cage. Water blasted from the showerhead. Steam frosted the walls.
    “The daycare called me at work,” I continued. “I rushed home, thinking the worst.”
    His face tilted beneath the stream. Water poured over his pectorals and defined stomach, touching him in ways that I hadn’t in months.
    “Tom. Talk to me.”
    “I can barely hear you.” He gargled the words beneath the waterfall while rubbing his hands back and forth over his face. He grabbed blindly at the shower shelf. Fingers clasped a green bar of deodorant soap.
    I cracked the shower door. The mist covered my face like a veil. “Where were you?”
    “An old coworker called asking to meet in the city. I ran out without charging my phone and it died.” He ran the soap over his chest and stubble, painting on a foamy turtleneck. “I didn’t realize the meeting would last so long and then I lost track of time.”
    A former colleague had finally reached out? I didn’t want to demand a name. It would make it seem like I doubted him. “Didn’t this person have a phone?”
    “I didn’t think to ask. I drank too much. Sorry that I didn’t get Sophia. I knew that the daycare could keep her and then you could pick her up on the way home.”
    “They charge way too much for her to stay. I had to come back early.”
    “No, you didn’t.”
    “I thought something happened to you.”
    Tom opened his mouth beneath the