Sleepwalker by Wendy Corsi Staub Page A

would ever think to crow.
    With a twinge of guilt, Mack hopes his wife will linger downstairs awhile longer tonight.
    If she comes up, she’s going to want to know what’s wrong with me, and I’m not good at talking about my feelings. I really just want to be alone right now.
    In the master bedroom, he closes the door behind him and strips down to his boxer shorts. Then he goes into the adjoining bathroom and looks at the prescription bottle.
    â€œ ‘Take one tablet at bedtime with plenty of water,’ ” he reads aloud. “Yeah. Here goes nothing.”
    He swallows a white capsule, returns to the bedroom, climbs into bed, and turns off the light.
    Okay, Dormipram . . . hurry up and do your thing.
    As he waits for drowsiness to overtake him, he replays the events of the evening, wondering if the kids picked up on his moodiness earlier. Probably.
    But I couldn’t help it. I felt so overwhelmed by everyone and everything. I just needed a few seconds to myself. Is that so wrong?
    Funny. In another lifetime—the one that came to a crashing halt more than a decade ago—it was just the opposite. Mack had more than his share of solitude and often craved human companionship. He was far lonelier during his first marriage than he’d ever been in his single life.
    Carrie was not, as he felt obliged to apologetically explain to his family and friends, a “people person.” She wanted— needed —no one but Mack.
    As a red-blooded man with a nurturing soul, he was touched—all right, flattered—by the fact that a fiercely independent woman like Carrie Robinson had chosen to let him into her life.
    It was obvious to him from the moment they met that she kept the rest of the world at bay. At the time, he had no idea why. He only knew that, as a man, he was as drawn to Carrie as he had been to stray puppies and kittens as a boy, and to the emotionally bruised children he met through his volunteer work with the Big Brother organization in his early twenties.
    He wanted to take her in, look after her, make up for the pain she had endured.
    The pain . . .
    Sometimes he still thinks about that—about Carrie’s past. He thinks about it, and he wonders, God forgive him, if the things she told him were even true.
    He managed to keep her secret to himself for the duration of their marriage. But at the very end, when he realized she’d been lost in the burning rubble downtown, his willpower cracked. He told his best friend, Ben, the truth about Carrie.
    A few years ago, over a couple of beers, Ben confessed that he had in turn confided Carrie’s secret to his wife—and that Randi hadn’t bought it.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” Mack was taken aback, not that Ben hadn’t kept the confidence, but that he—rather, Randi—would question the integrity in what Mack had revealed.
    Ben took a deep breath. “Look, this has been bothering me for a long time, and I’ve wanted to say something to you, but it always seemed too soon. Now you have Allison and the girls and you’ve moved on and I guess it doesn’t seem to matter as much . . .”
    â€œWhat are you trying to say, Ben?”
    â€œWhen I mentioned to Randi that you’d told me that Carrie spent her childhood in the witness protection program, she basically said that was bullshit.”
    â€œWhat, she actually thought I’d lie to you about something like that?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhat?” Then, reading the expression on Ben’s face, he suddenly got it. “Oh.”
    Randi—and apparently Ben, too—had concluded that Carrie had lied about it—to Mack.
    â€œYou’ve got to admit, it sounded far-fetched,” Ben said, and hastily added, “But I’m not saying it wasn’t true.”
    Maybe not—but suddenly, he had Mack thinking it.
    I guess it doesn’t seem to matter as much , Ben had said.
    He was