The Daylight Marriage by Heidi Pitlor Page B

right?”
    That was it? The detective began walking him toward the door. “I’ll be in touch when I hear anything more.”
    Lovell wanted to ask the man what he thought now. What was his opinion of Lovell now? Had he gained anything from being honest? Even if it was a little too late in the game? Duncan just said good-bye, took a step back into his office, and closed his door.
    Lovell made his way outside and back to his car. The kids were at home, waiting for him. Apparently, Janine had protested his staying away an extra night, which was understandable.
    There was no good reason to tell them about the fingernail marks. It was the sort of news that implied more than it told, and it would upset them. It would scare them. Janine’s mind would rush to horrible places. If they read about it in the newspaper or saw it on TV, then he would talk it over with them. He would remind them that they didn’t have the full picture yet, that they should hold out hope until they had every piece of information they could get. They owed Hannah this much.
    As he drove home, he thought more about this latest news. She was angry at him; she was angry at herself. She sat there on the beach, raging at him and, without even noticing that she was doing so, scratching deep marks into the wood. It was not all that far fetched. The things he had said to her that night. She must have been livid.

Chapter 12
    H annah grabbed her purse and locked the door behind her. Autumn pollen caked the windshield of the car. She turned on the wipers and the wiper fluid. She backed her car out toward the street and narrowly missed the milk truck. The driver blasted her horn and gave Hannah the finger. Shaken, Hannah inched down the street, her foot on the brake as she approached the stop sign at the corner of the Sullivans’ property and then the overgrown willow that spilled toward the street and brushed her windshield as she passed. She stopped beneath the tree and watched the wipers scrape the thick dust back and forth in a choppy rhythm and ensnarl one of the wispy branches, tearing it from the tree. She shifted to park, switched off the wipers, stepped out of the car, and yanked at the branch now braided around the torn rubber blade. She removed the blade from its rusted frame and picked at the gnarled stem that wove taut around it. She glanced over at the weeping willow, a mass of downward movement. It was a gorgeous tree. She wound the branch into a loose reel and set it on her backseat. Maybe she could replant part of it later in her backyard.
    She drove toward town, past the Victorians with their broad porches and window boxes (“Mums, mums, and more mums,” she often complained), the rhododendrons bunched in front, the brick library, a group of preschoolers clutching a red rope and toddling down the sidewalk as they did each day. They looked at their feet, the sky, the cars—these sweet, jittery little people. She rarely, if ever, saw preschoolers or toddlers anymore. She counted the years since Ethan had been a toddler: five, almost six. Hannah had married and had her children, and this time now was shaped only by the maintenance of those things that had come before.
    Ten years ago, when she and Lovell had been visiting her parents, she had surprised him with cross-country skiing on the beach during a blizzard. She had filled a thermos with bourbon. She had blindfolded him—and he protested and squirmed. He could hardly sit still during the short drive to Lambert’s Cove. “I’ve never liked surprises,” he griped, and she said, “Who doesn’t like surprises?” She refused to take off his blindfold until she had walked him up the snowy dune and onto the untouched beach, now a rumpled expanse of white. When she finally loosened the knot of the bandanna behind his head, he blinked at all that was around them, and said, “What is this?”
    She gestured beside them to the skis and poles