I don’t know exactly what he’d put in it. Something to make me sleep deeply, so he could pack and vanish without a scene. It doesn’t matter what it was. What matters is that for twenty minutes, while my husband believed he’d sedated me, I lay there wide awake, watching him in the reflection of the black window.
He packed like a thief, because that is what he was.
Designer shirts, folded fast. His passport. A thick envelope of cash I didn’t know we had. The blue velvet box where he kept his cufflinks. Jewelry. Documents from the safe. He moved through eleven years of our life taking everything he thought had value, and he left behind only the one thing he’d never possessed in the first place.
Guilt.
At 2:18 a.m., he came and stood beside the bed and looked down at me.
I will remember the way he said it for the rest of my life.
