These Violent Roots

by Nicole Williams

  “Floundering?” he guessed, concern drawing his forehead together.

  “Flopped.” My throat burned as we made our way into the lobby. “Between his job and mine, we haven’t seen each other for more than forty total minutes this week.” We paused before going through the glass doors. “I can’t remember the last time we shared a bed, not to mention what a couple occasionally does in a bed. He’s distant most of the time, and distracted the rest, and I’m pretty sure he wishes I’d just divorce him because he’s too gallant to mention it first. So that’s how things are in the Noah department.”

  When I paused to catch my breath, I noticed the surprise in Connor’s eyes. He knew a lot about my personal life, but I didn’t let him in much deeper than one stratum beneath surface level.

  “Sorry for the unload. I would have issued a warning if I knew that was all going to spill out.”

  Connor steered me away from the doors, into a quiet corner of the lobby. He lowered his face so it was right in front of mine. “Do you want a divorce?”

  My heart pounded as I considered Connor’s question. It seemed simple—I knew divorced people who saw each other more than Noah and I did—but nothing about dissolving seventeen years of marriage was straightforward.

  Especially with Noah’s and my history.

  “No.” My head shook with my answer. “I don’t think I do.”

  “Does he?” Connor continued.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to ask him?”

  “I’m not sure I’ll feel better no matter how he answers.” My gaze flickered to the door. I should have given Connor the generic response to his home life inquiry and moved on to a different subject. A person talked about this kind of stuff with a psychiatrist, not a co-worker. “I’m not sure if I’d rather him admit he wants a divorce or say he doesn’t, thereby admitting he’s content with this kind of non-existent relationship.”

  Connor’s head tipped the way it did whenever he was about to say something he shouldn’t. “You said you haven’t had sex in a while.”

  I shifted. “We surpassed a while six weeks ago.”

  To his credit, he tried to suppress his disbelief. “Maybe it’s time you quenched that dry spell. See if that does anything to bridge the abyss.”

  “That would require carving out more than five minutes of each other’s schedules.”

  “Then get to carving.” Connor waited for a nearby family to move past us before continuing. “I know I’m not married or anything and barely thirty, but in my experience, there aren’t many problems in a relationship that sex can’t fix. Just give it a shot.”

  My throat cleared from the next protest bubbling up. “What if he’s not . . . interested?”

  He rubbed at his mouth to hide his smile. “I take it that since you two have a child together, you’ve had sex at least once.”

  “Yeah. Andee was the result of an undergrad and graduate student drinking five too many drinks at a stupid frat party and decided getting it on in the back seat of Noah’s ’92 Camry was the height of romance.”

  “Fairy tale meeting.” Connor chuckled when I glared his direction.

  “Nothing about Noah and me has been a fairy tale. Not even the honeymoon in Maui, which I spent locked inside the hotel bathroom with morning sickness. He married me because he got me pregnant, viewing it as some kind of duty. I married him because I was scared shitless. The past seventeen years have been a blend of bearable years mixed with some really bad ones . . . especially the last few.”

  Connor rubbed my arm. “It will get better.”

  “You ever notice that when someone says ‘it will get better,’ things tend to get worse first?” Before he could respond, I pasted on a smile. “Enough about my disaster of a life. How are you? How’s Samuel?”

  The softening I saw in Connor’s eyes was something I remembered from what felt like a different life. “I’m great. He’s really great.”

  “Things are getting awfully serious for a couple of guys who weren’t looking for anything serious.” I raised my eyebrows in mock sternness while he pulled up a couple of photos on his phone.

  “Yeah, yeah. The commitment-phobe is contemplating notions of forever and always and it’s not even freaking me out the way it should.”

  I smiled at the stream of photos he showed me from what looked to be a hiking adventure he and Samuel had recently gone on. They looked happy—they were happy. You could see it brimming in their eyes, settled into the planes of their faces. I wasn’t sure I remembered what happy felt like.

  Warm, I thought. Childlike, perhaps?

  “I’m so thrilled for you. You deserve it all.”

  His shoulders moved as he pocketed his phone. “I’m actually on my way to meet him for drinks. Some local band trying to reincarnate Seattle’s grunge roots is playing at a club on Pike Street.”

  I gave him a look as I moved through the door he’d opened for me. “You hate grunge music.”

  “But I love him.”

  “So you’ll suffer in silence because of that?” I inhaled the cool night air tinged with the promise of rain.

  He held out his arms at his sides. “Gladly.”

  “Have fun.” I waved as I turned down the sidewalk.

  “Want me to walk you to your car?” The sound of his footsteps slapping the pavement behind me grew louder. “Rephrase. I’ll walk you to your car.”

  “Don’t take this as a hit against your sense of chivalry, but if we women are going to achieve any sense of equality in the future, we have to start asserting ourselves as strong and capable enough to make it to our cars on our own, sans white knights at our sides.” I winked at Connor before digging out my keys inside my purse. “Soapbox aside, I’m going to drop by the office. Spending all week in court has put me way behind.”

  “You should go home. To your family. Work can wait.”

  Checking my phone, it took me less than two seconds to read the missed texts from Noah and Andee. “My family isn’t there, and I hate stepping inside an empty house.”

  “You realize you do have to fight for the things you want, right? Good things might fall into your lap, but if you want to keep them, you have to go to battle.” Connor’s shoulder bumped mine before he turned down the next sidewalk.

  “You really should have gone into psychology. It pays better,” I called after him.

  “Good to know if I want a career change, I have an in with the wife of a well-known psychiatrist.”

  “Noah wouldn’t hire you. You’re too cheerful.”

  Connor’s laugh dripped into the darkness. “Dr. Wolff would love my unfounded sense of optimism.”

  Fighting the urge to follow Connor to whatever club he was meeting Samuel at, I watched him disappear around the next corner. Back when Connor had first started working for me, he was attacked by a group of men who touted homosexuality as a sin. Of course, as with most hate crimes, those men were using moral superiority to mask a deep-seeded sense of fear and ignorance.

  Connor had spent ten days in the hospital, half of those in ICU. The men had never been brought to justice. Cases like his, and now Skovil’s, scratched at the doubt I kept buried deep as to the effectiveness of the legal system.

  But by the time I made it to my office, I’d shoved any ribbons of escaped doubt back into the cavern I kept them trapped in.

  Justice, like life, wasn’t always fair.

  “Why did I have a feeling I might find you at your desk at this hour?” A familiar voice streamed into my office.

  Composing my face, I shuffled through the stack of folders on my desk. “Because a workaholic recognizes another workaholic?”

  The floor creaked when he moved closer, but I stayed focused on the paperwork—for more reasons than trying to catch up.

  “How was court today?”

  “Rough,” I answered, realizing coming here was a bad idea. When the office was empty and dark. When there were no distractions.

  “Then you prob
ably need this more than I do.” A cut-glass tumbler slid across my desk, amber liquid rolling across three cubes of ice.

  My gaze shifted, landing on him. “I shouldn’t.”

  “You should. I’ll pour myself another one, and we can share a drink and lament the life of a public prosecutor.”

  Dean Kincaid had been hired around the same time as me, and the two of us were in constant competition for percentage of cases won. He was in his early forties, never married, yet still possessed the kind of youthful attractiveness that caught the eye of women half his age. He drove a nice car, wore an expensive watch, and dressed like he was walking in fashion week, but beneath all of the clichés, he was a decent guy. One who brought in doughnuts for the whole office, remembered the secretary’s birthday, and was always willing to lend an ear or a hand when I needed it.

  He’d returned with another drink in less than a minute, his tie loosened and his hair tousled. After clinking his glass to the one on my desk, he lifted his drink and waited for me to do the same.

  “To the hope that Skovil gets his one day,” Dean said in that authoritative voice he used in the courtroom. “If not in the prison system, be it the fires of hell.”

  “I’ll toast to that.” I took a sip while Dean drained half of his in one swig.

  Ambling around the side of my desk, he pointed his glass at the photo of Noah and me at the company’s Christmas party two years back. I liked the picture because it made me look thin and Noah’s arm was wound around me in a way that suggested total adoration.

  It was a veneer of the life I pretended to have.

  “That husband of yours is a better man than me.” Dean paused a few feet away from me.

  Plenty of space to affirm the working relationship we had, but I couldn’t chase away the sense of intimacy his presence invoked. The hint of his cologne, the scent of bourbon on his breath, that invisible shroud of power and self-assuredness that clung to men like Dean Kincaid swung like a wrecking ball at a woman’s willpower.

  I rolled my chair closer to my desk and set down the drink. “Why do you say that?”

  It wasn’t until I glanced back in his direction that he answered. “Because I wouldn’t be so copacetic with my wife spending her nights in an office when I wanted her in bed with me.” He didn’t blink or look away. Instead, he leaned into the edge of my desk, a silent question in his eyes. One I wasn’t sure I wanted to decode.

  One I wasn’t sure I didn’t want to translate either.

  I shouldn’t have come. Some part of me had known Dean would be here. A part of me recognized the rush I felt from seeing him, the trill in my chest when he looked at me. It was reminiscent of high school when the gloriously out-of-my- league senior fired a smile in my direction for the sole sport of knowing his effect on the opposite sex.

  “Then it’s a good thing you’ve chosen not to get married, Dean,” I replied, my voice a key or two off.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because you have to let the other person be who they are, not who you want them to be. Or where you want them to be on any given night.” My eyebrow arched his direction before I scanned a file containing information for a new case. Another repeat offender. Another case with nothing more than circumstantial evidence to pull a conviction out of my hat with.

  “And that’s the kind of marriage you and your husband have?” Leaning over the desk a bit more, his presence enveloped me. “The ideal kind?”

  “No marriage is ideal.”

  A stretch of silence punctuated our conversation. I braced myself for absolutely anything Dean might say next.

  “How is Noah?” he asked, his voice hinting that he’d opened some distance between us. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  “He’s good. Busy.”

  “Still trying to save the world, one depraved soul at a time?”

  My tongue worked into my cheek when I detected the undercurrent of accusation. “He stills sees patients and leads meetings if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “How many of those patients has he managed to reform?” Dean’s voice came from another part of the office behind me.

  “I can’t give you a number.”

  “How about an approximate? What percentage of patients has your husband managed to cure?”

  My eyes were narrowed when I pinned them on him, back in the shadowy corner of my office, posture stiff and jaw locked. “You and I both know there’s no such thing as a cure.”

  “Then how many manage to control their urges and not reoffend?” Dean’s shoulders moved beneath his white dress shirt.

  “That’s really a better question for Noah to answer,” I said, giving my attention back to the case file in front of me.

  “Excellent idea. What do you two have going on next Thursday night?” Dean asked.

  “Work probably,” I more muttered than spoke.

  “Okay, so I’ll make the dinner reservations for later. Nine o’clock, how about? My treat.” He was about to step out the door as though I’d agreed to it all.

  “What? You, Noah, and me—the three of us—are going to have dinner together?” I tipped my head at Dean.

  His chuckle came from deep in his chest, the smile that accompanied it the kind that made me look away. “I was thinking of making it more of a double date than a third wheel sort of situation. If that works for you?”

  “A double date?”

  “Yes. Believe it or not, on occasion I can find a woman to take pity on me.” Dean pulled out his phone and typed something in. “I’ll send you a calendar invite. Talk it over with Noah and let me know.”

  I couldn’t recall how many times I’d reread the sentence my eyes were scrolling over on the paper below me.

  “You’re seeing someone?” Even as I asked it, I realized how tragic my tone was. The way I’d sound when I asked my dad if he would be at parent day at school, or the way I’d ask my mom what she thought about my outfit in the morning.

  Approval. Acceptance.

  Or maybe the sensation I was chasing had more to do with not feeling rejected.

  “Why? Do you have a special interest in who I am or am not seeing?” The tip his smile took indicated he hadn’t missed the change in my voice. “Anyone in mind you want to set a lonely, boorish bachelor like me up with?”

  This time, I made sure to take a full breath before offering any kind of response. “You know, if you actually want people to buy into that self-deprecating act, you better fine-tune it.” I attached a smile and motioned him out of my office. “I’ve got actual work to do that doesn’t include bantering with you all night.”

  “I’ll leave you to it.” Dean tapped on the door as he left. “Thursday night. It’s a date.”

  Four

  I’d lost.

  I knew that before the jury read the verdict in court. Glancing Skovil’s direction following the verdict, my stomach churned. He wasn’t hunched forward in relief or grinning ear-to-ear like other defendants I’d tried.

  No, Darryl Skovil was gloating. His posture, his expression, his eyes—he was radiating a fuck you to everyone in that courtroom.

  For a fleeting moment, I was tempted to throw myself at him and shell out the punishment he deserved, but I talked myself down with the reminder that, in the eyes of the legal system, justice had been served. The jury had not been convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Skovil was guilty of the monstrous crimes we’d accused him of.

  Licking the wounds from my loss, I spent every moment of the day keeping busy. Needless activity was one of the many substances I depended on as a numbing agent.

  When I heard Andee’s boots storming down the stairs, I grabbed the tray perched on the counter and rushed out of the kitchen. She didn’t hear me calling—her headphones were on and blaring—or she was ignoring me as she’d been doing for the past week.

  As I jogged to catch up with her, a couple of cookies bounced off the tray onto the ivory carpet. I didn’t stop to pick them up.

&nbs
p; “Andee!” I hollered, managing to grab a hold of the bulky army coat she’d thrown on.

  When she slipped off her headphones, the standard clamor of music wasn’t piercing from them. She circled around, arms crossed. “What?”

  “Where are you going?” I asked in a non-confrontational tone so as not to ignite the ever-shrinking fuse inside my child.

  “Out.” Her arms crossed tighter.

  “With that boy?”

  “His name is Austin.”

  I gave myself a moment before replying, refusing to let myself be pulled into another shouting match with a teenager. “Are you going out with Austin?”

  “Maybe.”

  “So you’re going out somewhere with someone?” I waited for her to confirm my summation, but her lips stayed sealed. “Do I have that right?”

  “Basically, yeah.”

  I looked at the tray of cookies clutched in my hands, searching for the right words lumped in between the raisins and oats. “As your parent, do you see how I can’t let you leave with that kind of explanation?”

  Andee’s head hung back as she snorted. “And do you see how you can’t just pick and choose when you decide to give a shit and actually parent?”

  I knew better than to offer a response to that. “What about staying home with me tonight? Your dad will be home in a few hours, but before he gets here, we can order copious amounts of takeout, put on some pajamas, and be four episodes deep into whatever Netflix series you want when he shows up.” I held up the tray of cookies. “Plus, I made your favorite.”

  Andee never glanced at the tray of cookies or gazed in the direction of the flat screen in the living room. She never stopped staring at me. I was good at reading people and situations. As with the verdict in court, I knew my daughter’s before she voiced it.

  “What parenting book is it this time?” She shook her head at me as she pulled her hood over her head. “How to Try and Fail to Reconnect with Your Teenage Daughter After Sixteen Years of Not Giving a Fuck?” Andee spun around, powering toward the front door. “Because it’s going to take more than some lame cookies and takeout to make a dent.”