A Happy Marriage

by A.R. Torre

I watch my wife eat her cereal and think about the first girl I killed.

Uhmm sir ... This is my first impression of you.

They never found her body, so the burial outfit never mattered. There was also no obituary, but to her credit, there were a lot of tears shed. If I ever kill my wife, I’ll make sure they find her body. She deserves that. She deserves everything.

NOW WAIT A DAMN MINUTE.

The fifty-two-year-old woman is sitting at the small round table in the kitchen, her head down on the red tablecloth. Her hair is pulled back with a fluffy scrunchie, and she has a small flower tattooed just behind her ear. Her face is turned toward him, her eyes dark, her mouth hanging open.

What y'all got going on in this book?

I was annoyed by him until he was gone, and now I wonder if, besides Joe and my first crush, he’s the only man I ever loved.

Wait ... HUH?

I turn slowly, double-checking every surface. Freddie writes something down, and I envision how tonight’s dinner conversation with Joe will go. “Did he flirt with you?” No. “Not even a little?” No. He won’t believe me, will want to meet Freddie, to do that male dance of handshakes and eye contact and dick-measuring; then there will be a whole new round of questions for me, at a time when it should be over. Joe has a lot of strengths, but trust isn’t one of them. His suspicion is a two-way highway between us, paved in love and fortified with rebars of verification, which is why I probably won’t tell him about Freddie at all.

Strange.

Did I roll Molly again?

Uhh ma'am.

I scream again, this one longer and louder, and from somewhere far away, her voice so faint I can barely hear it, another girl screams back.

WHOA!

There’s an encyclopedia inside that head of his, with a heading and tab for each subject.

When you gotta hide how you live I'm sure you gotta be like this. I mean ... he doesn't want to get caught, right?

Of course, my biggest flaw—the fact that several chapters of his Dinah encyclopedia are all lies—is the one flaw he’ll never discover. A secret worth killing for.

Not sure why I'm not super surprised by this.

My wife is my favorite puzzle to put together, and sometimes I like to rearrange the pieces of her mind just to keep it fresh.

I feel like he kidnapped her and is playing with her mind until he's ready to kill her.

I don’t ever want that.

Unfortunately that's exactly what a shared meal is like for many of us these days.

Joe asks how work is going, and I tell him bits and pieces of my week, strategically avoiding the mention of the clingy trainee, whom I will aggressively push back to Ron on Monday.

And for whatever reason I feel Joe already knows about Freddie.

Adults who are still dependent on and connected to their parents experience problems in their own marriages, poor connections with their own children, and a reduced ability to think and problem-solve for themselves.

A FUCKIN FACT IF IT'S UNHEALTHY & THEY IGNORE IT.

I ordered a Subaru Outback hybrid with every bell and whistle. Two weeks later, I solved a murder investigation by tracking the suspect’s activity using his car’s Starlink system. I canceled the Subaru the next day. It wasn’t about being guilty of anything; it was about the unknown future. If there’s ever a reason I don’t want my actions to be known—either by the police, a government entity, or my spouse—the last thing I’ll want is a vehicular tattletale.

Oh yeah she got some shit with her.

I’ve considered killing this woman. I believe it would make my wife happy, but the unsurety of that outcome is why I haven’t. It would be nice to detain Marci for a while and ask all the questions I want answers to.

I figured.

This is a long-term study, one I’m in no hurry to complete. After all, once you know everything there is to know about a person, they lose their purpose. Which is why, this weekend, I’ll need to kill Melonie.

Alright Joe ... yeah, strange.

At the rate this is going, I’ll die from sheer boredom if the dehydration doesn’t get me first.

At this rate you'll probably die in there unless you escape somehow.

Given that I can’t remember my name or any major pieces of my backstory, it’s entirely possible I was trying to off myself on a weekly basis—but why? What about my life is so horrible? I don’t remember it being horrible. Other than Mom being sick, it’s pretty good.

Damn I hope she gets out of there.

This feels like a challenge, and unfortunately, I’m going to fail it.

It is a challenge. I feel so sorry for her.

“You also told us that you had just killed your mother.” It’s no longer a struggle to keep my mouth closed. That bit of information renders me speechless.

HE'S LYING CAUSE WHY NOT CALL THE POLICE?

“I did an inventory of cars at the north end, from oldest to newest. Want to take a guess at how many belong to missing women?” My stomach clenches. “Not really.” “Fourteen.” “Are you thinking sex trafficking?” “Or a serial killer.” I drop my head back and laugh. “Come on, Freddie. We just wrapped up the Bloody Heart Killer.” “A city can have two serial killers at the same time.” “How long ago is the oldest missing woman?” “Six years ago.” “Damn, how rarely does that lot tow?”

Unless she's protecting her husband I need her to have way more interest & care cause 14 cars? Oldest 6 years ago? There's a clear pattern & issue here.

But I don’t have the capacity to do that. I wouldn’t have. I loved my mom. Like, more than any other daughter on the planet. I would never have hurt her.

She knows she didn't but he keeps drugging her.

I need to get off this medicine. Whatever they’re giving me is making it impossible to cut through the fog, though maybe that’s the purpose.

You're more aware than you think.

Four hundred missing women in this city, yet she couldn’t be one of them.

WELL DAMN.

Highly intelligent and at risk of being bored in this role. Should look for advancement opportunities to provide to her. Will clash with personality types that are similar to her own.

Heavy on the bored part but it gives nonchalant so its worse.

Joe would know. If I told him all this, the background and all the details leading up to these texts, he would be able to say with absolute certainty whether or not Freddie was bullshitting me.

She has to be brainwashed.

IA investigation opened after a call received from Oley Hugh on September 25th. Follow-up meeting held on October 2nd. Oley is a cooperating resource in this investigation.

WOW. NO WAY.

What we have goes so much deeper than the crude connection of sex. Granted, maybe it could be even deeper if we ever introduced that aspect into our marriage. Maybe. I’ve always wondered if it would. If we could try—just once—and see.

He had to have drugged her.

I haven’t had to burn a body in a while, but this week is an exception, which is why the bin is almost overflowing despite its large size. It’ll take over two hours for the fire to break down the body to bones. I’ll put cedar and more charcoal on top of the bones so that it’ll smell good by the time Dinah joins me. Before her family comes next week, I’ll go on a hike and bury the bones a mile or so out into the woods. I can fit an entire body in my camp pack. The skull starts out as the biggest bone but is easy to shatter into smaller parts once it burns long enough.

I wonder if she's aware.

She pauses, and her face crumples in the moment before she speaks. “Because she’s my daughter.”

I KNEW IT.

It was another way we were in sync—both of us uninterested in human flesh, in the ridiculous act of copulation, one that has little to no benefits but dozens of risks. It was a badge of honor that I carried, one that underlined my ability to trust her implicitly with other men. I was the only one she lusted for, and she did so with a level of decorum and distance that pleased me. Pleased us.

What the fuck kind of psycho is he?

Whatever is going on, I’m done. Like, jail might actually be better than this.

Jessica was ten when I met Joe. Had she been in my life, he never would have dated me.

Man fuck him.

It doesn’t make sense. None of it. And now, I’m starting to think through everything I should have questioned. Like why I wasn’t being arrested for what I supposedly did to my mom. Was that bullshit too? Probably. I just need my brain to be clear. I’m a smart girl when I’m not in some medication-induced fog.

You were smart even while he was drugging you. That's not on you.

Years later, when Reese Bishop found me and asked if I wanted to be part of Jessica’s life, I signed a new set of papers, ones that guaranteed that Reese would keep my identity from Jessica and that I would never initiate contact or reveal my maternity to her.

WOW.

That joint session made a mockery of that reveal. She didn’t even react to the news, other than to call me crazy and tell Joe that it wasn’t true. No warm embrace. No forgiveness for abandoning her. None of the different scenarios I had allowed myself to hope for in the rare moments that I indulged in the forbidden fantasy.

Girl YOU are a stranger to her what you expect? Sounding like Joe crazy ass.

A cracking sound. He tilts forward, and I shriek, diving to one side and hugging the tiled wall as he falls, his knife still stuck out, into the place where I’d been. The nurse—both hands tight around a bronze frog—stands above him, her breath hard, eyes wild. “The keys are in the Excursion,” she gasps. “Head north and use the key fob at the gate.”

YESSSS

I didn’t plan to help her. I planned to help him hunt her down, but somewhere in between me sneaking into her room to stage her suicide and me walking into our home and hearing her beg my husband for mercy, I grew a conscience.

I guess its bout time. Still too late for you though.

So did her sister, who is apparently married to my dad.

Wait what