Second Wife

Chapter 6 — Friendship

Anna told herself it was research.

That was the word she used when she sat in the parking lot of the Kroger in Fairview, forty minutes from her own town, gripping the steering wheel with both hands and watching the automatic doors slide open and shut, open and shut, spitting out mothers with carts full of juice boxes and cereal.

Research. That was what she was doing here. She was not a stalker. She was a wife doing research.

Beth had laughed when they’d met, last Tuesday, over the discount bin of bruised apples. She had a laugh that started somewhere low and surprised, like she hadn’t expected to laugh at all. They had talked for eleven minutes — Anna had counted, afterward, on the drive home, rewinding it the way a detective replays a tape — and Beth had given her a phone number written on a grocery receipt, the ink smudging under Anna’s thumb.

“Text me,” Beth had said. “I never have anyone to drink coffee with during the day.”

So Anna texted. And Beth replied in under a minute. And now here Anna was, a week later, standing in the bright, lemon-smelling lobby of the Fairview public library while Beth’s two children argued over which picture books to bring to story time.

“Kids,” Beth said, turning, and her whole face changed when she saw Anna. “You came.”

Like she hadn’t been sure. Like it mattered.

“I came,” Anna said, and heard how small her voice sounded, and hated it.

They sat on tiny plastic chairs meant for toddlers, at a tiny round table in the children’s corner, and watched a volunteer with a puppet try to interest twelve under-fives in a story about a bear who lost his hat. Beth’s son, Eli, nine years old and already too cool for puppets, sat with his arms crossed, pretending not to listen while his eyes never left the puppet. His sister, Maya, six, climbed into Beth’s lap without asking, the way children do when home is a safe place to land.

Anna watched that small, unconscious trust and felt something crack behind her ribs.

“She’s your youngest?” Anna asked.

“Youngest and last,” Beth said, smiling. “Eli’s the planner, Maya’s the tornado. What’s yours like?”

“Sixteen,” Anna said. “Jenna’s sixteen, which means I live with a stranger who occasionally eats my leftovers.”

Beth laughed — that low, surprised laugh — and leaned forward, elbows on the tiny table, chin in her hands. “Sixteen is its own country. I keep waiting for the travel guide to come out.”

It was so easy. That was the thing that unnerved Anna most, driving home afterward. It was *so easy*. Anna had rehearsed nothing — she had planned to be careful, to say little, to watch — but the words kept coming out of her like water from a tap she hadn’t meant to turn on. The truth, mostly. Jenna’s moods. The loneliness of a house where the husband is always packing or unpacking a suitcase. The way Anna sometimes stood in the cereal aisle and forgot what she’d come for.

“You seem like a woman who’s looking for something,” Beth said at one point, quietly, while the puppet show devolved into chaos behind them.

Anna’s throat closed. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know.” Beth tilted her head. Her eyes were the pale gray of river water, and they were too observant, too kind. “Just a feeling. Like you’ve misplaced something important and you’re retracing your steps.”

Anna laughed, a thin sound. “Maybe just my car keys.”

“Maybe.” Beth smiled, but the smile didn’t quite reach those river-water eyes. “But if you ever find it — whatever it is — I hope it’s worth the trip back.”

There was something in the way she said it. Not suspicion. Something closer to… invitation. As if Beth were leaving a door open on purpose.

They met again on Thursday. Coffee, this time, at a place with exposed brick and a chalkboard menu, the kind of café Anna’s own town didn’t have. Beth was already there when Anna arrived, two lattes sweating on the table, and she’d remembered — remembered from a single throwaway comment — that Anna took oat milk.

“You remembered,” Anna said, stupidly, sitting down.

“I listen,” Beth said, and shrugged, like it was nothing. Like it wasn’t the most startling thing a stranger had ever done for her.

They talked for two hours. About books they’d both read. About the particular exhaustion of being the wife of a man who travels — Beth’s expression flickered, just once, when Anna said that, a shadow crossing her face so fast Anna almost missed it. About dreams they’d shelved. Beth had wanted to be a painter. “Not even a good one,” she said. “Just one of those women with paint under her nails who gets to say ‘my studio’ with a straight face.”

Anna laughed until her eyes watered, and for whole minutes at a time she forgot why she was here.

That terrified her more than anything.

On the drive home, she pulled over at a rest stop and called her sister. “Ruth,” she said, “I think I’m going crazy.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“I made a friend.”

A pause. “Anna. That’s not crazy. That’s Tuesday.”

“No, you don’t understand. I made her *fast*. I like her *fast*. I told her things about my marriage that I’ve never told you.” Anna pressed her forehead against the cool steering wheel. “And she’s — she’s *good*, Ruth. She’s kind. Her kids are wonderful. And the whole time I’m sitting there thinking, she has no idea that I know—” She stopped.

“Know what?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

But she couldn’t forget it. That night, lying beside Craig in their dark bedroom, listening to his familiar, even breathing, Anna replayed Beth’s face — the shadow that had crossed it when Anna mentioned the traveling husband. The door left open.

It wasn’t possible, Anna told herself. It wasn’t possible that Beth could know. And yet the warmth had felt deliberate, somehow. Calculated the way a chess player’s warmth is calculated — offered, not accidental.

Craig rolled toward her in his sleep, and his hand landed on her hip, heavy and familiar, and Anna lay perfectly still, staring at the ceiling, thinking about a woman forty minutes away who remembered oat milk and looked at her with river-water eyes that seemed to see everything.

And she wondered, for the first time, whether she was the only one doing research.