The Other Mrs. Hale

Chapter 12 — The Proposal

He found her that autumn, a few months after the funeral, in the parking lot of the visiting-nurse agency in Old Saybrook where she had picked up per-diem shifts.

“Miss Ruiz.” He stood beside her car with his hands in the pockets of a coat that cost more than her car, and he looked embarrassed to be there. “I’m Richard Hale. You looked after my wife.”

Elena’s first thought was that he had come about the timesheet. Her second was that she barely recognized him — fuller in the face than the hollow man from the funeral home, but his eyes were the same: a pale, tired blue, like sky through thin ice.

“I asked the agency for your name,” he said quickly, as if she’d accused him. “I wanted to thank you. Margaret — she talked about you, at the end. The night nurse who read to her.” He held out a paper coffee cup. “I got you one. I didn’t know how you take it.”

Black, it turned out. They drank them standing between the parked cars while the wind came off the water, and he told her, in the halting way of a man unaccustomed to confessing, that the house was too quiet, that he kept setting two places at the table, that his children were handling their grief by handling him. Elena listened the way she had been trained to listen, and when he asked if she would have dinner with him sometime — “just dinner, no occasion” — she heard herself say yes before she’d decided to.

She told herself it was the investigation. It was always the investigation, in those first weeks.

But Richard Hale courted her the way men in books did, and Elena — who had not been courted in years, who had spent her thirties holding other people’s hands while they died — found her resolve thinning like ice in March. He took her for walks along the Connecticut River where the reeds went gold in the late autumn light. He drove her up the coast on Sundays with no destination, and they ate fried clams from paper trays and talked about books they’d both loved and pretended not to be cold. He cooked for her once, badly — a chicken so dry they both laughed until Elena’s face hurt — and he washed every dish himself while she sat on the counter and told him about growing up in New Britain, about nursing school, about why she had chosen the work of sitting with the dying.

“You make it sound like a calling,” he said.

“It chose me back,” she said, and he nodded as if he understood, and maybe he did.

He was funny, which surprised her. He was lonely, which didn’t. He asked about her life with a focus so complete it felt like being warmed by a lamp, and on the nights he drove her home, he never once tried to come inside.

For Christmas he invited her to the big house — the first time she’d crossed its threshold since Margaret died. She stood in the foyer with her coat still on, her heart hammering against her ribs, while Marcus took her hand in both of his and said, “So you’re the famous Elena,” with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, and Dana looked her up and down and said, “How nice,” in a voice like a door closing. Theo never came down at all. Elena told herself she was there to observe, to learn the shape of the house from the inside. She spent the evening watching Richard watch his children instead, and understood, with a nurse’s eye for pain, that the man was grieving more than a wife — he was grieving a family that had already started to come apart.

In December he took her to the house for the first time — not the big house on the hill, but the small cottage down by the water where he’d grown up — and they built a fire that smoked and talked until 2 a.m., and Elena fell asleep on the couch with her head on his shoulder and woke to find he’d covered her with his coat and fallen asleep sitting upright, afraid to wake her.

She was supposed to be watching him. Instead she was memorizing the way he looked when he laughed.

The guilt came at night, sharp and familiar as a needle stick. She was using this kind man — this grieving, decent man — as a door. Every tender thing between them was built on a foundation she hadn’t told him about. She told herself she would tell him everything once she knew the truth about Margaret. She told herself the tenderness was real even if the beginning wasn’t entirely honest. She told herself a great many things, lying awake in her small apartment while the river fog pressed against the windows.

He proposed that winter, on the porch of the big house, in the first snow.

There was no grand gesture. He’d made soup — better than the chicken — and afterward they stood at the railing watching the snow come down over the river, and he took her hand, and his was shaking.

“I don’t want a replacement for anything,” he said. “I don’t want you to fill a space. I want a beginning, Elena. With you. Will you marry me?”

The ring was simple, a thin band of gold with a single small diamond. She looked at it, and at him, and at the snow settling on his shoulders, and she wept — for Margaret, for the lie she was living, for the terrifying fact that the lie had stopped feeling like one.

“Yes,” she said.

That night, lying awake beside him in the house she had come to search, listening to his breathing even out into sleep, Elena understood something that frightened her more than any locked door in the place:

She had started to love the man she meant to use.