The Other Mrs. Hale

Chapter 5 — Theo

Elena found him on the terrace at midnight, three weeks after the wedding, in the rain.

She had woken to the sound of something — a thud, a scrape — and gone to the window, and there he was: Theo Hale, soaked through, sitting on the stone bench by the dry fountain with a bottle in his hand, his head in his other hand, looking like a man who had lost an argument with the night.

She put on Richard’s raincoat over her nightgown and went out. Richard slept on, undisturbed. He slept the deep, untroubled sleep of a man with nothing to hide, and lately Elena had started to envy it.

“Theo,” she said. “You’ll catch pneumonia.”

He looked up. His eyes were red — from the rain, or crying, or both. The bottle was whiskey, three-quarters gone. “Elena,” he said, and laughed, a wet, broken sound. “The new Mrs. Hale. Come to tuck me in?”

“Come inside,” she said. “Please.”

He shook his head. Water ran off his hair. “Can’t. Can’t go in there. She’ll see me.”

“Who?”

“My mother.” He gestured vaguely at the house, at the portrait she knew was hanging in the dark library. “She’s everywhere in there. You know that, right? You feel it too. I can tell. The perfect ones don’t feel it. Marcus doesn’t feel it. Dana doesn’t feel it. But you and me — we’re the ones who don’t belong, so we notice.”

Elena sat down on the bench beside him, rain and all. “You’re drunk, Theo.”

“Eight months clean,” he said, holding up the bottle like evidence. “Eight months, and tonight I — ” He stopped. “Dana called. Said I was embarrassing the family, showing up to Marcus’s dinner looking like a — like a junkie. Said Mother would be ashamed.” His voice cracked. “She’s right. She would be. You know what Mom did when I got out the second time? She drove to the facility herself. Sat in the parking lot for an hour because visiting hours weren’t till two. She brought me a duffel bag with real clothes in it, not the sweats. Said, ‘Theo, you’re still my son, and don’t you dare forget it.'” He stared at the bottle. “Nobody else ever said that to me. Not once.”

“Theo—”

“You know what the worst part is?” He turned to her, and his face was so raw, so stripped of everything, that Elena felt her nurse’s hands itch to do something, to fix something, though there was nothing to fix. “The worst part is I can’t even grieve her properly. Because every time I try, I remember — ” He stopped again, and drank, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Nobody believes me. Marcus says I’m confused. Dana says I’m looking for attention. The doctors said it was grief. But I was there, Elena. I was in that house the last month. I saw.”

“Saw what?”

He looked at her for a long moment, rain running down his face like tears he didn’t have to admit to. And then he said it — quietly, clearly, with the terrible precision of a drunk man telling the one true thing he knows:

“My mother didn’t die naturally.”

The words landed between them like something dropped from a height. Elena felt the rain on her face, cold, and the stone bench hard beneath her, and her heart beating too fast, too loud.

“What do you mean?” she whispered.

Theo laughed again, that broken sound. “Exactly what I said.” He stood up, unsteady, the bottle slipping from his hand and shattering on the terrace stones. He didn’t seem to notice. “Ask Marcus about the will.” He swayed, catching himself on the bench. “The new one. His lawyer drew it up two weeks before she died — I heard them arguing about it. Ask him why a dying woman needs a new will.” He laughed, a wet sound. “Or don’t. Nobody else does.”

He walked away into the rain, toward the garage apartment, leaving Elena alone on the bench with the shattered glass glittering at her feet like ice.

She checked his footprints first — no blood on the stones, thank God; the bottle had broken outward, away from him. Eleven years of nursing had wired her hands to triage before her heart finished feeling. Only when she was sure he wasn’t cut did she let herself sit back down.

She sat there for a long time, rain soaking through Richard’s coat, through her nightgown, to the skin. A dying woman changes her will. A son who smiled too much. A daughter who moved lockets into dead women’s drawers. A housekeeper who watched like a guard dog. A husband who sat in the dark staring at a portrait.

*My mother didn’t die naturally.*

Elena had been a hospice nurse for eleven years. She knew what natural death looked like. She knew the shape of it, the smell of it, the sound of a body shutting down by its own slow design.

And she knew — with a cold, professional certainty that settled into her bones like the rain — that Theo believed what he was saying.

The question was whether anyone would believe him.

Or whether, like everything else in the Hale house, the truth had already been decided long before she arrived — and she was just the latest piece being moved into place.

She sat until the cold drove her inside. She toweled off in the dark bathroom, hung Richard’s coat over the shower rod, and slid back into bed beside her husband, who slept on, undisturbed, one arm thrown across her pillow. She lay there with wet hair dampening the pillowcase, listening to him breathe, and thought about Margaret Hale dying in this house six months ago — in the room down the hall that was now kept locked, Mrs. Alden had mentioned once, quickly, as if it had slipped out.

A dying woman changes her will. A son who smiled too much. A locked room.

Elena closed her eyes, but sleep didn’t come. Somewhere above the mantel, behind the dark library door, the painted eyes of the first Mrs. Hale watched the house. Elena had the feeling, cold and certain as the rain still drying on her skin, that those eyes had been trying to tell her something all along — and that she was finally, terribly, starting to listen.