PART 1 — FORTY-SEVEN
The phone went at seventeen minutes past three.
“Mrs. Pellier? Anouk Pellier?”
“Yes.”
“This is Renwick County Highway Patrol. We need you to come and identify your husband. Cassian Pellier. His truck left the road at the retaining wall on the north expressway. The driver was d.e.a.d at the scene.”
It took me several seconds to get from the words to anything at all.
I turned my head.
Cassian was on his side with his face in the pillow and one leg over both of mine, breathing the way he has breathed next to me for six years.
“Officer, there’s been a mistake. My husband is in this bed.”
There was a silence on that line that I have never been able to describe properly.
Then the officer’s voice changed speed.
“Ma’am. I need you to leave the room without waking the man next to you. The identification, the vehicle, the phone and the personal effects at that scene all belong to Cassian Pellier.”
Everything went out of my face.
And then, from behind me, half asleep: “Babe? Who’s telling you I’m d.e.a.d?”
His eyes were already open.
I made myself laugh. “Scam call. They said you’d been in an a.c.c.i.d.e.n.t.”
He made a noise into the pillow. “They’ve run out of ideas.”
I got up and he caught my wrist.
“Where are you going?”
“Bathroom.”
He let go.
I locked that door and rang the emergency line myself, because I had to hear it from somebody who had not rung me.
It was not a scam.
At forty-eight minutes past two a black pickup registered to Cassian Pellier had gone off the expressway. The driver had his wallet, his watch, his wedding ring and his phone.
Two officers were at our door inside twenty minutes.
Cassian was extremely calm. He produced his licence, answered everything, and made a joke about somebody having picked a bad night to steal a truck.
We went to Renwick General.
When they put that man’s things on a table in a side room my legs nearly went.
The watch I bought him for our fifth anniversary. The wallet with the corner worn through. The ring, with our initials inside it, which I had engraved myself at a counter in 2019.
“They can take everything I own,” Cassian said. “That doesn’t make the d.e.a.d man me.”
The doctor said the face was not identifiable.
Then he read the rest of it off a sheet.
Male, approximately thirty-two. Six feet one. Blood type A positive. An old surgical scar low on the right abdomen consistent with an appendectomy.
Cassian is thirty-two. He is six feet one. He is A positive.
He had his appendix out in 2020.
He lifted his shirt in that room and the scar was exactly where the doctor had said.
In the lift on the way back up to our floor at about half five he took my face in both hands.
“Anouk. Look at me. It’s me.”
And he told me about the chapel wall at college, and the garlic bread, and how I had nearly died of embarrassment afterward about my breath.
Nobody else in the world knows that.
I wanted to be relieved and I nearly got there.
Then he pressed the button for our floor with his left hand, and Cassian does everything with his right, and I stood in that lift and felt the floor move.
At nine the police rang again.
The truck had left our parking garage at twenty-two minutes past ten the previous night. The driver wore a cap. The camera angle is useless.
And the smart lock on our apartment had no record of Cassian leaving. None. According to that system he was inside from six in the evening.
When I put the phone down I remembered two more things.
He had made me a hot milk before bed and stood there while I took my tablet for the insomnia, which he has never once done.
And when I woke up at 3:17 he was in grey pyjamas, and I would have sworn in a courtroom that he went to bed in the black ones.
He left for work at half eight.
I opened the lock app.
There are three fingerprints on that door.
Mine. Cassian’s. And a third one with no name on it, added eight months ago.
It has come through my front door forty-seven times.
Almost always between one and three in the morning.
And on at least eleven of those nights, my husband was already in the apartment with me.
PART 2 — THE SEVENTIETH
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