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Title: Live in Salt (1/1)
Universe: Pre-The Following, 2003, set during the investigation
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Joe Carroll/Claire Matthews
Summary: 2003. She wonders what happened to the perfect life they had together.
Author's Note: This story is written in a very different style than what I usually write… However, I really loved working on it, and I would be so grateful if you'd take a peek and let me know what you think. :)
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It's the second time she's woken up in the middle of the night and he hasn't there beside her in bed. She looks around, even lifts up the covers—as if he'd somehow be hiding beneath them—but of course he is nowhere to be found. When she touches the sheets on his side, they're cold.
She walks around the house—hoping, even though she knows better—that he will be somewhere inside it. He isn't in the living room watching late-night TV. He isn't in the kitchen making a midnight snack. He isn't in the bathroom and he isn't in the nursery.
Joey's room is the last one she checks, mostly because it is the only place she would truly love to find him. But he isn't there; not even a trace of him is there.
Joey is sleeping sounding in his crib, hardly making a sound as he sleeps. She stares down at him, torn between picking him up and letting him stay. She knows if she moves him, he'll start crying.
But she doesn't want to be alone right now, so she picks him up and cradles him against her chest. He starts crying almost immediately, but instead of cringing at the sound, she finds she welcomes the noise.
There's been too much silence in their home recently.
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She wakes up to the sound of the shower running, and when she blinks her tired eyes open, she finds she fell asleep on the couch. Joey is still in her arms, but he's long stopped crying and is asleep now. The side of his little face nested against her chest, and she cradles the warmth of him close to her, listening to him breathe peacefully. With a forced effort, she gets to her feet and puts him back in his crib. She knows he can't understand words yet, but she still doesn't want him in the room when she and Joe talk.
She's sitting on the edge of the bed, waiting for him, when he gets out of the shower.
"Where have you been?"
She doesn't beat around the bush anymore. It isn't a coincidence anymore. He purposefully waited until she'd fell asleep and then left the house—and she wants to know why.
"Walking," he answers, toweling himself off. "I went for a walk."
"In the middle of the night?"
"Am I not allowed to go for a walk in the middle of the night?" He's smiling and shrugging it off and she wants to ask him how he even dares to do that to her. How can he even try to pretend like this is nothing?
She crosses her arms. "I want to know where you've been."
"Around the neighborhood," he replies easily—too easily. "Why?" he asks, turning to her. "Where do you think I've been?" There's a challenge in his voice, one that they can both hear, and it takes all of her willpower not to rise to meet it. It's late and she's tired and she doesn't want to do this right now.
She doesn't want to be the paranoid wife that stays up all night and picks fights over what might very well be nothing.
So she just shakes her head, mutters "It's nothing," and they go to bed.
Even though she dropped the subject, she still spends the rest of the night wide awake, watching as he sleeps soundly, and wondering who it was that he was so intent on showering off.
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One night, a few days later, she opens up her computer and types in the words I think my husband is cheating into the browser, but she deletes them before she can press enter. Only desperate women take to the Internet like that. And she is not a desperate woman.
Not yet.
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She briefly thinks about taking them back to England, but she soon realizes it would be a needlessly expensive move, and that the distance will do nothing to fix the problem. There will still be young girls in England.
There will always be young girls. And he will always be so charming to them.
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She thinks of their marriage vows almost every day and she wonders how he forgot them so quickly, and so completely.
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One night, he apparently remembers them, because for the first time in weeks, they have a night out. A coworker watches Joey for a couple hours, and they dress up and go to dinner at a nice restaurant, and when they come home, things are the way they used to be.
He undresses her and she undresses him, and when he pushes inside her, she's wet and he's hard and there's no one else in the world besides the two of them.
He holds her so close while they make love, so close, and in his arms, as he whispers how beautiful she is and how much he loves her, she can actually believe—just for those few minutes, just while they're so intimately connected—that he hasn't been holding anyone else.
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She sees that FBI agent daily. Ryan Hardy. He walks around campus in broad daylight, staring at everyone, as if he can pick out the killer just by looking into the right pair eyes. She watches Agent Hardy from afar, wondering if he has any idea how conspicuous he looks, and how that must be hurting his cause. She thinks if she were the killer, she wouldn't get within a hundred yards of him.
As she isn't, though, she thinks about approaching him, and asking his opinion on her situation. But he is not a private investigator, she has to remind herself, and philandering spouses are not his area of expertise. He's here to find out who's murdering all those poor young women on campus, not give her his opinion on just how many times her husband's stepped out. He clearly has enough problems of his own—the least of which are probably the female undergrad population.
She's seen more than one confident girl slip him a piece of paper with her number on it, which he always takes with a distracted nod and a smile. The girls walk back to their friends, heads held high, hips sashaying just a little bit too much, always looking back to see if he's watching.
He usually isn't. Sometimes he stares at the paper, visibly confused. Other times, he's already moved on.
The girls never see him throw the paper away later, but Claire does. He always waits until they're gone, or at least distracted, before he gets rid of their numbers. She thinks it's kind of him to let them down so nicely.
If she were he, Claire can't help but think, she wouldn't let them off the hook so easy. She would lecture them on the inappropriateness of their actions, remind them that girls just like them are dying every month, and that this is neither the time nor the place to play games with the authorities. But she figures that isn't quite her place, so she stays silent.
She watches as Agent Hardy takes care to throw away the notes where the girls can't see, and she thinks that it's something Joe would've done long ago—something thoughtful, and nice, and forgiving.
But of course he would keep their numbers these days, not throw them away. She wonders how many he has.
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There's a beautiful girl in his ten AM American Literature class—strikingly, exceptionally beautiful—and Claire thinks it's her. After spending some time discreetly looking through Joe's files, she finds out the girl's name: Sarah Fuller. She's a junior, and she's studying for pre-med. Joe's literature course is one of her general education requirements.
Claire checks Joe's grade book and finds that Sarah is getting an A in his class so far—which is not an easy feat. She can't help but wonder what it is he's been grading her on all semester.
For the first time in her career, Claire finds herself hating those gen ed requirements, even though they are what brings her more than half of her students. Even though they're currently the only thing that's keeping her on the college's full-time payroll.
She hates them. And she especially hates that Sarah girl.
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She thinks of her baby at home—their baby—and she knows she can't raise him by herself.
Maybe she isn't a strong, independent woman who can leave at the drop of a hat. But she is at least a good mother, and she knows her son needs two parents who love him, no matter what they might feel or not feel for each other.
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One afternoon while she's alone in her office, she finishes the search she typed out weeks ago and presses enter. The browser fills with page after page: 7 Signs Your Husband is Cheating; I Know What He's Doing, But How Do I Confront Him?; What Do I Do Now That He's Left? She reads testimony after testimony and when Joe stops by to take her home, and asks what she's crying about, she lies and says the first thing that comes into her head: All those dead girls.
She'll feel guilty for it later, she knows, but right now, guilt feels so much better than telling him the truth. So much better than knowing the truth.
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She takes off her rings, once, while she's in the bathroom at work, but she can't tell if she feels heavier or lighter without them on.
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He tells her he loves her every day, but she's stopped believing him.
Prove it, she wants to say to him. But the words never leave her lips. Because what if he can't? Or worse, what if he doesn't even want to?
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It's Agent Hardy who finds her crying out behind the Kline Building. She's caught him looking at her more than once, and when she looks up and sees him standing there, she almost groans, Of course. Of course he would find her here. Of course it would be him.
She has to admit, however, that she would rather him find her than Joe.
Agent Hardy looks so apologetic upon stumbling across her crying that, for a terrified second, she thinks he knows. Does EVERYONE know? she nearly shouts. Has she been the blind one all this time? Is it that obvious that her husband is sleeping around? But then she remembers that young girls are being massacred left and right and he probably assumes that's why she's crying about.
It's what she should be crying about. Two of the girls, so far, have been in her classes. Mary Paudner and Elizabeth Neal. She should be crying over them. Their dead bodies. Their stolen lives. Their grieving families.
But instead, she's crying about her maybe-philandering husband and her very possibly falling-apart marriage.
She wipes her face as quickly as she can, trying to make this awkwardness as bearable as possible for him.
He was so nice before, when they first met, and she figures she should at least try to return the favor. She remembers seeing him smile and hearing him laugh, but now, she realizes, he looks incapable of doing either. He looks sad and tired and worn down and she wants to ask what's wrong. But then she remembers that five more girls have been murdered on his watch since they first talked all those months ago and she knows he must feel like a failure at his job. She almost pulls him aside to commiserate: Aren't we all failures? But she can't even get out the words. She ducks away and leaves before he can even begin to ask what's wrong.
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Late one afternoon, when she's alone in the house, she tries to picture it.
She isn't sure if it Joe started it or the girl did, but Claire knows they both finished it. She wonders how many times they've done it, and where. Certainly not in the dorms. There are too many cameras, too many ID taps, too many people who know exactly who he is. But maybe off-campus, if she lives in other housing… Or many his office, or a classroom. Those would be easiest to sneak in and out of, and there's rarely anyone around on campus at night to overhear. Especially if they play the silent game.
She could picture them so easily, fucking in his office. His pants around his ankles, his tie loosened; her, spread out completely naked before him, open and glistening and writhing and young. So young with her perfect breasts and tight pussy and shining hair; moaning and crying out like a porn star because she's at that age where she thinks that's what men find sexy. And then he's pushing into her and her body's moving across the desk and they're both so close—
Claire barely makes it to the toilet before she throws up, dry heaving bile into the bowl as her stomach retches uncontrollably for what feels like hours but must only be minutes.
Afterwards, she goes into Joey's nursery and holds him, and wonders what happened to the perfect life they'd all had together just a few short months ago. She doesn't cry. She sits there and stares, and wonders if there's even anything left between them to cry about.
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That night, she stays up late. She drank coffee after dinner—she hasn't done that since long before Joey's birth—and now she's wired, even at one in the morning. She can feel the mattress move when he gets out of bed. She listens to him walk around, put on his shoes, zip up a jacket, and set out the front door.
She can't get over that—he leaves by going out the front door? His confidence, which used to be so appealing to her, disgusts her now. Everything about him disgusts her. Can't he at least have some sense of shame about it, and slip out the back door like a regular scum-of-the-earth cheater?
He's gone for hours.
She was going to sit inside the living room to ambush him, but she feels too caged in in the house, so she sits out on the front porch instead. Despite the late hour, it's still relatively warm out, and all she wears is a knitted sweater over her pajamas.
One-thirty passes. Two o'clock arrives. Two-thirty.
She wonders numbly how many times they've fucked so far tonight. He'd always had a pretty good recovery time. She used to like that.
She's stopped looking at her watch by the time he finally shows up, but she knows it must be well after three AM. He stops in his tracks when he sees her, stuttering out her name, asking what she's doing awake and outside. She almost smiles. It's been so long since she's caught him off-guard. So long since she's rendered him speechless.
But she doesn't smile, because this isn't all those years ago when they met, and every little thing he does no longer charms her.
She stands up, towering over him from the top step of their porch as he stands beneath her on the sidewalk. She looks him in the eyes, making sure he sees her, before telling him, "If you go to her again, Joey and I will not be here when you decide to come back."
He runs after her when she turns around and walks inside, demanding to know what the hell she's talking about, but she ignores him as she makes her way through the house. She only turns when she reaches their bedroom door. She points to the couch in the other room and tells him he can sleep there.
Claire, you're kidding—
She shuts the door in his face.
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No matter how many times he tells her he isn't sleeping with someone else, she never believes him.
If you aren't fucking someone else, she demands, then what the hell are you doing leaving the house at one o'clock in the goddamn morning?
It's nothing you need to worry about, he tells her. She laughs sharply because that is no answer. And she glares at him because he should fucking know that, and try harder. I swear, he tells her earnestly. I swear to God I'm not cheating on you. On my parents' graves, I swear to you I am being faithful. I have never been anything but faithful to you. I love you, I want you, I need you—only you.
She stares at him, too fed up to yell, too fed up even to argue. She can see it in his eyes—he actually believes his own lies.
So she just shakes her head and walks away, because there's no arguing with a fool. She'd always thought he was a smart man, a brilliant man. But maybe she was wrong about that, too.
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Things get worse quickly after that.
They fight almost every night, though never loud enough for the neighbors to hear. He remains adamant that he isn't sleeping with anyone else—that he would never—but when she demands to know what he's doing leaving the house like he does, he never has a good explanation.
More than once he's tried to make up with her with his lips and hands instead of his words, and once, she almost let go. She almost let him carry her to bed. She almost let all his kisses and whispers and soft touches erase everything else between them. But then she realized what was happening—and she shoved him off and told him never to touch her again, not with those hands that have been on other women.
They haven't really spoken since then. He tries to talk to her every day, but she's learned to turn a deaf ear and for the most part, she ignores him.
He now sleeps on the couch every night and she sleeps in the bed. Joey stays in the nursery, but when she hears him cry, she gets up and takes him—even if Joe's already holding him.
He doesn't fight her, not over their son, but she can see the sadness and the pain in his eyes when she takes their baby away from him and behind closed doors. Though she tells herself it's what he deserves for what he's done, thinking that doesn't stop the tears from falling.
Despite her purer intentions, and her irrefutable justifications, she knows that she's no better than him. She she's still tearing apart their family just as much as he is.
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They used to have lunch together at work every day, since neither of them has to teach between noon and one-thirty, but now they eat separately. She eats alone in her office and pretends she doesn't see him when he walks by.
The only time they do interact at work these days is coming to it and going away from it. Since they only have one car, they both have to arrive and take off at the same time. Their schedules line up so well that it isn't really a nuisance, but some days Claire thinks she would rather walk all the way to work than sit beside him in the car for the fifteen-minute drive.
It's getting harder and harder to block out his voice when he tries to talk to her.
As they walk from the parking lot to the main campus every day, she can feel Agent Hardy watching them from afar. No matter how early they get there, no matter what day of the week, he's always there first, and she's started to wonder if he camps out on the grounds. Maybe he has a tent pitched out by the soccer fields.
She can sense his eyes on them as they walk to work—she can actually feel the back of her neck prickle as he scrutinizes them, and she ducks her head so she doesn't ever accidentally meet his eye. She's sure he's noticed by now that she and Joe don't walk side by side anymore like they used to. They don't hold hands. They don't smile, they don't laugh; they don't kiss.
She thinks that Agent Hardy really does know about the adultery now. He must. She's seen him walking around the streets late at night these past couple days, and she thinks he's probably noticed Joe walking around out there, too. She's tempted to ask him if he knows where her husband has been, but she isn't sure she even feels like knowing anymore.
She isn't sure she even feels like having a husband anymore, either.
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She's asleep when they come pounding on her door two nights later.
She almost doesn't answer, thinking whoever it is will come back in the morning, but when they yell through the wood that they're federal agents and that they will break down the door if she doesn't open it in the next five seconds, she jumps out of bed. She's seen enough action movies and TV dramas to think that they really will.
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When they tell her that her husband was found with Sarah Fuller, she immediately assumes the agents are saying the two were found in bed together, and she thinks, I knew it! with a sick sense of pride for being—if cheated on—at least right about it actually happening.
It takes her some time to realize the truth is, in fact, so much worse than that.
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Five days later, after they've cleared her of all suspicion, she's the only civilian allowed in his hospital room. The rest are cops, doctors, and nurses; people who are mandated to be there. The medical staff comes and goes as quickly as they can. They never spend more than a minute or two in the room, and she can practically smell the anxiety wafting off of them like it's perfume. Even the FBI agents standing guard outside the door seem nervous.
She isn't nervous, however, and she isn't sure why. She knows what happened. The two agents that came to her house in the middle of the night told her: her husband had been discovered attempting to stab the life out of Sarah Fuller. He'd already murdered one of her roommates and was about to do the same to her when he was shot in the back.
They don't say who shot him, but she thinks she knows. She hasn't seen Agent Hardy around, and from the way his fellow agents are always glancing up and down the halls, she guesses he must be in the hospital himself somewhere. Sarah Fuller must be, too.
Finally, after she's been there for nearly an hour and a half, Joe wakes up.
His eyes blink slowly, taking in the space around him. When he tries to sit up, the handcuffs on either wrist stop him from moving more than a couple inches, and he looks down at them as if he can't fathom why they're there.
Eventually, he looks up. She finds she's been holding her breath, and lets it go, taking in another one. Her breathing is the only sound in the otherwise silent room.
His eyes look tired, lazy—drugged up, probably, since they had to scrape that slug out of his back—but he's able to focus with them. She can tell from the look on his face that he's lucid enough to recognize her. He takes his time to survey the officers behind her, and then to look into her eyes, and she waits for the long explanation. She waits for the denials and the begging and the I didn't do it and the I swear and the You know me. She waits for the truth—the real story—and the proof he must have of it. But all he says is, I told you I wasn't cheating, Claire.
It takes four law enforcement officers to hold her back: the two cops that had been standing behind her and the two federal agents outside the door. Those four pairs of arms wrapped around her are the only things keeping her from throttling him where he lies, handcuffed to that hospital bed, looking utterly remorseless.
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She was on her way out of the hospital when she saw him.
She was just running by, searching for the exit, when she happened to glance to her left, and—there he was: Agent Hardy. Her breath caught a bit in her throat when she saw him because even though she knew he hadn't been killed, she hadn't exactly been expecting to see him alive, either. The papers had said he'd been "critically injured," but she didn't know what that meant. It sounded close to fatal—but looking at him now, she doesn't think he looks anywhere near death.
In fact, looking at him now, as he sleeps, she can't help but notice that he looks a good deal younger than when she last saw him. He looks less tired, less worn, less frustrated. Less everything. He looks younger and smaller and Claire can't help but wonder if she looks just as carefree when she sleeps, too.
But something tells her she doesn't. Something tells her she sleeps with a frown on her face and a couple tears in her eyes.
It is, after all, how she wakes up every morning.
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They paint her as an accomplice in the papers, even though both the local and federal police have publicly removed her from their list of suspects, and even gone so far as to liken her to a victim herself.
No one in her world seems to notice.
She gets stared at and jostled and yelled at when she leaves the house, so she no longer leaves the house. She still has one or two friends who will speak to her, and they graciously agree to pick up groceries for her when she runs out of food and buy diapers for Joey when they're needed.
She can't go to work and she can't leave the house with the press crowding outside, so she spends most days holed up inside with her son. She shuts all the blinds completely, and tries so very hard to ignore the people outside on her front stoop, calling her name and asking all manner of disgusting things at the top of their lungs.
Did you know he was a murderer when you married him?
Do you think your son takes after him? Are you worried he'll be a killer, too?
Two of the girls were in your class; did you help him pick them out? Did you bring them to him?
Did you help him get rid of the evidence when he came home with their blood on his hands?
She's grateful Joey's too young to understand what they're saying, but she still covers his ears anyway. She knows one day he will be old enough to understand. And she knows one day she won't be able to cover his ears anymore.
For now, she does what she can.
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A couple weeks later, just after eight PM, she gets a knock on the door. The press have abated some—they no longer scream at her from sun up to sun down—but they still hang around outside her house. She figures this reporter really must be green if he's coming up to her front door. The rest have learned that she doesn't tolerate their kind, and keep their distance, tracking her with their telephoto lenses.
She throws open the door, ready to tell off whatever cocky little first-timer is out there, and loses her voice almost immediately. It isn't a freshman reporter standing there with a camera in her face.
"Could we talk for a minute?" Agent Hardy asks.
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"Tell me everything," she requests as they sit down, and he does. He tells her every last detail, right down to the part where her husband drove a knife into his heart and left him to die before turning back to finish off Sarah Fuller.
Hearing it all—finally knowing it all—doesn't make her feel any better.
She's quickly losing faith that anything will ever make her feel better again.
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"How long did you know?" she asks Ryan one day, weeks later, staring at him as he sits on the couch she used to make her husband sleep on. "How long did you know it was Joe before you caught him?"
Ryan shakes his head, looks down at his feet, and doesn't speak for a long time. She holds off on pressing him because she knows how difficult it is to come to terms with one's own blindness and failure and complete stupidity.
"I didn't," he finally says, letting out a heavy sigh with the words. He doesn't look up to meet her eyes. "I didn't know. Not until it was too late."
It doesn't need to be said, but she feels the need to get it out anyway: "Neither did I."
In the silence that follows, she waits for him to tell her it isn't her fault. She waits for him to tell her there was no way she could have known; there was nothing she could've done. She waits for all the meaningless condolences that fall out from everyone else's mouths like rain from a storm cloud.
But he doesn't say anything, and she supposes that's what she deserves. For her blindness and her failure and her complete stupidity.
Because she should have known.
She should've done something.
And it is her fault.
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I told you I wasn't cheating, Claire.
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She sits outside the courtroom nearly half a year later and shakes—her feet tapping, her fingers drumming—waiting to be called. She knows it will happen any minute now, and despite having practiced endlessly with her lawyer what she has to say, she's still nervous she won't be able to get the words out. Still terrified that no one will believe her.
Just tell your side, her lawyer had counseled earlier this morning, as he had every day leading up to today. Just tell the truth.
Easier said than done.
She doesn't think she can sit in the same room as Joe and breathe, let alone speak. Let alone tell everyone—the judge, the jury, all those people watching—what she'd failed to see in him.
The truth had been right under her nose and right in front of her face and yet she hadn't seen it. She'd been sleeping next to a murderer and she hadn't known it. Hadn't so much as suspected. Not for one single second.
And what kind of defense was I thought he was cheating on me, anyway? Who was actually going to believe that? Oh, my husband was out there eviscerating students every month? But I thought he was just sleeping around! It sounded like a complete crock of shit, even to her.
Burying her face in her hands, Claire shuts her eyes and forces herself to breathe. In, out; in, out. Just breathe.
"Doing all right?"
Her head snaps up at the sound of Ryan Hardy's voice; when she looks up, he's standing a couple feet away, hands tucked self-consciously into his pockets.
"Fine," she forces out, hardly thinking about the word. She stares at him, trying to figure out why he's here. It isn't his day to be in court; it's hers. Practically the entire day is blocked off for her testimony. "What are you doing here?" she finally blurts. "It isn't your day to be in court."
"No, it's not," he agrees, his eyes dropping to the tiled floor beneath his feet. "I just…" He blew out a breath. "I wanted to be in there when you went up to speak. I figured you might, you know, maybe need moral support or something. I figured I'd offer myself for that. If you need it."
"Oh. That's…" Claire blinks, staring at him, struggling to come up with an answer as a lump starts to grow in her throat. She doesn't even know what to say. That's so nice? Generous? Unbelievable? "That's brave of you," she finally settles on, because it's true. She can hardly make herself go into court on the day she's assigned; she can't imagine walking into it voluntarily, without being summoned, like he is offering now. Let alone to face the man who—if she were Ryan—would be her attempted murderer.
Joe had destroyed her life—destroyed her family, her career, her sense of self and her entire sense of trust. He'd taken everything in the world from her, and made her a target of anger and scorn across the entire nation.
But he had never once tried to hurt her.
She cannot fathom what it is like for Ryan to have to face him again. She wonders if Ryan thinks of Joe every time his pierced heart miraculously continues to beat inside his chest. She wonders if he can still feel the knife there.
"You—You don't have to come, you know," she forces herself to say, even when all she really wants to say is the opposite. Please come. Please don't leave me with him.
"If you don't want me to go with you, I won't."
"I just don't want to make you be in the same room as him," she excuses, trying to skirt around the final decision for as long as possible. "Not after what he did to you."
"Well, I don't want to make you be in the same room as him, either."
She smiles at that—she appreciates the blunt way he speaks—and in that second, she makes up her mind. He has to come. If she can hardly breathe and think sitting out here alone; what sort of mess is she going to be in there, in front of all those people? In front of Joe?
Maybe having just one friendly face to look at will make a difference.
"Okay," she finally says. "If you're sure you want to come, I won't stop you."
The words had hardly left her mouth by the time her lawyer appeared in the hallway, telling her it's time. She nods at him, taking a deep breath as she gets to her feet. The large wooden doors stand closed before her, looming up above her head; they seem to bear down on her as she steps forward.
"You ready?" her lawyer asks as he leads her towards them, and she nods again, terrified once more that she can't speak.
Just breathe, she thinks, but even she has trouble taking her own advice.
She can feel Ryan standing beside her, and just before her lawyer reaches forward to open the doors, she reaches out and takes Ryan's hand in hers and squeezes it tightly. It's just for a second—just for good luck—but she hopes he knows it's a thank-you. And an apology.
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Author's Note: Reviews would be lovely. I had such a blast writing this and I would love to hear what you guys thought. Thank you so much for reading!