CHAPTER TWO
It doesn't take long for his pleased bemusement to harden into suspicion. He's not stupid, after all.
Nothing about her is the same.
He starts to keep track of the little things that niggle at him. Putting hamburger in the spaghetti sauce. Beating Juliette handily at some silly cell phone video game that he's fairly sure she's never played before. Turning down dinner invitations from Jack and Carol Rossiter - pompous gasbags that she's been courting socially for more than a year - without a murmur of protest, when he makes a face at the sound of their names.
That's a big one, right there. She doesn't even make him feel guilty about it later, just makes smiling excuses into the telephone and returns to her mystery novel - and there's another one for the list: since when did Shiv read fiction instead of self-improvement?
"Tired of your Kindle?" he prompts, curious. She hesitates, then shrugs.
"I guess so. I like the way that a real book feels."
"Ah," he says, but what he's thinking is, Really?
And then there's what happens at night, in bed.
Shiv's always been a light sleeper, prone to insomnia. Sleep masks, lavender aromatherapy pillows, relaxation tapes - she's tried it all, layering over the homeopathic stuff with regular nighttime doses of sleeping pills. Andrew first took to sleeping in the guest room as a way to avoid waking her up at night. Later, when things were at their most strained between them, he returned to the master bedroom, grimly restaking his territory on one side of the big California king even though the foot or so of chilly space between his body and hers felt more like an acre.
When did he first notice that she wasn't taking her pills anymore? A week ago? Two?
"They're not really necessary," she told him blithely when he asked about it. "Maybe it's that the weather's getting colder. I'm sleeping like a rock. And the bed's really comfortable."
Andrew's the one with trouble sleeping now. After four years of drugging herself to unmoving unconsciousness on the far edge of their enormous bed, his wife has suddenly developed the tendency to … entwine. Nearly every night for the past few weeks, he's jolted awake to find her wrapped around him like a pair of aviator sunglasses, wearing one of his tee shirts instead of her customary satin pajamas and muttering incoherent fragments of her dreams into his chest. All those bird-call relaxation tapes must have gotten to her, or maybe she's been watching National Geographic on the sly; she talks a lot about macaws, and judging from the way she shudders against him, she thinks they're scary.
He lies awake and cuddles her pliant little body against his, and worries.
What is this? What does she want from him now, that she didn't seem to want before?
"I have gifts for you," he tells her and Juliette after dinner that night. Juliette's is a gift card to Barney's - he may be holding her trust fund in abeyance at the moment, but that doesn't mean he can't indulge her perfume-and-sunglasses habit. She, at least, reacts predictably: a kiss on the cheek, a bubble of teenage-princess delight, and a retreat to her room to check out the new collection online. He smiles after her, then remembers himself and slides a flat orange box tied in brown ribbon over to Siobhan.
"You're always getting me stuff," she says, beaming at him with hardly a second glance at the box. "It's so sweet. I'd say you didn't have to, but I'm not gonna lie - it makes me really happy."
"Open it," he says, grinning in spite of himself, and she does.
"Oh," she says, real surprise in her voice. "Oh, it's so pretty."
She holds it up, shakes out the folds, smooths her fingers over the silk. She's delighted with it, delighted with him; she can't stopper her pleasure. She comes at him over the table with the same innocent enthusiasm as Juliette, showers his face with chaste breathless kisses. And he accepts them, he welcomes the slight weight of her on his lap, he gathers her in and lets her drape both of them in Hermès silk, and underneath it he's thinking: you are not Siobhan.
"Do you recognize the design?" he asks her finally, pulling back a little, and she shakes her head, utterly guileless.
"It's gorgeous. Like a maze. So detailed." A flicker of doubt. "Should I know it?"
"It's called Turandot," Andrew says, and waits for a reaction. Nothing. "I thought you might like it, since you enjoyed the opera so much last spring."
What he doesn't say: it's a limited edition from 2002; I had to scour heaven and earth to find it in this condition with the tags still on and pay three times the original purchase price; you've been looking for this particular scarf in this particular colorway for months; I overheard you on the phone with Gemma in August going on and on about the jacquard and the Three Enigmas and the significance of the lotus blooms around the Caliph. Oh, and how on earth could you look at that orange box and not know immediately what was inside it? I've given you dozens of Hèrmes scarves since we were married, and the most I've ever gotten in response was a peck on the cheek.
"It's beautiful," she says. There are tears in her eyes; she's heartbreaking in her sincerity. "You're beautiful."
She kisses him.
Imposter, he thinks, and kisses her back.