The Marriage Lie: Shockingly twisty, destined to become the most talked about psychological thriller in 2018!

My throat closes around the last two words. Accident site. I can barely stand seeing the images on television. The idea of walking among the wreckage, of standing on the earth where 179 souls crashed into it, feels like a vicious punch in the gut.

“There’s no hurry,” Ann Margaret says, filling up the silence. “When and if you’re ready.” When I still don’t respond, she consults her papers for the next item on the agenda. “Oh, yes. Liberty Airlines is working with a third-party vendor to manage the process of returning personal effects to the rightful family members. You’ll find the form on page twenty-three of your packet. The more detail you can provide here, the better. Pictures, inscription texts, distinguishing characteristics. Things like that.”

Will isn’t big on jewelry, but he wears a wedding band and a watch. Both were gifts I had engraved with our initials, and both are things I’d want back.

“Again, you’re assuming he was on that plane.”

My denial, I know, is textbook. I don’t believe, therefore it cannot be true. Will is not buried under Missouri soil. He’s in Orlando, dazzling conference attendees with his keynote on predictive analytics and bitching in the hotel bar about the heat. Or maybe he’s already home, rumpled and tired from wherever he’s been all this time, wondering what’s for dinner. I picture myself walking through the door to find him there, and a bubble of joy rises in my chest.

“Mrs. Griffith, I realize how difficult this must be, but—”

“Do you? Do you really? Because was it your husband on the plane? Was it your mother or father or daughter or son who was blown to bits all over a cornfield? No? Well, then, you don’t know, and you can’t realize how difficult this is for me. For anyone in this room.”

Ann Margaret leans into the desk, and her brow crumples. “No, I didn’t lose a family member on Flight 23, but I can still feel deep sadness and compassion for you as well as everyone else here today. I share in your anxiety and distress, and I’m on your side. Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”

“Give me my husband back!” I shriek.

All around us, tables fall still, and heads turn in my direction. Solidarity, their teary faces say. They want their loved ones back, too. If we were sitting close enough, we’d bump fists. It’s a shitty, fucked-up society, but at least I’m not the only one in it.

Dave presses a palm to my right shoulder blade, a show of brotherly support. He knows I’m on the verge of a meltdown, and I know his newest, most urgent goal is to get me out of here. “Is there anything else?”

“Yes. It would help greatly if you would provide the name and address of your husband’s doctor and dentist. Be assured that all information collected is confidential and will be managed only by forensic personnel under the guidance of the medical examiner. And I’m very sorry to have to ask, but, um, we’ll also need a DNA sample.”

My father reaches for my hand. “Anything else?” he says through clenched teeth.

Ann Margaret pulls an envelope from her packet and pushes it across the desk. “This is an initial installment from Liberty Airlines to cover any crash-related expenses. I know this is a very difficult time, and these funds are intended to, well, take a little of the pressure off you and your family.”

I pick up the envelope, peek at the printed paper inside. Apparently, death has a price, and if I’m to believe Liberty Air, it’s $54,378.

“There is more forthcoming,” Ann Margaret says.

The anger that’s been simmering under the surface since I walked through the door fires into red-hot rage. The flames lick at my organs and shoot lava through my veins, burning me up from the inside out. My hands ball into tight fists, and I sit up ramrod straight in my chair. “Let me ask you something, Margaret Ann.”

“It’s Ann...” She catches herself, summons up a sympathetic smile. “Of course. Anything.”

“Who do you work for?”

A pause. She furrows her brow as if to say Whatever are you talking about? “Mrs. Griffith, I already told you. I work for you.”

“No. I mean whose name is at the top of your paychecks?”

She opens her mouth, then closes it, hauls a breath through her nose and tries again. “Liberty Airlines.”

I rip the check in two, reach for my bag and stand. “That’s what I thought.”

* * *

Ann Margaret is true to her word on one account at least. When we push through the door of the Family Assistance Center, a handful of uniformed Liberty Air agents hustle us through the terminal and out a side door. If any journalists spot us on the way to the car, we don’t see them. The agents act as a human shield.

They pile us into Dad’s Cherokee and slam the doors, backing away as soon as Dad starts the engine. He slides the gear in Reverse but doesn’t remove his foot from the brake. Like me, Dad’s still in shock, trying to process everything we learned in the past hour. I lose track of how long we sit there, the motor humming underneath us, staring silently out the window at the concrete barrier of the parking deck, and it’s not until I feel Dad’s warm palm on my knee and Dave’s on my shoulder that I realize that this whole time, I’ve been crying.

9 (#u65b1e9f1-681e-5bc9-a4e7-ee4781eff6ae)

All night long, I dream I’m Will. I’m high in the clouds above a flyover state, safely buckled in an aisle seat, when suddenly the bottom drops out of the sky. The plane lurches and rolls, and the motors’ screams are as deafening as my own, as terrified as the other passengers’ underneath and above and on all sides of me. We heave into a full-on nosedive, careening to the earth with irreversible velocity. I wake up right as we explode into a fireball, Will’s terror gritty in my mouth. Did he know what was happening? Did he scream and cry and pray? In his last moments, did he think of me?

The questions won’t leave me alone. They march through my mind like an army on attack, blitzing through my brain and lurching me upright in bed. Why would my husband tell me he’s going one place but get on a plane to another? Why would he create a fake conference with a fake flyer as fake evidence? How many other times has he not been where he said he would be? My heart gives a kick at that last one, the obvious answer like trying to jam a square peg in a round hole. Will wouldn’t cheat. He wouldn’t.

Then, what? Why lie?

I twist around on the bed, groping in the early-morning light for his empty pillow. I press the cool cotton to my face and inhale the scent of my husband, and memories swell in razor-sharp flashes of lucidity. Will’s square jaw, lit up from below by his laptop screen. The way his hair was always mussed on one side from running a hand up it, an unconscious habit when he was thinking about something. That smile of his whenever I came into the room, the one that no one else ever got but me. More than anything, the sensation of how it felt to be whole and to be his, what it felt like to be us.

I need my husband. I need his sleep-warmed body and his thermal touch and his voice whispering in my ear, calling me his very favorite person. I close my eyes and there he is, lying in the bed next to me, bare chested and a finger crooked in invitation, and an empty heaviness fills my chest. Will’s dead. He’s gone, and now, so am I.

The fresh wound reopens with a searing hot pain, and I can’t stay in this bed—our bed—for another second. I kick off the covers, slip on Will’s robe and head down the stairs.

In the living room, I flip the wall switch and pause while my eyes adjust to the sudden light. When they do, it’s like looking at a picture of my and Will’s life, frozen the moment before he left for the airport. His sci-fi paperback, its pages dog-eared and curling up at the corners, sits on the side table by his favorite chair, next to a mini mountain of cellophane candy wrappers I’m always nagging him to pick up. I smile at the same time I feel the tears build, but I blink them away, because one little word is slicing through my memories like a machete.

Why?

I push away from the wall and head over to the bookshelves.

When we moved into the house last year, Will nixed the idea of a home office. “A techie doesn’t need a desk,” he said at the time, “only a laptop with a multi-core processor and a place to perch. But if you want one, go for it.” I didn’t want one. I liked to perch wherever Will did, at the kitchen counter, on the couch, in a shady spot on the back deck. The desk in the living room became a spot for sorting mail, storing pens and paper clips, and displaying our favorite framed photographs—snapshots of happier times. I turn my back to the desk so I can’t see.

But inevitably, home ownership comes with a paper trail, and Will stored ours in the living room built-ins. I kneel on the floor, yank open the doors and marvel at a display worthy of a Container Store catalog. Colorful rows of matching three-ring binders, their contents marked with matching printed labels. Everything is ordered and grouped by year. I pull the binders out, laying them across the hardwoods by priority. Where would be the most likely place to find another lie?

A trio of letter trays are stacked at the very left side of the cabinet, and I flip through the contents. Work-related brochures, a yellowed Atlanta Business Chronicle with a front-page article on AppSec, tickets for the Rolling Stones concert later this summer. A neat stack of unpaid bills is on top, clipped together and labeled with a Post-it in Will’s handwriting: To Do ASAP. My heart revs up, pumping too much blood all at once, and I begin to sweat despite the chill in the room. Will isn’t dead. He’s coming back. The evidence is right here, in his distinct scrawl. A dead person can’t go to concerts or knock out to-do lists, and my meticulous husband never leaves a task unfinished.

I sit cross-legged among the papers, sifting through the binders one by one. Bank statements. Credit cards. Loans and contracts and tax returns. I’m looking for... I don’t know what. A toe-dip into the husband I thought I knew so well, any clue as to why he has suddenly morphed into the kind of man who lies.

An hour and a half later, I come across one. A fresh copy of his will, a version I’ve never seen before, updated only a month ago, and the discovery hits me like a punch in the gut. He revised his will without telling me? It’s not like we have a lot of assets. A heavily mortgaged house, a couple of car loans and not much else. Will doesn’t have any living family members, and we don’t have children. Yet. Probably. Except for the maybe-baby, our situation is pretty straightforward. I flip through the pages, searching for the reason why.

I find it on page seven: two new life insurance policies Will purchased earlier this year. Together with the one he already had, the payout adds up to a grand total of—I have to look twice to be sure—two and a half million dollars? I drop the papers onto my thighs, my head spinning with all the zeros. The amount is staggering and completely out of proportion to his mid-level salary. I know I should be glad for his preparedness, but I can’t help the new questions that poke and prod at me. Why two new policies? Why so much?

“Dare I ask?” I look up to find Dave standing in the doorway. He’s wearing his husband’s Harvard T-shirt and pajama pants, the fabric rumpled from bed, and yawning hard enough to crack his jaw. By now it’s barely seven, and Dave has never been a morning person.

“I’m searching for clues.”

“I figured as much.” He stretches his long arms up to the ceiling and twists, a noisy wringing out of his spine that makes me think of bubble wrap. “But what I meant is, dare I ask if you’ve found evidence of another life in Seattle?”

“The opposite, actually. No unusual payments, no names I don’t recognize. Only more evidence that when it comes to organization, my husband is completely anal.” I pick up the will, flip through to page seven. “Do you have a life insurance policy?”

“Yeah.”

“For how much?”

He rubs a hand over his dark hair, making it stand up in tousled tufts. “I don’t remember. Just under a million or so.”

“What about James?”