She was once again sitting at the small, wobbly table, this time reading a book that she had flattened against the table’s surface. She had on a black silk dress with a rose collar, and pink glass beads at her throat. She was bent over the volume, her hands clasped in her lap. As I watched, she leaned her elbow on the table and put her fingers to her forehead, much as I had seen Clara do when studying for her exams. Etna turned a page and put her chin in the palm of her hand. She shifted slightly on the ladder-back chair on which she sat (it cannot have been very comfortable) and crossed her leg over her knee, a gesture she would never have made in public, or even with me in the parlor. Once again, I had the sensation that I was watching a thing set apart, someone who had nothing to do with me. She stretched her arms over her head.
I walked to the front door and entered the room.
She stood and knocked against the table, toppling a saucer to the floor. “Nicholas,” she said.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, spreading my arms.
She moved so that the ladder-back chair was between us. “It is my own,” she said.
“What do you mean it is your own?” I asked, taking another step.
She put her hands on the top rung of the chair. A deep flush, in competition with her pink collar, rose to her cheeks. “It is mine.”
“Etna,” I said, “I do not understand you.”
“I own this cottage,” she said.
She owned this cottage? That simply wasn’t possible. I took a step toward her. She gripped the chair rung but held her ground. “What are you talking about?” I asked.
“I bought it,” she said.
I listened as if to a foreign language I had neglected to study.
“With what?”
A sudden, if faint, sheen of perspiration popped up on her forehead. “I inherited a painting,” she said.
“Then there was a painting,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You lied to me.”
“How did you find me?” she asked.
“I followed you,” I said. “Yesterday.” I threw off my hat, heedless of where it landed. “I never saw a Claude Legny.”
“It was in the attic of my sister’s house,” Etna said. “She brought it to me, at my request, last year.”
“Last year? How long have you owned this?”
“Since January.”
I tried to think. That was eleven months ago! “You have been coming here all this time?”
She didn’t answer, but she didn’t need to. The answer was plain enough in the domesticity of the scene, the tidied garden at the side of the cottage. She had come to this place in the winter, when snow was all around, and in the spring, when someone had planted phlox by the side of the house. She had come here all during the summer and the early fall, when I had walked beneath the fiery canopy of Wheelock Street. Did the children know about this? Had they ever been here?
I stepped farther into a room that was perhaps twenty feet long and thirty feet wide. As I did so, I noted objects I hadn’t seen the day before: a dress form in the corner, books in shelves under a window, a Chinese grass chair. Under the chandelier, there was a small Persian rug. An area near the kitchen was covered with linoleum. On the shelf over the kitchen sink, there was a glass jar of sugar. I looked up at the ceiling.
“The chandelier,” I said. “You lied about that as well. The day the bill came.”
Etna’s grip tightened on the chair.
“You are my wife,” I said.
“I have been a good wife,” she said.
“A good wife with a secret.”
She bent to pick up the pieces of the saucer. “It did you no harm,” she said.
“No harm?” I asked incredulously. “No harm?”
She stood, the china shards in her hand.
“What do you do here?” I asked, gesturing to include the entire room.
“I do …” She looked all around her. “I read. I sew. I write.”
“Does anyone else know of this?”
“No,” she said. “Does anyone come here? A lover?”
“No,” she said again, seemingly shocked at the suggestion. “Of course not.”
I put my hand to my forehead, as if in doing so, I might be better able to think. “How can I believe anything you say?”
But, in truth, I did believe her. I believed — and still do — that on that day she told me the entire truth; that, in fact, the experience was akin to a sudden torrent of tears — liberating for her and full of relief.
“You have had me all these years,” Etna said quietly. “You have had the children. I have given you a home. I have been faithful. I have been dutiful.”