Little Secrets Read online

  Ginny laughed softly. “Not physically, no. Mentally…”

  “You’re a great painter.”

  “Sure. Of walls.” She looked around the kitchen. “Speaking of which…”

  “No,” Sean said. “No way. Don’t even think about it.”

  “I could just stop at the paint store…look at colors.”

  “I told you we could go this weekend.” Now he sounded as irritable as she felt, which in turn only made her all the more annoyed. “I don’t want you lifting heavy paint cans, and besides, Ginny, I know you. You’ll go to pick out colors and come back with all the stuff, and I’ll find you up on a ladder when I get home.”

  She couldn’t really argue with him, since that was true. Still, it didn’t sit well with her to be lectured that way, even if he had good intentions. “You worry too much.”

  More silence. Now she’d hurt his feelings for sure. He always clammed up when he was upset, and she stifled a sigh. She settled for a halfhearted apology instead. “I’m sorry.”

  “I worry. Of course I do. Am I not allowed?”

  She rubbed the space between her eyes with the tip of her finger. “Of course you are. But—“

  “I’ll stop and pick up something for dinner on the way home,” he told her. “It’s Friday. We can just relax tonight, and tomorrow we’ll hit the grocery store, the mall, the paint store, whatever you want. Okay? I’ll be there to do the heavy lifting, and you can pick out the colors. I can paint Sunday, before anything gets unpacked. Easier that way, we won’t have to cover the furniture or anything.”

  When he put it that way, made it sound so reasonable she couldn’t argue, there was no way for her to reply with anything but a murmured “fine.”

  It was far from fine, but as usual, Sean didn’t appear to hear the frustration in her voice. “Good. What do you want for dinner?”

  “If you’re going to pick it up,” Ginny said in a clipped tone, “you should just decide.”

  “Okay, good idea. I’ll surprise you. I’ll be home a little later than usual, then. Are you good for now, though? Should I have my mom—”

  “No. If I need anything, I’ll tell my sister to bring it over.” She couldn’t tell him enough times that she didn’t need his mother to help her do the things she could do on her own, or with the help of her own mother or siblings. Or friends. Sean’s mother meant well, but she was an easily flustered, flighty and sort of useless kind of woman with whom Ginny had never really connected. It was going to be bad enough that she had to tippy-toe around the mess in her house while she waited for her big, strong man to help her with tasks she could so easily accomplish twice as fast and perfectly well on her own. She didn’t need a hovering, cooing mother-in-law there to second-guess and wring her hands fretfully over every choice.

  “I gotta go. Lunch meeting. Paul’s picking up Chinese.”

  “Well,” Ginny said drily, because how could she stay angry in the face of Sean’s clear delight, “I guess I know what you won’t be bringing home for dinner then.”

  He laughed, and after a moment she did too. They exchanged I-love-yous, his coming first but hers at least sincere, and she disconnected. It wasn’t so much that she wasn’t angry anymore as it was that she was making a deliberate effort—a choice, if you will—to tuck that annoyance away and focus on the positives. She didn’t have to cook dinner. That was a plus. Her husband loved her. Another plus. They’d just bought a new house, and she could be a lady of leisure in it. No more job. Didn’t have to unpack. Bonus, bonus, bonus. Everything she listed eased her irritation into a smaller, tighter package, until she was able to get rid of it altogether.

  That was until she wanted to drink some juice and it was all gone, and when her stomach growled because she still hadn’t eaten, and when she wanted to at least have a peanut butter sandwich and there was no bread, only saltines, and she had to use a spoon because she couldn’t find a knife to spread it with.

  “Fuck this,” Ginny said aloud. Then again, just because she could, as loud as she wanted, no neighbors with their ears pressed against the walls to hear her. Or at least she presumed so, unless she screamed at the top of her lungs or those kids were hanging around on the porch, nobody would hear her. “Fuck this with something hard and sandpapery.”

  It felt good to have let off just that little bit of steam, but when she had to resort to eating her saltine crackers over the sink because the table was too crowded to set down a plate, Ginny knew there was no way she could wait until the weekend to at least get some part of the kitchen unpacked and organized. She finished her lunch and dusted her hands free of crumbs, then lifted the lid of her laptop to turn the music on since, of course, she hadn’t yet found either her iPod or the speakers that went with it.

  She’d learned to be fastidious about shutting down her browsers, cleaning her cache, signing out of her email and social media sites. Sean had his own computer, but that never stopped him from “just hopping” on to hers if it was more accessible or faster or just plain nicer than his older model desktop—and the laptop almost always was all of those things. No matter how many times she’d tried to explain that the entirety of her job was contained on that laptop, that not only was all the information she gathered confidential—legally—but that when he went in and tried to fiddle around, closing tabs she’d left open on purpose or signing her out of whatever she’d been doing, he was potentially screwing her investigations. She’d thought about setting up a user account for him, except she knew he’d never use it because he only ever intended to do something “real quick” and would see no point. And now, she supposed, since she was no longer working, it wouldn’t matter. He’d been on here this morning though; she could tell because though the laptop powered up to the login screen, the lid itself was slightly sticky. Like from juice. Frowning, she ran her fingers over the metal.

  Sticky.

  Not like someone had spilled juice right on it. More like someone with juice-coated fingers had touched it. She tried the keys, but they all seemed fine. The screen too, which was a good thing, because if Sean had not only spilled juice and left it for her to clean up, but also had gotten it all over her computer, paying hell would be less expensive than totaling up Ginny’s expense report.

  Moments ago she’d been on fire to get something done, but the inertia of pregnancy settled her more firmly into her chair as she opened iTunes and clicked Shuffle to play through her entire music library. She didn’t have to check her email or anything else…but she was going to. Why not? Sean had said she was supposed to take it easy, and fooling around on the Internet, not even pretending it was for work, was as easy as it got.

  She checked her messages, answered one from her mom, marked one from her brother as unread so she’d remember to answer it later, deleted a slew of fluffy kitten glitter angels and urban legend warning forwards from Sean’s mom, who obviously never visited Snopes.com. Ginny logged in to Connex and skimmed the updates, wished an old college friend a happy birthday and thought about resisting the allure of starting up a word challenge game with some random strangers, but didn’t. She loved and hated those games because despite her large and eclectic vocabulary, she sucked spectacularly at the sort of strategizing necessary to make the most of the double-word and letter tiles. This time, she started off with a seventy-six point word that made her whoop aloud with glee.

  With half the day already gone, her stomach momentarily at least sated if not full and a house full of boxes silently cajoling her into opening them, Ginny moved to log out of everything but the music program. And then…the way it always happens, a song shuffled up. At the first note she froze, fingers on the trackpad twitching so the cursor flew around the screen.

  This song.

  Oh, this song.

  She hadn’t let herself listen to it in months, though there’d been a time when she’d played it over and over again on Repeat, barely a break in be