Little Secrets Read online

  Temperatures were cold, but not yet freezing. The past few weeks had seen rain, a lot of it. The squirrel into which she’d just sunk her fingers was both mushy and saturated, its belly bloated. It stunk. Its eyes were gone, she could see that much, and its little mouth gaped with teeth that were too long. Ginny backpedaled with her hands out in front of her, her shriek locked in her throat.

  In the kitchen, Sean sat at the table with a towering Dagwood sandwich in front of him. She pushed past him to the sink, where she ran the hot water aggressively and scrubbed at her hands. More soap. More scrubbing. Oh God, so gross. So gross.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I was bagging up leaves, and guess what I found. A dead squirrel. A rotten dead squirrel. And guess what I found it with, Sean? My hands!” She shuddered, repulsed, but laughed too at the absurdity of it. “It must’ve gotten into the bait and gone outside to die, just like the exterminator said.”

  Sean crossed to the sink to grab her hands. “What? Jesus Christ, Ginny, what the hell were you thinking? Are you okay?”

  “I didn’t puke, so yes, I guess so.” She shuddered again, but the disgust was fading as the hot water and soap washed her clean. She tried to tug her hands from Sean’s grip, but he held her tight.

  “Get something,” he said.

  “Something like what?”

  “Hand sanitizer. Alcohol. Something! No, I’ll get it.” Incredibly, he grabbed a bottle of whiskey from the lower cabinet and spun the lid.

  Ginny stared. “What are you going to do with that? Light my hands on fire?”

  Sean looked at the bottle, sighed, put the cap back on. “Maybe I should drink it.”

  “Sean…” Ginny turned off the water and dried her hands on a towel. In the yard, knuckle deep in rotting squirrel, she’d screamed. Here in the bright kitchen with her hands clean, she didn’t want him to keep fretting. “It’s not that big a deal. Really. It was gross and startling, but that’s all.”

  “You shouldn’t have been out there at all. Raking leaves? In the dark?”

  “I didn’t start when it was dark,” she pointed out. “And the leaves needed raking. It’s not a big deal.”

  Except that it sort of was.

  “I thought I heard you go upstairs,” Sean muttered. “I didn’t know you were still out there, I’d have come out and helped you.”

  Ginny pulled a bottle of hand lotion from the cupboard and rubbed it carefully into her skin. “What do you mean, you didn’t know I was out there? You saw me go out the back door.”

  “I thought maybe you came in the front.”

  “You thought I came in the front door,” Ginny said. “How on earth could you think I came in the front door? You saw me from the window upstairs.”

  “I didn’t see you.” Sean went back to the table and scraped his chair back to sit again in front of the sandwich.

  Ginny’s fingers curled so tight into her palm her fingernails dented the skin. Not quite painful—not yet. But the potential was there. “I saw you. In the window upstairs. I waved. You waved.”

  “I was in here making myself something to eat since you weren’t cooking dinner.”

  Oh. No. He. Didn’t.

  “Yeah well, I was outside raking the leaves since you weren’t doing that.” She eyed the table. “I notice you didn’t make me a sandwich.”

  “How was I supposed to know you wanted one? You were upstairs. I figured you were pissed off at me, so you went upstairs to…you know. Be pissed.”

  Incredulity kept her speechless for a minute as her mouth worked without finding words. And, ah yes, there was the bright sting of pain in her palms. Ginny focused, eased her grip. “Sean. Seriously? You are kidding, right?”

  He looked at her, eyes narrowed. She couldn’t tell if he was challenging her or genuinely oblivious. “No.”

  “I saw you,” Ginny said. “Upstairs. In the window.”

  “I wasn’t up there.” He bit into the sandwich, spoke around a mouthful of sloppy lettuce and mayo. “You want some of mine?”

  She didn’t want any of his. She’d starve before she ate any piece of that dripping mess. Plunging her hands into a dead and bloated squirrel hadn’t made her vomit, but that sandwich might.

  In times past, she’d have raged at him until he turned his back and gave her the silent treatment, but this was supposed to be a fresh start. Right? All of this, everything new and fresh and different than it had been before. Every fucking piece of it.

  Sean cut off a piece of the sandwich and held it aloft, ignoring the slide of tomato seeds and mayonnaise over his hand. “Here. It’s good. Eat some.”

  Ginny sat at the table across from him. “Yes, okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

  Chapter Nine

  This would be the baby’s room.

  Ginny had never wanted to know the gender of her child in advance. So few surprises in life were truly wonderful, and she’d always imagined the moment of birth to be the perfect time to discover if she was the mother of a daughter or a son. Because of her previous problems, this time around she’d been subjected to every possible test and what felt like an insane number of ultrasounds. You could get them in 3-D now, a scarily vivid image of your unborn child’s face presented to you on a piece of photo paper or on disc to upload to the Internet and show off to all your friends. It was hard to make sure the techs didn’t slip up and give away the baby’s sex, even though most of them were genuinely eager to help keep the secret. Ginny thought Sean knew, though. She’d heard him murmuring to the tech once when she was getting dressed. Something about “if you could make a guess.”

  She thought it was a boy.

  That didn’t mean she was decorating this room in any shade of blue, though. Both her sister Peg and sister-in-law, Jeannie, had done up their nurseries in pastels, with babycentric designs, and then complained when the kids got older and the rooms needed to be redecorated. Ginny had decided to go with a fun jungle theme, using vinyl stickers against brightly painted walls. The stickers could be pulled off later and replaced. The bedding could be changed as a child of either gender graduated from a crib to a bed, and the colors she’d chosen would work for even an older child. Two walls lime green, two a rich chocolate brown. This room also had a dormer. She envisioned benches with cushions, a cozy place to read and play. Maybe some curtains to make a cave or castle, depending on the kid’s personality.

  For now, it needed a thorough cleaning and all of the fixtures and trim taped off. Sean had forbidden her from doing any painting, but he hadn’t been able to argue too strenuously against her taping things. At least so long as she promised not to get up on a ladder.

  This pregnancy had been hard on her physically, but mentally Ginny had taught herself to feel better than she ever had. Less worried, for one thing. The more she’d learned about the possibilities of mental and physical defects, the less frightening having a child with special needs seemed.

  For Sean, on the other hand, the more he knew, the more uneasy he became. The facts and statistics she devoured unsettled him. Sean didn’t think he could balance a checkbook or clean a strange stain off a shirt or organize a surprise weekend away, and in the fourteen years they’d been married, Ginny’d never been able to convince him otherwise. There was no way she could convince him he could be a good father to a baby with problems. All she could do was not take chances. Reassure him. Let him fuss over her. Ginny had learned not to tell him what she discovered from her online research.

  She’d learned not to tell him lots of things.

  With her music playing, this time from a carefully chosen playlist that contained nothing to sneak-attack her emotions, Ginny gathered her bucket of supplies, all organic or nonchemical based because Sean had insisted he didn’t want her breathing in toxic fumes. They’d had a cleaning service come through the house before they moved in, but she hadn’t be