Verity

I went to bed convinced I had seen Verity at the top of the stairs last night.

I woke up full of doubt.

I’ve spent most of my life not trusting myself in my sleep. Now I’m starting to not trust myself when I’m awake. Did I see her? Was it a hallucination because of stress? Did I feel guilty for being with her husband?

I lay in bed for a while this morning, not wanting to leave the room. Jeremy left my bed sometime around four this morning. I heard him lock the door, then he texted me a minute later and told me to text if I needed him again.

Sometime after lunch today, Jeremy knocked on the door to the office. When he came inside, he looked like he hadn’t slept. He hasn’t slept much this week at all because of me. From his point of view, I’m a hysterical mess of a woman who wakes up in his wife’s bed in the middle of the night and then claims I see his wife standing at the top of the stairs after he finally kisses me.

I thought he had come to the office to ask me to leave, and honestly, I’m more than ready to go, but the money still hasn’t hit my account. I’m kind of stuck here until it does.

He had come to my office to let me know he got another lock. For Verity’s door this time.

“I thought it might help you sleep. Knowing there’s no way she could leave the room if that were even possible.”Property belongs to Nôvel(D)r/ama.Org.

If that were even possible.

“I’ll only lock it at night, when we’re asleep,” he continues. “I told April her door comes open at night because of drafts in the house. I don’t want her to think it’s there for any other reason.”

I thanked him, but after he’d gone, I didn’t feel reassured at all. Because part of me worried that he’d put the lock there because he was worried. Of course I wanted him to believe me, but if he believed me, that meant it might be true.

In this case, I would rather be wrong than right.

I’m struggling with what to do with Verity’s manuscript now. I want Jeremy to understand his wife in the way that I now understand her. I feel like he deserves to know what she did to his girls, especially since Crew spends so much time up there with her. And I’m still full of suspicion since he spoke of Verity talking to him. I know he’s only five, so there’s a chance he was confused, but if there’s even a remote possibility that Verity could be faking it, Jeremy deserves to know.

But I haven’t worked up the courage to give the manuscript to him yet because it is just a remote possibility that she’s faking it. It would be more plausible to believe I was seeing things due to exhaustion and sleep deprivation than it would be to think a woman could fake a disability of that extent for months on end. Without any apparent reason.

There’s also the fact that I haven’t finished it yet. I don’t know how it ends. I don’t know what happened to Harper or Chastin, or if the timeline of this manuscript even covers those events.

There isn’t much left to read. I’ll probably only be able to digest one chapter before needing to take a break from the horror of this manuscript. I make sure the door to the office is closed, and I start the next chapter and decide to skip it, along with several others. I don’t even want to read about a simple kiss, much less more sex. I don’t want to ruin the kiss we shared by reading about him doing that with another woman.

When I’ve skipped yet another intimate scene and reach the chapter I feel may be an explanation for Chastin’s death, I double-check the office door again before starting it.