Wives Don’t Travel Alone
I was sitting in my car the first time I heard my husband say I wasn’t really family. Not to my face, of course. Vincent was far too polished for that.
His voice came through the tiny earpiece plugged into my phone, smooth and composed, the way a man sounds when he’s made a presentation so many times the words have stopped meaning anything to him. He was talking about me the way he might talk about a quarterly report: dispassionately, with mild appreciation for the numbers. “She’s convenient, Mom,” he said, a low chuckle threading through the words.
“Good income, quiet, loyal. She’s not going anywhere.”
There was the faint ring of cutlery in the background, the distant blur of other conversations, and then Margaret’s voice, unmistakable as always. Crisp.
Clipped. Coated in that icy civility she wore the way other women wear perfume. “Useful,” she corrected.
“She’s useful, Vincent. That’s all. Women like Nina don’t leave.
They’re too timid. Too grateful. We can steer her.”
And then Sophia, bright and dismissive as a struck match: “She actually thinks we respect her.
It’s kind of adorable.”
I paused the audio. The silence inside my parked car hit harder than their words. My hands were trembling around the phone, but not from shock.
Shock had stopped being a factor a long time ago. I had been listening to two years’ worth of this particular music: the private symphony of how the Castellanos talked about me when they believed no one who mattered was listening. I had listened to every note.
The first time I had planted the voice recorder, I had been terrified in a way that felt shameful in retrospect. I had driven home with my heart battering against my ribs, certain that someone would call, that Margaret would somehow know, that I would be exposed as paranoid and vindictive and everything she had always quietly suggested I was. No call came.
Margaret’s world was far too busy admiring its own reflection to notice one small microphone sewn into the plastic stem of a silk orchid at the center of her dining table. Back then, I still thought maybe I was the problem. Twelve years into my marriage, I had absorbed so much of what that family said about me that I’d begun to believe it.
Oversensitive. Ungrateful. Dramatic.
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