Sarah sat in the dark, limp-limbed as though she’d been poured into the plush recliner. It was the most comfortable chair in the living room, supple fabric and well-trained cushions. Bryce’s favorite chair, molded to the shape of his body.
Strobes of light stabbed through the parted curtains at the front window, jagged lines clawing across the floor. After Claire had dropped her off, Sarah could do nothing more than find the chair. Flipping on a light had never crossed her mind. She might have closed the front door.
Claire had offered to stay, but Sarah didn’t want that. With Bryce on the road—New Hampshire?—and Alyssa gone for the night, she longed for time alone to think things through. So she’d jettisoned her wet jacket and shoes, padded across the room, sat in the best chair. With its familiar softness. Its familiar scents.
Thirty minutes later she was still there.
The seminal events of life often emerged slowly. You needed time to absorb things, to wrap your mind around what you were seeing. Unfortunately, what Sarah had seen tonight at the condo … that seemed unwrappable.
The pictures, the videos, the notes. All damning in so many ways. Yet also so … implausible.
Claire had felt it too. Sarah recalled their parting exchange in the driveway.
We’ll figure out what’s going on.
Will we?
I don’t think you should be alone.
I’m not alone. In the morning, I’ll have Alyssa.
I’ll call you first thing.
Sarah had simply nodded. Then a dead walk to the front door through driving rain. She’d heard Claire back out, heard the Mazda slosh away down the street.
From the chair she surveyed a room cut in shades of gray. Had she avoided turning the lights on to promote a peaceful aura? Or was it the other?
Bolts of doubt flashed through her gloomy thoughts. Her mind kept resetting, going back to the monitor in the condo, its quad-display of scenes inside her home. She remembered seeing the chair in which she was sitting, and estimated where the camera had to be. In near darkness her eyes lifted. Somewhere above the fireplace. Beside the brick mantle was a portrait of Bryce’s grandmother on porcelain, a family heirloom that had been on the wall since they’d moved in. She imagined the eyes moving like a cartoon mystery. No, the angle would be wrong. The crooked doorbell Bryce had finally straightened? Next to that was an air vent. Yes, she thought, that’s it. She imagined where the vents were in every room, and those she could remember correlated to the live feeds she’d seen. The garage and the backyard would be different, but the interior cameras were concealed in the air ducts.
When she’d first seen the streaming video, she’d been justifiably shocked. Yet now she felt something different. Acceptance? Resignation?
No, she decided.
Confirmation.
She’d been sensing it for weeks, ever since the morning of the Watergate attack. She remembered Bryce returning from his early run, a bloody scrape on his calf. How did that fit in? Countless discrepancies flickered into her head. Sights and sounds and words from recent months took on new meanings.
It was overwhelming.
An alternate reality.
Sarah sat motionless, refracting her husband through a new lens. Phrases that seemed out of character, the occasional microexpression in his lovely face that seemed … different. Yet in so many other ways he was Bryce. The movement, the voice. The scars for God’s sake. She remembered the pictures at the condo. Why pictures of his damned battlefield scars?
What was real?
What wasn’t?
She looped back to a variant of her earlier thought. Could some kind of mental illness be involved? She’d already reached out to Dr. Chalmers once, but he’d invited her to call if she had further concerns about Bryce, even given her a code word to jump to the front of the queue. Now however, a new dynamic was in play, and would be for the foreseeable future: Bryce was running for president. Which meant talking to his psychiatrist carried serious implications. What could she confess to Chalmers, knowing it might leak out? What would the doctor say if he saw the condo? How could her husband be the same, yet so very different?
As she tried to process it all, a fleeting image ran through Sarah’s head. Something she’d noticed months ago, but written off at the time. And avoided ever since.
The TV remote control was on the table next to the recliner. It belonged in the wicker basket by the TV, but her normally squared-away housekeeping had gone askew. She turned on the television and navigated to the online menu, selected YouTube. A few key words took her to the clip she was after. It had fifteen million views, one of which was hers in the immediate hours after the attack at the Watergate. She’d vowed then that once was enough. Good for a lifetime. Even on that occasion she found herself averting her eyes, which was only natural. What woman wanted to watch her husband cheat death so narrowly?
Yet now she did want to see it, because one detail kept pinging in her head. Perhaps it hadn’t struck at the time. Or maybe it had and she’d tuned it out. Sarah hit play and the scene began to run. The video had been captured from ground level across the street, the camera canted slightly upward. On the distant rooftop of the Watergate, Sarah saw people lined along the perimeter rail, many with refreshments in hand. All were facing the lectern where Senator Morales was beginning his remarks. Then a slightly-built, jacketed figure appeared. Moments later, she saw Bryce. He looked competent and self-assured. A swirl of motion commenced at the roof’s edge. Two bodies intertwined, engaged in a struggle. She saw Bryce attempt to heave the smaller man out into space, only to be dragged over himself.
Then the critical moment.
Sarah paused the clip, then backtracked. She looped the same five seconds, again and again. Eventually she narrowed it down to two seconds. Bryce hanging from the rail by his left hand, clinging for life. Sarah stepped the video forward frame by frame. She watched carefully as his right arm lifted over his head to get a second handhold, doing so with the ease of a gymnast working a high bar. No hesitation, no impinged motion.
His right arm.
Bryce had not lifted that arm above ninety degrees since the tragic day in Mali three years ago. It was the injury that had forced his medical discharge. The limitation Bryce would have moved heaven and earth to overcome, yet one that doctors had assured him was beyond repair. She’d gone with Bryce to his final consult, and the words of the orthopedic surgeon rang in: I’m sorry, Bryce, but the mobility of that arm won’t ever improve—not if your life depended on it. Then Bryce’s tortured reply as he confronted what it meant: It’s not my life I worry about. It’s the guys in my unit.
The doctor had been right—the injury hadn’t improved in the intervening years. How many times had Sarah seen it out of the corner of her eye? Bryce fighting to raise his right arm to paint a wall, to reach a cabinet, every time defeated. He’d suffered through a year of rehab: punishing exercises, endless stretching routines. In the end, none of it had helped. Indeed, only last summer he’d confessed to her that, if anything, the lack of mobility had gotten worse. It didn’t affect his day-to-day life, and Bryce had gotten good at masking the limitation. But it was there. And it was permanent.
… not if your life depended on it.
Sarah turned off the television.
There could be no more doubt. Taken with what she’d seen earlier, a new clarity emerged. Seemingly impossible. But now indisputable. The man in her life today was not Bryce Ridgeway. Whoever, whatever he was, he was a stranger. An interloper who had studied and mimicked and hijacked her husband’s life. Who’d hijacked all their lives. And a man who was today running for president of the United States.
A sudden rattle from the storm door brought her back to the moment.
Sarah rose out of the chair. “Alyssa? I thought you were spending the night at—”
He stood in front of her casually, suitcase in hand. The man who looked very much like her husband, but most certainly was not.
He smiled broadly. “Surprise, surprise.”