Three days after the Virginia attack, Lily was back in the hospital. It started very simply: a shirt Greg wanted to wear happened to be at the dry cleaner’s, and when Lily couldn’t produce the shirt, Greg slammed her fingers in the bedroom door. It didn’t even hurt at first; there was only the door, held tight against her hand so that no sensation traveled. But when Greg opened the door a few seconds later, the pain came roaring in, and when Lily screamed, Greg did something he had never done before and punched her twice in the face. On the second shot, Lily felt her nose break, a thin, crisp snap, like stepping on a twig in winter.
Greg was already late for his meeting, and so it was Jonathan who took Lily to the emergency room. He said nothing, but she could see his set jaw and narrowed eyes in the rearview mirror. Whom did he disapprove of? Both of them? She hadn’t spoken to Jonathan since that night in the living room; he was clearly determined to pretend that it had never happened, so Lily did the same. Sometimes she wished that she could talk to him about it, but Jonathan’s reserve kept her from opening the discussion. She concentrated on her nose instead, working hard to keep blood from dripping to the seats.
It turned out that Lily had two broken fingers in addition to the broken nose, and she could only stare groggily around the brightly lit room as Jonathan responded to the doctor’s questions. When it was time to repair her nose, they knocked her out. She spent the night in the hospital, in the charge of two nurses, and when she woke up and heard their voices, kind and mothering, Lily wished that she could stay there forever. There was pain in the hospital, and sickness, but it was a safe place. Greg had said it wouldn’t happen again, but he had been lying; several times since that day at the country club, Lily had woken up with Greg’s fingers inside her, shoving painfully, almost scraping. Broken bones were bad, but that was infinitely worse, and the hospital felt so safe compared to home.
Five days later the power went out all over New England. It was a brief outage, only twenty minutes, and there was no real damage done except for a few traffic accidents. But still, the incident caused a flurry of panic in Washington and on the stock exchanges, because such an outage was supposed to be impossible. In a world where everything was run by computers, safeguarded and backed up eight ways to Sunday, the system wasn’t supposed to have room for failure. Greg said that the hardware had been defective, but Lily wondered. She thought of Dorian, of how a woman without a tag had been able to get through Security at a naval base. She thought of the thousands of soldiers, like Jonathan, who had come back from serving in Saudi Arabia to find that there were no jobs, no market for their skills. And now she began to wonder: how many separatists were there, really? The news sites spoke of the Blue Horizon contemptuously, describing the cell as a few disorganized, dissatisfied groups of mentally unstable individuals. But the evidence didn’t bear that out. Lily thought of Arnie Welch, the Security lieutenant who had once admitted, over too many drinks, that the terrorists were both efficient and organized. William Tear had said that there were ways through every barrier, and the questions swirled in Lily’s head, maddening. Just how big was the Blue Horizon? Did they all answer to Tear? What was the better world?
The next weekend Greg had Arnie Welch over to dinner, along with two of Arnie’s underlings. Greg always invited Arnie on the rare occasions when he was in town; they had been fraternity brothers at Yale. Greg said it was useful to be friends with a Security lieutenant, and even Lily saw the sense in that. But this time, when Arnie walked through the door, Lily didn’t see Greg’s parking tickets or a quick travel visa for vacations or even the Security helicopters that Arnie would sometimes loan as a favor when business was slow. Instead, she saw Maddy being hustled out the school doors, the last flash of her blonde pigtails, a picture so clear that Lily swayed momentarily on the threshold, and when Arnie tried to put an arm around her shoulders, she ducked away toward the kitchen.
For once Arnie didn’t drink during dinner, and he glared at his two flunkies when they showed signs of reaching for the whisky. Greg heckled him about it, but Arnie merely shrugged, saying, “I can’t afford a hangover tomorrow.”
Lily was just as happy to have Arnie stay sober. He got pretty handsy when he drank; once he’d actually tried to worm his hand between her legs at the table. Lily could never tell whether Greg noticed these advances; as possessive as he had become, he seemed to have achieved a level of deliberate blindness when someone was in a position to be useful to him. But Lily had seated Arnie on the far side of the table, just in case.
Although her nose was almost back to normal, Lily still had noticeable bruising under her right eye, but she was not surprised when Arnie didn’t ask about it. She found that she could barely eat. Her healing fingers, both of them still encased in temporary splints, made it hard to manipulate the knife and fork, but that wasn’t really the problem. She had spent most of her married life telling lies, but ever since Dorian toppled over the back wall, there had been a shift in the foundation, and it was becoming harder to dissemble, harder to force each individual lie out. She was afraid of her husband, but the fear was less important now. She sensed a wider world out there, a world not run by people like Greg, and sometimes, even though she understood nothing, she knew exactly what Dorian meant: it was so close she could almost touch it.
Pigs, she thought, watching Greg and the military men snort and chuckle and snuffle their food. Pigs, all of you. You have no idea about the better world. Lily didn’t understand the better world either, true, but she thought she was beginning to at least see the outline now. No poverty and no greed, Tear had said. Kindness is everything. People like Greg would be entirely irrelevant. Yesterday he had told her that he’d made contact with an in vitro doctor. They would go on Monday. Lily couldn’t imagine what her life would look like on Tuesday.
She had her doubts that Arnie could really stay sober throughout dinner; even among Greg’s normal set of dinner invitees, Arnie was a consummate boozehound. The whisky bottle sat on the table right in front of him—Greg’s idea of a good joke—during the entire meal, but somehow Arnie ignored the bottle, sticking strictly to water. He was nervous and jumpy, constantly checking his watch. His two underlings weren’t much better, though they still found time to nudge each other and grin at Lily during the meal. She was used to this kind of thing, and ignored their comments, even when she heard herself referred to as a nice piece of snatch.
“What’s got you so twitchy?” Greg finally asked Arnie. “Are you on drugs?”
Arnie shook his head. “Stone sober. I have a long day tomorrow, that’s all.”
“Doing what?”
“It’s classified.”
“I’m cleared.”
Arnie looked uncertainly across the table at Lily. “She’s not cleared.”
“Oh, fuck her, she’s not going to tell anyone.” Greg turned to Lily with narrowed eyes. “Are you?”
She shook her head automatically, keeping her eyes on her plate.