He was fast, I'll give him that. He got upright and he looked at me, and the first thing out of his mouth was, "Hey, hey, hey." In this tone, like he was trying to de-escalate a situation he was somehow a neutral party to, like I was the one who'd shown up somewhere unreasonably. That hey, hey, hey was the thing that did it, if I'm honest. Not the sight of him, not Holly's face. That tone, reasonable, managing, let's all calm down, from a man standing in a bedroom with my wife in a cabin they'd been sneaking off to for the better part of a year.
I closed the distance and hit him. I caught him across the left cheekbone with a right hand, and he went sideways into the nightstand, and the lamp came off it and hit the floor. He didn't go all the way down, caught himself on the wall, but his legs weren't under him right, and he put one hand up against the plaster to stay vertical. Behind me, I heard Rick and Dana come through the front door. Holly was making a sound I couldn't categorize.
Not screaming, not words, something in between. She had the sheet bunched in both hands, and she was staring at me with an expression that was cycling through things too fast to read. "Nathan," she started, her voice breaking. "Nathan, it's" "Don't," I said. Brent straightened up off the wall.
His hand was at his face. He looked at me, and then past me at the door, and whatever he saw there, Rick coming in, Dana right behind him, seemed to recalibrate something for him. He'd thought this was one angry husband. Now, he was counting people. Rick walked past me without a word, and in my peripheral vision, I saw him go left toward the second bedroom, where the door was shut.
He didn't run. He just moved with a very specific kind of purpose. He opened that door, and there was a shout from inside. Male voice, startled, and then the sounds of something physical happening. A crash, something against a wall.
Not a long fight, short and definitive. Dana had stopped in the bedroom doorway. She was looking at Holly. Holly pulled the sheet up higher and said, "Dana." And Dana said nothing, just looked at her. Holly's face was doing something complicated.
The bravado she'd started with, that reflexive Nathan, it's That was already gone. She was scanning the room, counting the same people Brent had just counted. Starting to understand that this wasn't just her husband finding out. This was something coordinated, something that had been built while she thought everything was still fine. I watched her figure that out.
It took maybe 10 seconds, and it was its own kind of thing to see. Brent made a move. I don't know what he was trying to do. Get past me? Get to his clothes?
Get to a phone? But he pushed off the wall, and I stepped into him, and shoved him back hard, and he hit the wall again, and this time he slid down it, and sat on the floor, and put both hands over his face. He was bleeding from just below his eye, where the cheekbone had caught the most of it. It wasn't dramatic. It was a cut, maybe an inch, leaking steadily.