My Husband Came Home Wrong

"What kind of rabbit walks on three legs?" My husband asked me that on our wedding night, his mouth still against my throat. He'd spent three years deep cover in Honduras.

I waited three years. He made it home alive a few weeks ago. Today we got married. My heart stopped dead. That riddle was a code. Ours. Mine and Wyatt Calder's. Rabbit meant danger.

The number told you how bad. A threelegged rabbit meant the highest alert there was. Except the riddle had no answer. It was never a brain teaser.

It was a distress signal between the two of us, and nobody else on earth knew it existed. And the man who had just asked it lifted his head, smiling, and waited for me to answer.

Chapter 1 I stopped breathing. Then I made myself start again, slow and heavy, like nothing had happened. "Seriously? Riddles.

Right now." Wyatt lifted his head off my neck and bit down lightly on my collarbone. "Somebody asked it during the toasts. Nobody could get it. Figured my wife's smart.

She'd have it in two seconds." I had it, all right. The riddle had no answer. Three years ago they were sending him under in Honduras, and nobody would promise me he'd come back.

The night before he left, I said, "Let's make a code. Just ours." "A threelegged rabbit means danger.

Rabbits spot danger before anything else does." "Three, because a rabbit digs three exits. Three legs means it's out of exits. That's the worst it gets." "That way, Wy.

If you're in trouble, I'll know." He didn't laugh at me for being naive. He hooked his pinky through mine like it was a contract. "Deal.

Then I'll sit tight and wait for my wife to come save me." The Wyatt on top of me had no idea what any of that meant. Three years. That was all. And he'd forgotten?

Everything else was right. His voice. The halfsmile. Even the order he did things in bed, which I could have followed blindfolded.

I caught his hand before it went any further. "Wait." I made my face go sheepish. "Wy, I think I just got my period." "That fast." Something moved behind his eyes. "We picked the date around it." "Work's been a nightmare," I said, sounding guilty on purpose. "I pulled allnighters for a week straight just to get the time off approved.

My body's probably just wrecked." He cupped my face in both hands. "No job's worth that. You're a goofball.

I'm going to have to keep an eye on you from now on." Nothing but concern in his eyes. I let out a breath where he couldn't see it. Maybe I was making things up.

Three years under, every day within reach of a bullet. Forgetting one dumb joke is not a crime.

He came back with a heating pad, and then a mug of hot apple cider he'd warmed on the stove. "Here.

Warm up." I smiled and took it, sweet as anything, and lifted the mug toward my mouth. The steam touched my face. My stomach dropped straight through the floor. Cinnamon.

I'm severely allergic to cinnamon. Junior year he bought me a coffee and the kid behind the counter dusted an extra layer on top. Half an hour later my eyes had swollen shut.

Wyatt carried me into the ER and stood in that hallway all night. After that night, he knew my allergies better than he knew his own birthday.

There was no version of him that forgot. Something was wrong. Deeply wrong. The man in my bed was not Wyatt Calder. I lay staring up into the dark and listened to him breathe.

We'd held the wedding at the old Calder place, out in the hollow. During the toasts that afternoon, a beggar had come to the door. A man so wrecked he barely looked like one.

Half of one eye gone. Fingers missing, one leg dragging. Whatever came out of his throat was just air. He got down on the threshold and wouldn't leave.

He thrashed on the ground like a sick dog, one arm stretched into the house, reaching. Men from town swore at him and hauled him off, and he was still reaching.

I remember thinking it was bad luck. I remember closing the door. Wyatt lost his parents young.

He got raised on whatever the town could spare, and at the toasts he named every cousin and neighbor without a single miss.

He even remembered his uncle had wrecked his leg out in the field, and that the man couldn't stand ginger. There is no such thing as two identical men.

The fear went back into every vein I had. Had somebody done something to him? Had they turned him? Not possible. Wyatt was the guy who ran toward the wreck.

That's why they picked him for the worst assignment they had. Which left exactly one explanation. I turned my head. Moonlight lay across his face.

That was the face I'd been looking at for years. Even the rhythm of his breathing in his sleep was the same as it had always been. I laid my hand flat on his chest.

The heartbeat under it was steady. It wasn't my husband's heartbeat. It belonged to a stranger. Wy. Where are you. Chapter 2 I rolled over slowly and opened his profile.

He'd never been a poster. A handful of things, going back years. The newest was three days old. An old photo of us.

Flowers in our hands, standing at the gate of our old campus, laughing at each other. His caption: my girl. let's do this until our hair goes white.

For a man about to get married, that was the most ordinary thing in the world. The comments were all congratulations. Every one of them was congratulating a man I had never met.

Then something pulled tight between my eyebrows. No. We had a rule.

His job meant he could not have a face in public, and Wyatt guarded that harder than anything. "I've made a lot of enemies, Cori.

That means you're careful too." I took a selfie once and caught half his jaw in the frame. He made me delete it, then made me check the recently deleted folder.

I got genuinely angry that time. "I waited three years for you. Three years I couldn't tell a single person where you were. You don't come to my parties. You won't meet my friends.

Everybody I know thinks I invented you." "That whole operation down there got wiped out, Wy. Can you relax?

Please?" He wouldn't bend. "The people who ran that place are worse than you're picturing. Some of them got out. Don't hate me for being paranoid, Cori.

Paranoid is the only reason I'm alive." I bit down on my lip and kept scrolling. Two weeks before the wedding, Wyatt had gone up to town to fix up the old place for the ceremony.

On April 26 he posted the front door, freshly painted. And a photo of a page out of an old book of poems. That book was mine.

I'd left it there the summer after junior year, the first time he took me home with him. Why would he post that? Then it came back to me.

That same summer, he'd decided on a whim to teach me the basics of codes. He liked writing them in my palm and making me find the pattern. I'm ticklish.

I laughed every time and burrowed into his chest. "Wyatt Calder. Is this a lesson or is this a scam?

Are you even teaching?" He kept his face straight and wrote three numbers in my hand again. "Numbers map to letters. Use what I told you.

Solve it yourself." I worked on it for an embarrassing amount of time before it fell out of me. "I… I love you?" The second it left my mouth I knew I'd walked into it, and I hit him for it.

His whole chest shook. There was nothing in his eyes but a man who'd gotten exactly what he wanted. "That's right. I love you.

Congratulations, Miss Vale, you've graduated." For the next three years, any night I missed him past what I could stand, I'd write those three numbers in my own palm.

Then close my fist around them. Like holding his hand. The rest came back fast. My heart was going like a fist on a door.

I blew that page up as big as my screen and worked it line by line. Pulling it apart. Lining it up. Putting it back together. Wy. Wait for me. You have to wait for me. His method.

Take the first letter of every stanza. Shift the second stanza one, the third stanza two, and keep going down the page. And out of all those lines of poetry came two sentences.

THE RABBIT HAS HUMAN EYES. TRUST NO ONE. NOT EVEN ME. Every drop of blood in me went cold. Rabbit meant danger. So Wyatt already knew something was coming.

Why wouldn't he just tell me? Because he didn't want me anywhere near it? And why would a rabbit have human eyes? I turned both lines over and over. Wy.

What are you trying to tell me? Who exactly slept beside me last night? There were too many thoughts and they were all hitting each other.

I pushed the bedroom door open to get some air. The morning fog hadn't burned off yet. I got one foot over the threshold. And stopped where I stood.

Because on the wall across from me, there was a pair of eyes, and they were looking right at me.

Chapter 3 At some point somebody had set up a little roadside stand across from the old place. On the shelf behind Old Chester's counter hung a poster gone almost white with age.

Left over from some Easter years back. A rabbit holding a painted egg. Where the rabbit's eyes should have been, a kid had scribbled human eyes over them. That was it.

The rabbit with human eyes.

I held everything down and made my voice sound like small talk. "Chester, when Wy was fixing up the house, I bet he was in here bothering you every day." Old Chester waved that off, grinning. "Listen to you.

That Calder boy's the one taking care of me." "Kid thinks of everything. My eyes are shot, so folks were walking off without paying.

He's the one who said set up right here, and if anybody stiffs you, you come find me." "Oh. And he put in a camera for me.

Now I know exactly who's trying to pull one over." My pulse jumped again. A camera? So the rabbit with human eyes meant two things at once.

The second one was surveillance. "Mind if I take a look?" I watched the screen with both hands closed tight and slick with sweat. April 26. The day he made that post.

Wyatt walked into the house fast, all business. Half an hour later he came back out carrying a bag. I sat straight up. It had just finished raining that morning.

Going in, his boots were caked with mud, all the way up over the laces. Coming out, they were spotless.

The anger came back into my veins on top of the fear, and I went cold all over. The man who walked out of that house was not my husband. They'd swapped him inside of thirty minutes.

There was a sound in my head like a wire pulled too tight. If the one who walked out was fake, then where was Wyatt? He was Army Special Forces before the DEA ever got him.

Years under, and he'd come through every one of them. Nobody takes a man like that down easy. What in God's name happened in that house? I made the call to his handler at the DEA.

I gave him all of it. Every detail. Then I waited, and what came back was nothing I needed. "Ms. Vale.

You're telling me the man who came home isn't Wyatt Calder." He sounded like he was doing something else at the same time. "Because he forgot a joke the two of you made three years ago.

And forgot you don't do cinnamon." "Please listen to me. I don't know how they did it. But that man is not Wy." "Do you have anything? Anything solid?" My throat went dry. "No.

Not yet." He let out a long breath. "Do you have any idea what those three years were like for him?" My chest pulled tight. "He said it was classified.

He never told me anything." "He ran highrisk assignments over and over. There were times he came back with half his blood in him. You are the reason he made it.

When he came in, we put him through the full trauma protocol, and some of the worst pieces of it, we helped him put away." Then his voice changed. "And for the record, we verified his identity ourselves.

There is no scenario where that man is a substitute." My eyes went hot. I didn't move an inch. "If I'm the reason he made it, then nothing between us was ever the painful part.

He wouldn't forget me." "I can tell because I love him. That man is not Wy. I'm sending you the camera footage. Watch it and you'll see." There was a long pause on the line.

Then he agreed. I watched the bar crawl. 92%. 95%. 97%. 98%. Then it stopped. I stared at those two digits. One second. Two. Ten.

Wind came down off the ridge and rattled the plastic sheeting over the stand. The bar sat at 98%, like a breath stuck halfway up my throat.

Chapter 4 Reception in the hollow was bad. I was already turning to try another spot when a voice came from behind me. "That's not going anywhere." Every hair on my arms stood up.

I turned around like my neck had rusted. Wyatt stood there with one hand in his pocket, watching me, perfectly calm. No idea how long he'd been there. "Cori.

A mudslide took out the cell tower a little while ago. We're down for fortyeight hours." Fortyeight hours. His voice was warm.

There was nothing wrong with it anywhere. "Good timing, though. Now we get a honeymoon with nobody bothering us." "Isn't that lucky