The First Time [antikvár]

Chapter One She was thinking of ways to kill her husband. Martha Hart, called Mattie by everyone but her mother, who regularly insisted Martha was a perfectly lovely name - 'You don't see Martha Stewart changing her name, do you?' - was swimming back and forth across the long, rectangular pool that occupied most of her spacious backyard. Mattie swam every morning from the beginning of May until mid-October, barring lightning or an early Chicago snowfall, fifty minutes, one hundred lengths of precisely executed breast-stroke and front crawl, back and forth across the well-heated forty-foot expanse. Usually she was in the water by seven o'clock, so that she could be finished before Jake left for work and iCim for school, but today she'd overslept, or rather, hadn't slept at all until just minutes before the alarm clock went off. Jake, of course, had experienced no such trouble sleeping and was out of bed and in the shower before she'd had time to open her eyes. 'Feeling all right?' he'd asked her, already dressed and out the door in a handsome blur before she was able to formulate a response. She could use a butcher knife, Mattie thought now, pushing at the water with clenched fists, slicing the imaginary foot-long blade through the air and into