I turned into my driveway, grinding to a stop beside the stack of unpaid bills on the front stoop, praying that Steven had paid my electric bill as I clicked the button on the remote. A relieved breath rushed out of me when the garage door groaned open. I eased the van inside and shut the door behind me, staring at the empty pegboard as I turned off the engine. The garage was dark and quiet, and I sat for a while, thinking. About my kids. About my bills. About Steven and Theresa.
About all the real-life problems fifty thousand dollars could fix.
I fished the crumpled note from my pocket and peeled it open, wondering how bad a husband Harris Mickler really was.
CHAPTER 3
The clock on the microwave was flashing when I opened the door to the kitchen. I knew I had Steven to thank for it; he would never let our children stay in a home without power. Still, it was hard to feel grateful for hot water and lights when it was Steven’s fault our home had fallen apart to begin with. I was pretty sure this was all part of his attorney’s plan, conceding to give me as little as possible every month so Steven could swoop in and save the day, restoring the illusion of his moral worth while throwing shade on mine.
The longer it went on, the more I wondered if he was right. I spent the next several hours thinking about Harris Mickler. In my more virtuous moments, I imagined him as a Hugh Jackman look-alike—too charming and attractive to possibly fend off the countless women who must be throwing themselves at him, the poor victim of a jealous wife who would probably benefit from his life insurance policy. During moments I was far less proud of, I imagined him as Joe Pesci on Viagra and strongly considered the fact that, at his height, I could probably lift his lifeless body into the back of my van.
These thoughts were usually accompanied by fantasies of full shopping carts in big-box stores. Fantasies where I let myself calculate how many economy-size packs of Huggies, Lean Cuisines, and baby wipes fifty thousand dollars could buy.
I pressed my forehead to the door of my home office, disgusted with myself. If I needed money, I should just write the damn book my agent and editor were waiting for.
With a sigh, I squeezed the plastic childproof cover and turned the knob. The added security measure was probably unnecessary; I hadn’t opened my office door in so long, I’m pretty sure my kids didn’t even know this room was here. The air inside was musty and stale. A layer of dust coated my desk and dulled the frame of the college diploma hanging above it—a four-year Bachelor of Arts in English from George Mason University that qualified me to do absolutely nothing.
I toggled on the power to my computer and waited, listening to the high-pitched whine as the screen came to life. It had been Steven’s computer in college, and then our home computer up until the divorce. Now, it was so old it would probably take all the child-free time I had left in the day just to boot the damn thing up.
The hard drive hummed, the hourglass flipping over and over on a discouragingly blank screen. Where would I even start? How was I supposed to write someone else’s heart-pounding romance when I’d completely failed at my own? It was already close to noon, and Steven was expecting me to pick up Zach in a few hours. Probably so he and Theresa could spend the rest of the day boning each other between a fancy late lunch and happy hour. If I worked every night after the kids went to sleep for the next six weeks, I might be able to finish a really horrible first draft. But why bother? Just so I could blow the remaining pennies of my advance on overdue bills? Judging by the size of the stack on my front stoop, the money would be gone in less than a week.
My home screen flickered to life. A search bar popped up. I typed the word how. As in, how do I write this damn book and fix my life?
The rest of the box auto-populated, fueled by a search history full of violent and salacious questions all beginning the same way: How long did it take dead bodies to decompose in a shallow grave in the winter in Virginia? How much damage would the bullet of a Colt 45 inflict on a large adult male with abnormally developed pecs? And how might a person eliminate the identifying features of his corpse?
I should have closed the search engine and opened a Word document instead. I had more than one good reason to get moving on this book. But I also had fifty thousand reasons to be curious about Harris Mickler.
Really, when it came down to it, what was one more search? Just a name to put a face to. Was there really any harm in a quick click through a few public records, just to get a feel for who Harris Mickler really was?
I eased back into my chair, feeling strange as I settled into its familiar dips and curves. Just as I lifted my hands to the keyboard, my phone vibrated on the desk beside it. A profile pic of my ex-husband flashed on the screen, and I swiped right just to make the image disappear. “Hey, Steven.”
“Is your power back on?”
“Yes. Thank you for handling it,” I said through a forced smile, hoping he could hear it. Zach squealed like an angry pig in the background. Steven grunted.
“Don’t thank me. Theresa took care of it. She has a client who works in billing at NOVEC. She pulled a few strings to reinstate your account. Then she and Amy went over to your place on their way to lunch and closed the garage. Speaking of that, Theresa said the service door to the kitchen was unlocked. You really ought to be more careful about that, since you and the kids are there alone so much.”
I bit my tongue before I could say something ungrateful and bitter. “I’ll take it under advisement. About this Amy person, who is she?” I seemed to have missed the memo.
“You know, Theresa’s best friend. Delia’s really smitten with Aunt Amy. She babysits the kids for a few hours on Saturdays so Theresa and I can have a break.”
A break? From his forty-eight hours with our children?
“Delia has an Aunt Georgia. She doesn’t need an Aunt Amy.”
“Great,” Steven deadpanned. “Let’s call Georgia and ask her to babysit.”
I gritted my teeth.
“Ouch! No, no, Zach! Come back here … Christ,” Steven muttered, a little winded. “Listen, Finn, I need you to come get Zach. Theresa had an appointment after lunch to show a house, so I took him to the farm with me. I’ve got a client coming in less than an hour for a meeting, and Zach is all over the place.”
“Of course he is.” I squeezed my eyes shut, envisioning the chaos playing out on the other end of the line. Steven’s sod farm was just a ginormous backyard without a fence. Acres of open space to run, and plenty of tractors and backhoes to climb. It was a toddler’s paradise, and unless you medaled in track and field, it was also a parent’s worst nightmare.
“Finn?” Between Zach’s shrieks, I could practically hear Steven’s sanity cracking. His farm was close to the West Virginia state line. It would take me at least forty minutes to get there. And I’d have to pick Delia up at preschool on the way.
“Fine.” I rummaged through my wallet and found the twenty dollars I hadn’t spent on lunch that morning. Enough for gas. “I’m coming. Give me a few minutes to use the bathroom and grab Delia.”
“An hour, Finn. Please.” He sounded desperate. And a little pissed off. He’d had only one of our children for less than three hours, and he thought he could handle full custody of both? I considered taking my time, showing up late, just to see how much hair he had left when I finally arrived. But then Zach started crying in the background, the kind of wails Steven had always been too impatient to learn to quiet. I got up from the desk, a layer of dust revealing itself where my hands had briefly skimmed its surface.
This was my life. A two-thousand-dollar contract for months of work, no sleep, and ten minutes in the bathroom alone.
“Tell Zach I’m on my way.” I hung up the phone, switched off the computer, and tried not to wonder about Harris Mickler anymore.
CHAPTER 4
Steven had bought his sod farm less than a month after we’d divorced. I’d taken the kids to see it once. I didn’t know much about the place, other than the fact that it covered three hundred
acres, it produced various kinds of grass he then sold to homebuilders and real estate developers, and he’d been making a small fortune from it since. Mostly, I pictured him and Theresa frolicking naked in emerald fields of cash and fescue, which was probably why I’d never bothered going back.
I had a vague recollection of where it was. My GPS led me the rest of the way, to a huge billboard marking the entrance to a gravel road. ROLLING GREEN SOD AND TREE FARM, it read. The long dirt driveway was flanked on both sides by fields of baby Christmas trees, the next big cash crop Steven would undoubtedly use as Exhibit A in his custody case against me. Not only could he afford to keep my children clothed and fed, he could give them the perfect Norman Rockwell Christmas to boot.
Sitting tall in her booster to see out the window, Delia directed me to park in front of a small construction trailer at the rear of the tree lot. I freed Delia from her car seat and followed her to the sales office, knocking once before poking my head inside the trailer door. Delia scooted around my legs and rushed toward the desk, beaming up at the pretty young blonde seated behind it. The receptionist couldn’t have been much older than nineteen or twenty, with a sweet smile and perky boobs. Just like Steven liked them. The poor thing. Theresa probably had no idea, and I almost felt sorry for her, too.
“Hi, Delia,” the girl cooed, rubbing my daughter’s head. Delia’s cap shifted a little, exposing the edge of the duct tape holding her hair in place. The girl wrinkled her nose at it, flashing me a conspiratorial grin as if she had discerned the backstory Delia’s hat was struggling to hide.
Oh, honey, I thought to myself, you have no idea.
“You must be Finlay?” the girl asked, standing to shake my hand. “I’m Bree. Mr. Donovan is expecting you.”
How sweet. She called him Mr. Donovan in the office. I wrinkled my nose and smiled back. “Thanks, Bree. I’m just here to pick up Zach.”
“They’re in the Zoysia. Just stay on the gravel about a quarter mile, until you pass the tractors on your left. He’ll be in the field right behind them.”
“Thank you,” I said, genuinely sad for her when I thought of all the heartbreak ahead of her—all the phalluses just waiting to be drawn in the dust on the windshield of her future. I wanted to tell her to run. To save herself while she still could. But I had been about the same age when I’d fallen for Steven, and if anyone had told me he’d turn out to be a philandering creep, I never would have believed them.
I took Delia’s hand and led her back to the car.
“Can I ride up front with you?” she asked when I opened the back door.
“No, sweetie. You need to be in your booster.”
“But Daddy lets me.”
“Daddy’s setting a bad example. It’s not very responsible of him. What if a policeman saw and gave him a ticket?”
Delia rolled her eyes. “This isn’t a real road, Mommy. Daddy says it’s private.”
“What if we were in an accident?”
“But nobody ever drives here!” she whined. “Only Daddy’s pickup truck. Sometimes, he even lets me ride in the very back.” She confessed this bit with an impish smile. I returned it, making a mental note to share that information with my attorney—if he’d bother to take my call. I was pretty sure his invoice was in the pile with all the other outstanding bills on my front step.
I strapped Delia into her car seat and we bobbed down the gravel road, kicking up dust behind us as we cut through Steven’s farm. I hated to admit that it was a beautiful piece of land. Wide open and flat with unobstructed views of the rolling Appalachian foothills to the west, the fields neatly sectioned in squares of varying shades of green. I found Steven’s pickup truck easily among them. The red paint popped against the bright shamrock backdrop, and I could just make out the arch of Steven’s back as he chased Zach behind the cab. Zach zipped around it, emerging on the other side, his heavy diaper nearly dragging along the ground.
Well played, Steven. Well played.
Steven scooped him up at the sight of my van and rushed him toward me, eager to get us all out of his way before his clients arrived. If I knew Steven, he’d have his pretty assistant hold them back at the office until our van was gone. He was a master at shell games, hiding his interests and using distractions to move them smoothly out of sight, preserving his impeccable image. Though I doubted even Steven could hide the toddler-size stains Zach had left on his logo-emblazoned dress shirt.
He dumped our son unceremoniously in my arms, much like I had done to him earlier that morning. Zach’s pacifier—the one that clipped to the front of his overalls—was nowhere to be found as he screamed bloody murder in my ear. “Thanks for coming all the way out here,” Steven said over Zach’s shrieks. “I wish I had time to say hi to Delia, but my client’s going to be here any minute.” He waved over my shoulder, then swore under his breath. I turned to see Delia already out of her buckles and climbing out of the van. She ran toward us, leaping into Steven’s arms. He planted a kiss on top of her cap and set her down beside me, his gaze drifting anxiously down the road.
“Must be a big one,” I said, struggling to get Zach to settle.
“The developer for that new planned community in Warrenton I was telling you about,” Steven said absently. “Twenty-five hundred units over the next ten years.” He held up a finger to one of his crew members, letting us both know he only had a minute to wait.
I bounced Zach on my hip. He rested his head on my shoulder and his wails faded to pathetic moans. “Great, well, I don’t want to keep you. Where’s Zach’s blanket?”
Steven cringed. “I left it at the house this morning. Along with his paci.” Which was clearly why he had wanted me to rush out here so fast. I stopped bouncing to gape at him. Zach arched in my arms and started wailing again. “Here.” Flustered, Steven fished around in his pocket and unhooked a house key from his key ring. “You can stop by my place and get it. Just leave the key under the mat, and for god’s sake don’t tell Theresa I let you in.” He took me by the arm and began shuffling us toward the van.
I planted my feet and set Zach on the ground. The crying abruptly stopped, and he gleefully took off running. Steven failed to catch him as Zach waddled full tilt for the field.
I cupped a hand over my eyes, shielding out the afternoon sun as I watched Zach toddle off. “It was a long drive out here and I’m low on gas. All I’ve got with me is a twenty. Do you mind?” I held out a hand. If he wanted us to go that badly, the least he could do was cover the trip.
Jaw clenched, Steven reluctantly pulled his attention from Zach. “Twenty is plenty to get you home. It’s not that far.” He smiled tightly. Probably so he wouldn’t look like a total asshole in front of Delia.
I reached down and put a hand on our daughter’s head, plucking off her cap. A few chunks of loose hair came away with it. Steven’s face fell. His eyes darted back to the gravel road behind us as he peeled a twenty from the wad in his pocket and shoved it in my hand. Delia snatched her hat back, repeatedly failing to pull it over her head. I ran to fetch Zach before he could climb the bright yellow tractor that had captured his attention.
“Thanks for watching Zach this morning,” I said when he was finally writhing and whining in my arms. “Guess we’ll be going.”
Dust kicked up behind two approaching cars. The glistening Mercedes came to a stop behind the phallus on the rear window of my minivan, and I’m pretty sure Steven had never looked so relieved as he did the moment I buckled the kids into their car seats and shut the doors.
“It’ll be faster if you go out the back way,” he said, opening my door for me in a gesture that probably looked chivalrous from a distance. “Follow the gravel road to the end. It connects with the rural route behind the farm. Make a right, then another right, and follow the signs back to the highway.” Steven waved good-bye and rushed off to greet his clients, whose cars were now blocking the road we came in on.
I started the engine and rolled down the windows. A cool breeze blew over th
e acres upon acres of new grass, rippling them like the surface of a huge green sea. As we drove through it, I couldn’t help but admire what Steven had built here. Planting, growing, harvesting. Seeing something he’d started and stuck with, all the way through. Tractors turned over the rich dark earth on either side of me, spreading fresh seed into the trenches behind them. Others cut long, crisp strands of dense sod that looked like they could resurface a golf course. And still others pried up long stretches of turf, rolling them into tubes and stacking them onto flatbeds.
Three hundred acres. I couldn’t even finish three hundred pages. Couldn’t keep one little girl’s hair cut as neatly as Steven kept up all these fields.
I left exactly the way Steven wanted me to, out the back where no one would see me, past the fallow field at the end of his farm, the last few acres of dirt he hadn’t yet gotten around to covering over with something new.
CHAPTER 5
I wedged Steven’s key in the lock with one hand while Zach whimpered on my hip. Delia trailed in after me, slipped off her sneakers, and headed straight for her room. Theresa’s house was a no-shoes zone. The wide plank wood floors and pristine white carpets smelled strongly of lemon Lysol, as if Theresa had drenched the entire house in it after my kids had left that morning.
I kept my sneakers on, trailing in some of the sod farm with me as I climbed the stairs to the children’s rooms. Zach’s was sterile and bland—white carpets, white blinds, and stark pricey furniture with sharp angles and clean lines. Zach’s blanket, covered with brightly colored stains and faded puppies, was draped over the changing table beside his chewed-up paci. Zach jammed it into his mouth. He tucked the pilled flannel under his chin, his head resting against my shoulder as he made contented soft sucking sounds. I called for Delia as I descended the stairs but, as usual, she was reluctant to come. This house was still new to her, novel and different with frilly new princess bedding and shiny new Barbie playthings. She never played with Barbies at home. And she didn’t much care for princesses. But this was her daddy’s world, and she was perfectly content to play dress-up in it.
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