Why hadn’t Sheila just told him what was so damn important? He didn’t know whether to be worried or annoyed.
As he headed downstairs to the gym’s lobby, he kept telling himself that if it were a real emergency, Sheila would have urged him to come home.
He approached the glass doors to the street, then stopped.
The blonde was standing just outside the doorway, trying to avoid the downpour.
Dylan took a deep breath and pushed the door open. He worked up a smile for her. “Hi, again,” he said. “Listen, I’m sorry about earlier. I’m happily married. I don’t want you thinking I’m one of those guys who go to the gym to hit on women.”
“I didn’t think you were,” she replied with a wistful smile. “And I really was finished with my routine. Anyway, no need to apologize.” She held her gym bag in one hand and her phone in the other. She wore a lightweight olive jacket with the collar up. The jacket’s shoulders were water-stained and her hair was wet. It looked like she’d started out in the storm but turned back.
“Do you need a ride?” he asked.
She squinted up at the rain. “Oh, I think it’ll let up soon.”
“Well, I live in Roanoke Park. If you’re headed up to Capitol Hill, I’m going in that direction anyway.” He nodded at the black BMW parked by the curb in front of the building. “My car’s right there. I’ve got rockstar parking.”
She checked her phone. “Typical. It’s pouring out, so naturally, my Uber app has gone haywire on me.” She looked at him and smiled. “A ride would be great, thanks.”
They ran through the downpour to his car, and Dylan opened the passenger door for her. Then he hurried around to the driver’s side and jumped in behind the wheel. He listened to the rain pelting the car roof.
“I really appreciate this,” she said, a little out of breath. She set her gym bag in front of her on the floor. “By the way, my name is Brooke . . . Brooke Crowley.”
Dylan shook her hand. “I’m Dylan O’Rourke. Where are we headed?”
She lived on Belmont Avenue, which wasn’t far away, but involved crossing a high overpass to Interstate 5 with nothing to shield her from the wind and rain. The rest of the walk was up a steep hill.
Even in the downpour, they had a sweeping view of the city and Lake Union from the overpass. For a few moments, there was an awkward silence. The only sounds were the windshield wipers squeaking, the rain, and the traffic noise on the interstate below. Then Brooke asked if he and his wife had any kids.
She’d asked in a very friendly way. At the same time, Dylan wondered if she was trying to make a point about him being married.
“We have three kids,” Dylan said, eyes on the road ahead.
“So tell me about them. I’m interested.”
“Well, there’s Hannah, who’s sixteen, going on twenty-seven. She’s very popular and just starting to date, which scares the hell out of me. Steve is fifteen, and he’s into trains . . .”
“Is he like you?” she asked.
“No, he’s smarter than me. He takes after his mom. He’s very sensitive, too. He recently had his hair all shaved off to help raise money for children with cancer. It’s just starting to grow back, thank God. Strangers look at us with such pity when we’re out together. I want to tell them, ‘He’s okay, don’t worry . . .’” Dylan laughed and glanced at her.
They were at the stop sign at the end of the overpass. A streetlight was shining from above. Shadows of raindrops on the windshield dappled her face, and for a moment he thought she was crying.
“You all right?” he asked.
She nodded, and then cleared her throat. “You said you had three kids. What about the third one?”
Dylan shifted gears to head up the steep hill. “Well, Gabe is ten and a total jock. Every Saturday, he has a game somewhere. So—Gabe’s the King of Saturdays. Most of our weekends are scheduled around him.”
She nodded. “Belmont is coming up,” she said. “You’ll take a right here.”
Dylan followed her directions. “What about you and your husband?” he asked. “Do you have any kids?”
She hesitated, and then pointed to an apartment building on the right. It was one of three buildings in a row—each about ten stories high. “That’s me, right there.”
Dylan turned into the driveway. “Nice,” he murmured. “Do you have a view?”
She nodded. “Yes, and it’s pretty incredible, too. We’re on the ninth floor. Everyone comes over on New Year’s to see the Space Needle fireworks—whether we invite them or not.”
Pulling in front of the lobby’s glass double doors, Dylan let the car idle. “So—no kids?” As soon as he asked this, he regretted it. She’d skirted the question earlier, and obviously, there was a reason for that.
“Not anymore,” she said quietly. “We had a son, Aaron, who died. It’ll be two years in November. He had leukemia.”
“I’m so sorry,” Dylan murmured. He didn’t know what else to say. He felt terrible, joking a minute before about Steve’s shaved head.
“It’s weird,” she sighed. “When I meet someone who’s married, I sort of automatically ask if they have any kids. I keep forgetting that they’re bound to ask me the same question. I’ve had practically two years to figure out how to answer them, and I’m still not sure.”
“I think you can just be honest,” Dylan said, shrugging.
“Yeah, only they get uncomfortable when I tell them the truth. But whenever I say I don’t have any children, it feels awful—like I’m pretending Aaron never existed. It seems so cold-blooded. I felt bad enough when we moved here . . .” She looked out the car window at her building. “We used to have a house in Queen Anne, and once Aaron died, Paul—that’s my husband—he said we should move. I didn’t want to, but I understood. Aaron had been sick for so long. He spent his last two months in the hospital. You’d think Paul would’ve gotten used to that empty bedroom. But after Aaron died, Paul couldn’t take it.”
“Of course not,” Dylan whispered.
“Paul said that even if we gutted it and tried to change the bedroom into a study or something, it would’ve always been Aaron’s room. Anyway, we moved here about a year and a half ago. And I’ll bet right now you’re very sorry you asked if I had any kids.”
“No, I’m not,” he said. “I’m glad you told me. Was he at Children’s Hospital?”
“Yes, I started volunteering there after we moved here. You know, moving here didn’t really change things too much, not for me. Maybe I didn’t want things to change. I’m still constantly walking past or revisiting Aaron’s room at the hospital. There’ve been scores of children in that room—in that same bed—since Aaron. But to me, it’s still Aaron’s room. It’s one of the main reasons I work there. I want to be near his room. Isn’t that crazy?” She reached into her coat pocket, pulled out a tissue, and wiped her nose. “I haven’t admitted that to anyone, not even my close friends.”
“Sometimes it’s easier to talk to a stranger,” Dylan offered.
She smiled at him. “You don’t feel like a stranger.”
Dylan was speechless. One minute she seemed wary of him, and the next, she’d say something like that. The signals she sent were so mixed, and somehow that intrigued him. In their silence, he listened to the rain on the car roof. He wanted to reach over and touch her tear-stained cheek, but he kept his hand on the wheel.
“I didn’t mean to get so serious on you.” She let out a sad little laugh. “Poor guy, you offer a girl a ride home, and she practically breaks down crying in your car. You’re probably thinking this is the last time you ever ask anyone out at the gym.”
“Actually, I was thinking that I’d really like to see you again,” he said quietly.
She grabbed her gym bag and opened the passenger door. The interior light went on. “I should go before I say yes.”
He didn’t want her to leave. Still, he quickly jumped out of the driver’s side to help her with the door. Ding-ding-ding, the
alarm chimed. He’d left his key in the ignition. Ignoring it, Dylan ran around the front of the car and reached her door just as she was stepping out. He shut the car door for her.
“Do you usually walk to and from the gym?” he asked, a little out of breath. He felt like he was on the elliptical machine again.
She nodded.
The two of them stood in the rain for a moment.
“And this is the time you usually go there?” he asked.
She nodded again. “My new time, yes . . .”
“Will you be working out tomorrow?”
She shook her head. She didn’t offer more.
He managed a smile. “Well, maybe I’ll see you there again sometime.”
“Thanks for the ride, Dylan,” she said. Then she turned and started toward the building’s glass double doors. She took her keys out of her pocket.
Dylan stood by the car, watching her. The driver door was still open, and the alarm was still ding-ding-dinging.
She stopped and turned around. “I’ll be working out on Friday,” she called.
“Friday,” he repeated, slightly breathless again.
She nodded. Then she hurried to the door and let herself in.
CHAPTER FOUR
Wednesday—7:12 P.M.
“Are you sure you don’t know who she is?” Sheila asked. “Or was?”
Dylan sat at their breakfast table, which was actually a booth, something out of a fifties diner with green vinyl seat cushions and a green “cracked ice” pattern tabletop trimmed in chrome. They’d bought the house nine years ago because Dylan had loved the kitschy midcentury modern kitchen—wood cabinets, green and brown boomerang-patterned countertops, and outdated, bronze-colored appliances. Sheila wanted to tear it all out and put in an island, granite countertops, and stainless-steel appliances. But Dylan wouldn’t hear of it. As a compromise, he bought her the stainless-steel appliances, but wouldn’t make any other changes. It was his favorite room in the house. Sheila tolerated it. The other anachronistic compromise to the midcentury look was a small flat-screen TV at one end of the diner-style table, by the window. At the moment, The Big Bang Theory was on mute. But Dylan paid no attention to it. He was looking at Sheila’s phone, reading the Oregonian article someone had texted to her.
“Antonia Newcomb,” he read the name aloud. Then he shook his head. “Babe, it doesn’t ring a bell, not even a distant one.”
“Are you sure?” Sheila asked, glancing over her shoulder at him. She was at the stove, stirring a pot of sloppy joe. “I thought maybe she was someone you knew back in school—or when we lived in Portland . . .”
Dylan shook his head again. He had no idea who the woman was. He sipped his scotch and soda. He allowed himself one drink when he got home every night. Sheila, obviously shaken, had already knocked off her second glass of merlot.
The boys were watching TV down in the basement recreation room, and as usual, Hannah was barricaded in her bedroom, on Instagram or texting with one of her friends. The family always ate a bit late on the nights Dylan went to the gym. He’d arrived home even later than usual tonight. And he was glad Sheila hadn’t asked why he’d been delayed. She’d been too preoccupied with the text and some creep she’d encountered on the bus.
Though Antonia Newcomb was a total stranger to both of them, the way she’d died was eerily familiar. Dylan was reluctant to say anything about it, and he knew Sheila was, too. In fact, he was surprised she’d even brought up Portland.
They didn’t talk about their time there. Though he traveled to Portland for work occasionally, Dylan did his damnedest to avoid even mentioning the city in Sheila’s presence.
“Are you sure this text wasn’t meant for someone else?” he asked, setting Sheila’s phone down on the tabletop. “It doesn’t mention either one of us by name. You said you tried to reply to this thing, right?”
“Twice,” Sheila answered, taking the salad out of the refrigerator. “And both times, my texts bounced back as undeliverable.”
“That just proves what I’m saying. It wasn’t meant for you, or it’s from someone trying to screw with you.”
Dylan didn’t want to say anything beyond that. Sheila’s name had been in the Portland newspapers seventeen years ago. Maybe someone remembered and sent the article out of spite. People could be pretty awful sometimes.
He now understood why she’d become unnerved and left him so many messages today. He sighed. “Honey, I don’t think you should worry about this. Just delete it. And don’t open any more strange texts with links. They could have a virus or spyware. You could have really screwed up your phone, or far worse. You could have—”
“I know, I know,” Sheila huffed. She pulled the merlot out of the liquor cabinet and refilled her glass.
That’s three, Dylan thought. She was really tipping back the wine tonight. Sheila drank a little bourbon sometimes when she couldn’t fall asleep at night, but it was unlike her to get plastered before dinner.
“So—you’re saying it’s all just a coincidence? Portland Woman Falls to Her Death . . .” Sheila’s voice cracked as she recited the headline. She took a gulp of the wine. “Some coincidence. I’m on the bus, and I see this shoplifting creep from ten days ago. He calls me a bitch. And after I slip out the back door without him noticing, he jumps off at the next stop, and in less than five minutes, he’s across the street from where I am. He must have backtracked—running—four blocks. The guy was obviously following me. The text came, like, a minute later . . .”
Dylan slid out of the booth. He stood up. “You didn’t tell me that he called you a bitch.”
“He mouthed it at me,” Sheila said.
“Is something burning?” he asked.
“Damn it, the buns!” Sheila grabbed a potholder, yanked open the oven door, and pulled a cookie sheet of hamburger buns from the top rack. Some of the buns were black around the edges. She dropped the sheet onto the stovetop’s vacant burners. Two of the bun tops fell onto the floor. “Goddamn it!” she hissed. “And we don’t have any buns left . . .”
“Honey, chill,” he whispered. “It’s not the end of the world.”
She frowned at him. “Y’know, one of the worst things you can say to someone who’s having a meltdown is ‘chill.’”
“Point taken, hon.” He handed Sheila her wineglass, then steered her to the booth and sat her down.
Picking up the hamburger buns, Dylan got a knife out of the drawer, moved over to the sink, and started scraping the scorched edges off the buns. He watched a layer of black crumbs form around the drain. “Sheila, you should have told me about this creep on the bus when you left me your first voicemail. I would have come and picked you up at the ballroom. Please tell me, after all that, you didn’t take the bus home from work.”
With the glass in her hand, she shrugged. “Well, I made sure the guy wasn’t anywhere around . . .”
Shaking his head, Dylan set out the dinner plates. “You know how much I hate the idea of you taking the bus to work. Every other week, you’re telling me about some incident or crazy person you encounter on that stupid bus. If you don’t want to take the car to work, call a cab or take Uber—”
“That’s so expensive,” she murmured.
He started to get exasperated. “I don’t understand. If he was harassing you on the bus and chasing after you, why didn’t you call the police?”
“Well, he—he wasn’t exactly harassing me. He caught me scowling at him, and he scowled back. And I can’t be a hundred percent sure he followed me. I only caught a glimpse of him across the street. Maybe I’m just blowing it all out of proportion.”
Dylan took the tater tots out of the oven, set the baking pan on a trivet, and turned to stare at her. A minute ago she was telling him how the guy had jumped off the bus one stop after her so he could hunt her down. And now she wasn’t even certain the guy had been following her. Apparently, all he’d done was give her a dirty look on the bus. Was the dirty look even meant for her?
<
br /> This was so typical of Sheila. She’d get upset over something and tell him about it—until she worked him into a state. Then once he was good and mad, or worried sick, she’d suddenly play down the whole thing. It drove him nuts.
He took a deep breath. “Well, I don’t want you taking that bus anymore. And if you see this creep again, just call the police—and then call me.”
Sheila nodded. “What do you think I should do about this text?”
That was what really upset her, the text—and the story about the Portland woman falling to her death. He understood, and he felt terrible for her. No wonder she was numbing herself with wine. Dylan was convinced someone must have seen the article and sent it—just to be cruel. Maybe it was somebody one of them had known back in Portland, or maybe a stranger. How the culprit had gotten Sheila’s contact information was a mystery.
Dylan moved over to the breakfast table, smoothed back Sheila’s hair, and kissed her on the cheek. “Like I told you. Delete it, hon.”
“Are you sure you don’t know this Antonia person?”
Dylan sighed. “For God’s sake, Sheila, who are you going to believe—me, or this jerk sending you some anonymous text? It probably wasn’t even meant for you. Just delete it, okay?”
He stepped away and headed around the corner. Then he called down the basement stairs: “Hey, guys, dinner’s ready!”
His fifteen-year-old son, Steve, came to the bottom of the stairs. With his recently shorn brown hair, he looked like a gangly, scared, underage marine recruit. He always had a slightly vulnerable, deer-in-the-headlights look to him, which made Dylan wonder if he was getting picked on at school. Despite his wide shoulders and long limbs, he wasn’t much of an athlete, though he was trying to be. Unfortunately for him, sports were more of his kid brother’s forte.
“Anchorman is on. Can we eat down here?”
Dylan frowned at him. “Isn’t that rated R, or something? Gabe shouldn’t be watching that.”
The Betrayed Wife Page 4
