My Darling Husband

by Kimberly Belle

  Sebastian pulls the phone right up to his mouth and shouts, “Too late. Now get your ass home with my money or your kid dies and then your wife dies and you will sit there helpless knowing there’s nothing you could do about it. You won’t be able to stop the people you love from dying, and you’ll have to live the rest of your miserable life knowing their deaths are all your fault. Then you’ll finally understand what you did to me. You’ll feel the pain I felt.”

  Beatrix’s face screws into a purple coil, and I scoot closer, wrapping a hand around her ankle.

  “I feel your pain now,” Cam says, his voice low, calmer now. He’s holding it together, but just barely. “Just hold on. Don’t do anything you’ll regret. I’ll be there in eighteen minutes, and then I swear to you we’ll fix this. I want to fix this.”

  Sebastian checks the time on his cell. “In fifteen they’ll all be dead.”

  “Come on, Sebastian. I know you. You may hate me for what I did, but you’re not evil enough to kill innocent people. You’re smart, you’re caring and you’re a great father. No father deserves the kind of worries you’re carrying around, but you’re not that guy. I know you don’t want to do this.”

  “Oh yeah?” He steps closer, his eyes flashing when they land on mine. “If you know so much about me, smart guy, then you know I have nothing left to lose.”

  J A D E

  6:45 p.m.

  Fifteen minutes.

  Fifteen minutes until Cam gets here and I can run across the street for Baxter. I don’t think about everything I just heard, about the lawsuit and Cam’s callous dismissal of a girl’s illness, or the fact that Cam said it would be eighteen minutes and in all the years I’ve known him he has never once been on time. And it’s raining again. Atlanta’s rush hour is still in full swing. There are so many possible complications, but I tell myself he will get here on time. I can’t think of what will happen if he’s too late.

  The words chant like a mantra through my head.

  Fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes.

  Sebastian pushes off the windowsill and grabs his backpack off the floor. He shoves a hand in deep and roots around, but not before dumping the gun and both cell phones onto the side table next to Beatrix. I would protest—Too close, what kind of idiot puts a loaded gun within arm’s reach of a child?—if her arms weren’t strapped to the chair.

  “All right. Game time. Let’s go.”

  I stare at him in horror because I’m pretty sure what’s about to happen. Still, I have to ask, “Go where?”

  “On the chair.” He pulls his hand out of the bag and gestures to the recliner at the far end, as far away as possible from Beatrix. “That one.”

  I shake my head. “I want to stay next to Beatrix.”

  He digs through the bag again, his hand emerging with a fresh roll of duct tape. “This is not up for discussion. I’m not asking you which chair you want to sit in. I’m telling you which one, and it’s the last one.” He drops the bag on the carpet by the side table.

  Questions fly through my mind. What’s going to happen once I’m tied down? How do I save my daughter when I’m strapped to a chair? I try to think of some way to frame the questions so Beatrix doesn’t understand, but the idea of being tied down and helpless to protect her has me too panicked to think straight.

  Fifteen minutes. It feels like an eternity. There’s no way I can stall for that long.

  He finds the edge of the tape and tears off a long strip. It rips off the roll with a harsh clatter.

  “Mom—” Beatrix begins, but I stop her with a look.

  “Please,” I say to Sebastian. “If you let me stay here, I’ll make sure she stays quiet and does as you say. We both will.”

  He shakes his head, and my throat dries up like sandpaper. It’s a setup. Sebastian is a parent, which means he knows the agony I am feeling at the thought of being separated from my child. At being helpless to save her. He has to know what this is doing to me.

  Sebastian lifts a brow—a silent Well?—and Cam was wrong about this man. He is not a good guy. Anyone who separates a mother from her child, who ties her to a chair and turns her defenseless is evil. Never, not once ever in my entire life, have I wanted to kill someone like I want to kill this man. He is a monster.

  I look at my daughter, silent and strapped to the couch, and her expression makes my stomach hurt. “No. I won’t do it. You can’t make me.”

  “Mom.” Beatrix widens her eyes, round and insistent. “Just go, okay? It’s fine.”

  A hand reaches into my chest, seizes my heart in a fist and squeezes it in two. Beatrix is always doing this—acting mature beyond her years, assuming responsibility for matters a little girl shouldn’t have to assume responsibility for. An inflexible, type A perfectionist who carries the weight of the world on her shoulders. Now she sees my distress and wants to comfort me.

  “It’s not fine.” I shake my head, and tears tumble down my face. I will not sit apart from her. I won’t.

  “Come on, Jade, ticktock. Get moving, or I’ll drag you there myself.”

  Thirteen minutes. All I have to do is hold on for thirteen more minutes.

  My mind shuffles through the items around me, inventorying the ones that are heavy enough, sharp enough, solid enough. The fern in a ceramic pot, the footed bowl on the coffee table, the antique marble bust, the PlayStation guitar on the stand in the corner. These are the things that could bash in a head, but I’d never make it to any of them in time, not without getting shot in the back. He’s too strong for me to fight, too fast for me to outrun.

  I grab on to the recliner, digging in with my entire backside until every part of me is flush to the chair. If he wants me on the other one, he’ll have to unglue me from this one first.

  Sebastian cocks his head. “Hey, what do you think Cam meant when he said don’t listen to me?”

  It takes a second or two for my mind to catch up to his sudden change of subject, and then another few seconds for the meaning to come to me in a slow drip. Cam told me not to listen to Sebastian. He said he was lying, that none of the stuff he told me was true.

  Which also means that Cam heard our conversation. He remembered the nanny cams, he was listening and watching. He heard everything.

  “What?”

  “Cam, when he called just now. He said, Jade, don’t listen to him, referring to me. It was one of the first things he said after I put him on speakerphone. What do you think he meant by it?”

  “I don’t...” My voice breaks, and I swallow. Force myself to breathe. “I don’t know. He probably figured you’d been telling me all sorts of awful things about him. Which is true, by the way. You have been.”

  “Possible, but it seemed like he had ears in the room or something. Almost as if he’s been watching us the entire time. What, does he have ESP?”

  I think of my phone on the side table next to the gun, the colorful cartoon image of a baby’s face among the apps on the third page, above the word iSpy. Two little swipes of his finger, a couple of taps to the screen, and Sebastian would be staring at himself on the screen. He’d see me clinging to the recliner next to my strapped-down daughter. He’d hear my lame-ass lie, coming at him in stereo: “That’s impossible.”

  Sebastian gives me a one-shouldered shrug. “Maybe, but Cam still knew. I mean okay, sure. Let’s say he had a hunch I’d gotten in your ear, but he sounded so certain about it. Not even the slightest hesitation or a question mark, just pure conviction right out of the gate. Doesn’t that seem kinda funny to you?”

  “Not even a little bit.”

  He regards me, silent, as the lights flicker on in the backyard outside, a golden glow that filters up to the window. They work on a timer, which means it’s dangerously close to seven.

  “Right, right.” Sebastian’s shoulders relax under the black fabric of his shirt, and mine do, too. H
e goes back to his tape, and I blow out a silent breath while at the same time, my fingers tighten on the cushion.

  He transfers the strip from his fingers to the side table, the stubborn tape not wanting to let go of his gloves. As soon as he frees one finger, the tape sticks to another, and he tucks the roll under a bicep so he can use both hands. When he’s free, he whirls to face me.

  “But what if it was? I mean, you wouldn’t be the first parent to stick some spyware in a teddy bear so you know when the babysitter has fallen asleep on the job. What do they call those things? Nanny cams.” He looks around demonstratively, taking in the decor, his gaze finally landing on Baxter’s stuffed gorilla, sticking out from under the coffee table. He reaches down, wrangles it off the floor.

  If Baxter were here, he’d be going ballistic. Gibson doesn’t like to be squeezed.

  Sebastian holds the animal in front of his face. “Hey there, gorilla. You got any nanny cams in that big fat belly of yours?” He gives it a good shake, then tosses it to the floor.

  I stare at Gibson, wedged between the table and the carpet by my feet, and try to breathe.

  Sebastian steps to the center of the room, rotating in a slow circle. “Though, if I were going to install nanny cams in my house, I sure as heck wouldn’t put them in something as cliché as a stuffed animal. I’d be a little more creative, maybe hide them in a plant—” he steps to the coffee table and rifles through the fern directly in front of me, shrugging when he finds nothing but fronds and dirt “—or a picture frame. Books. You’ve got a bunch of books over there on the shelves. Any of them contain cameras you forgot to tell me about?”

  I shake my head, but I’m not very convincing. The strips of tape dangling from the console, the insistence I move to the far chair. He’s all but forgotten that plan now, but I can’t shake the feeling that something’s off. That this is all an act.

  It’s certainly possible he’s seen the nanny cams on my phone. He’s had plenty of time to look, moments when I was tied to the blue chair and wouldn’t have seen him nosing through my phone. This is a test, he said the first time he asked me about the cameras. This could be one big ruse to watch me paint myself in a corner.

  One by one, he inspects the possibilities in the room. He runs a gloved finger down the book spines, bends to study the bowls and vases on the console, pulls the paintings away from the walls and peers behind the frames. He takes his time, moving around the room so slowly, so leisurely, I begin to think he’s running down the clock, dragging the drama out on purpose.

  He parks his feet in front of the shelves, standing dangerously close to where two cameras are hidden—one in a speaker high on the wall and the other in the ugly mantel clock. Above my head, about five feet to my left, the third camera provides a birds-eye view from what looks exactly like a fire alarm.

  Nobody will ever know the difference, the installer assured me as he screwed it into the plaster. Not unless they sell fire alarms for a living.

  Now Sebastian extends a long finger at the ceiling, and my heart stops. “What about that thing?” He points to the motion sensor, its light flickering red in a corner of the ceiling.

  It takes me a second or two to find my voice. “Just another Santa cam.”

  He grins. “Maybe that’s where Cam got his information, then. What do you think, Beatrix? Does your dad have a hotline to Santa?”

  Beatrix doesn’t respond.

  The second he turns back to the shelves, I decide, is the best time to strike, and with the marble bust. The gun is too far but the bust is right there, on the table between us, and it’s plenty heavy, the base square and sharp enough to crack a skull. A good whack would take any man down, but there’s ten feet, maybe less, between us. I’d have to be fast, my attack stealthy and silent. I don’t know if I can clear the space fast enough.

  “You know, if I were going to hide a nanny cam in this room, I’d put it in something nobody ever really notices. One of the ceiling speakers, for example.” He tips his head and studies them, his gaze bouncing between the four mesh circles flush to the plaster. “Those look legit. If there’s a camera in there, all I gotta say is bravo. That fire alarm, however...”

  He comes closer, climbing up on the coffee table to get a better look.

  My blood runs cold, an icy chill that starts at the back of my neck and creeps down my back like an invisible finger.

  Sebastian reaches up, knocks the alarm with a gloved knuckle. “There are better models on the market, you know. This one looks cheap, and you know what’s weird? It doesn’t match any of the others you’ve got in the house. The one out in the hallway, for example, is a whole different brand. How do you explain that?”

  He knows.

  The words boom in my head like from a megaphone, loud and terrifying. This little tour around the room, the battle between the chairs...it’s all part of his evil game. I was delusional to think he wouldn’t know about the cameras. Maybe he’s known about them all along.

  How many more minutes until Cam gets here—Ten? Eight? An eternity, when every second feels volatile.

  “And why ten past five?” he says, gesturing to the dummy clock. He hops off the table and crosses the room to the shelves, comparing the time to a cheap watch underneath a sleeve. The time is off by almost two hours. “Why not ten past three, or four, or six? Why five?”

  Because it’s the no-snack zone. It’s what I told the installer when he asked the same thing. A time of day the kids know not to bother me for a rumbling belly. The answer will always be no.

  I say nothing.

  “Hey, you know what else is weird? When the kids and I were watching cartoons earlier, I noticed one of the wall speakers wasn’t working.” He points with a long arm. “Must have a short or something.”

  My whole body is shaking now, and I am thinking through my next move. Sebastian is far enough away, his back half turned. I could probably make it to the hall, but not without Beatrix, and I would never leave her here. My only move, the only thing I can come up with, is one of defense—to drape my body over hers, sacrifice myself by covering her body with mine, taking her bullet.

  Sebastian’s grin is slow and sinister, like he read my mind. “Such a shame. I thought you were smarter than this.”

  Are we still talking about the cameras? The kids? Cam? I have no idea, and I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to. This whole conversation feels staged, another one of his sneaky attempts to control and manipulate. These threats he’s lobbing, they’re vague on purpose. Meant to throw me off.

  And it’s working.

  My cheeks are hot, burning like smoldering coals.

  “We’ve met, you know. More than once.”

  This surprises me, and it doesn’t. He was in business with Cam, which means at some point our paths would have crossed. Cam parades me by all his staff, especially management and investors, but the problem is there are so many. I’m not like Tanya. It’s impossible for me to remember them all.

  “Sorry, but I—”

  “And you know what you said, every single time?”

  I shake my head.

  “You stuck out a hand and said, ‘Hi, I’m Jade Lasky. So nice to meet you.’ Don’t you just hate that? When people you’ve met and talked to multiple times treat you like a total stranger? When they think so little of another human being that they can’t be bothered to remember your face or name?”

  Prosopagnosia. It’s a neurological disorder that makes people unable to distinguish between faces. I know because Cam is always teasing me that I have it.

  In my defense, I meet a lot of people. People who see me at the restaurants or with Cam at parties, who buddy up to us and act like we’re old friends, but none of it is real. They don’t know me, not really, and I sure as hell don’t know them. It’s part of being a celebrity chef’s wife; I’m lit up with the glow of his stardom.

 
“I can’t see your face,” I point out instead.

  He comes closer, marching across the carpet and around the table until he’s close, standing right in front of me. I try to move back, but there’s nowhere for me to go. My calves are already pressed against the soft leather of the couch. I stare into his eyes and search for something I recognize, something unique in the shape or size or color, but there’s nothing. Hazel and almond-shaped, like half the people on the planet.

  “You really don’t know?” He licks his lips. Smiles. “Are you sure about that, Jade? Like, really, really sure?”

  The room falls silent, everyone waiting for my answer. Pain shoots through my cheek and I wince, blinking against it. I look him in his unremarkable eyes and force myself to steady my breathing.

  “No, but if you take off that mask, I might.”

  His pupils go dark, like a tiny man inside his eyeballs flicked off the lights. From ho-hum hazel to stormy black, just like that.

  It’s the last thing I notice before he pulls off the mask.

  J A D E

  6:52 p.m.

  It takes me a minute to place him.

  Partly because he’s lost weight since the last time I saw him, a good twenty pounds melted off his limbs and torso and hollowing out his cheeks. His hair is different, too. Shorter. Lighter, almost completely gray.

  The other part is because it’s been a few months. I haven’t seen him since the spring.

  “I remember you. Except your name wasn’t Sebastian. It was something else.”

  Though admittedly, that doesn’t explain the other times.

  I close my eyes and try to reconstruct the meetings in my mind, but the only one I can come up with with any sort of certainty was this past April. Him, waving at me through the windows as he climbed the front steps. Me, opening the door to invite him in. He introduced himself, but not as Sebastian, as—

  “Bas. You joked that your wife refused to call you that, that she preferred the name ‘Bossy.’ I laughed and said she sounded like a smart woman.” I pause, the obvious question rising in my head. “Which one is it?”