One Little Secret (ARC)

by Cate Holahan

  “How? I didn’t—”

  “You brought an eighteen-year-old to a party with copious amounts of alcohol, even though she wasn’t of drinking age.” Gabby took another forward step, pretending that she really had the evidence to do more than threaten the girl. “Maybe you knew Andy liked them young and inexperienced and thought she’d be his type, once she was all liquored up.”

  Fiona’s jaw dropped to her chin, a puppet with a snapped string. Her eyes took on a glassy quality. “I didn’t serve her. I—”

  “Does Andy ask you to bring him girls, Fiona? Maybe you get a tip for every pretty young thing that you entice to come over? Maybe you even know how he likes to mix drinks.”

  “No.” Fiona’s face froze with fear. “I had nothing to do with it. You have to believe me. Mariel looked into him. I’d never have left if I’d thought she’d been drugged. I’m not a—”

  “Then help her,” Gabby interrupted. “Help your friend instead of protecting a rapist.”

  Fiona pulled in her lips, trying not to cry. She withdrew an outdated cell from the pocket of her jean shorts and tapped in a six-digit passcode. Gabby watched as she called up the Lyft application and hit the purple icon. “It’s not far,” Fiona said. “542 Pepperidge Lane.”

  Gabby pulled out her own phone and inputted the address in her map program. She started toward the black Dodge parked at the curb.

  “Please.” Fiona’s voice cracked behind her.

  Gabby glanced over her shoulder, prepared to hear the girl plead that she not mention her name to the party boys. Fiona clutched the Celtic knot on her neck. “Tell Mariel I’m sorry. I thought we’d have fun in a mansion with some cute guys. I wasn’t bringing anybody anyone. I thought Andy was hot, so I assumed she did too. I really didn’t know.”

  Gabby turned back to the car without promising to relay the message. Fiona didn’t seem stupid. On some level, Gabby guessed, Fiona had known that she was leaving Mariel in a dangerous situation. Jealousy had simply convinced her that her friend had deserved whatever was coming.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE DAY OF

  Anger had sobered Louis. He strode through the great room, spine steel-straight despite all the wine and scotch at dinner. Part of Jenny wished he’d drunk more. Inebriated, Louis might not have noticed anything unusual in Ben’s attention at dinner. He might have assumed that the interest in her bruise had stemmed solely from friendly concern. He might even have convinced himself that Ben, unhappily married to Rachel, simply couldn’t help looking at his beautiful wife. Let him look, liquored-up Louis might have teased as she undressed for bed. He can look. Only I can touch.

  But the pressure on her hand as Louis led her toward the open staircase made clear there’d be no laughter later. Her husband had picked up on the pointedness of Ben’s questions, and now he would have some of his own. Why had Ben not believed his bug bite story? Why had he asked about the painkillers? Why was Ben more concerned about her cheek than his own crumbling marriage?

  She couldn’t answer the last one. Jenny tried to prepare explanations for the others as she followed Louis up the stairs. Her precarious position on the steps kept distracting her. Louis held her left hand, forcing her to the staircase’s open side, her feet inches from the empty air and the waiting concrete below. Her legs trembled with each step. Still, she didn’t ask Louis to let her stop and steady herself. She wouldn’t dare.

  When she reached the landing, she nearly dropped to her knees. Louis noticed the shift in her weight and tugged her arm, keeping her upright in front of their friends and urging her forward. He pushed back the bedroom door and held it open, releasing her hand to let her walk through first. Jenny glanced over her shoulder, wondering if any of their neighbors had noticed her husband’s aggressive behavior. Ben sat on the couch with his back to her, a scotch glass in one hand and the bottle in the other. Susan and Nadal gave her small smiles and mouthed good-nights.

  Jenny supposed she couldn’t blame her new neighbors for not doing anything. From the first floor, Louis’s door-holding would appear chivalrous. They couldn’t see her husband’s jailor stance as he ordered her inside, or the red bracelet of fingerprints around her wrist from their hand-in-hand ascent to the loft.

  “Thanks.” Jenny forced a smile as she passed her husband. She knew from experience that he was watching her behavior, looking for things to add to the list of transgressions justifying his anger. She wouldn’t let him call her unappreciative.

  The door shut behind her. It didn’t slam. Louis was smarter than that.

  Jenny scanned the room for an escape hatch, some way of avoiding the altercation. The sunset sneaked through a pair of balcony doors on her left. Its reddish light stained the edge of the white duvet atop the bed.

  “Interesting conversation at dinner.” Louis feigned a kind of gossipy camaraderie. Let’s talk about the weirdos next door. He liked to pretend that his actions weren’t premeditated. It made him feel more normal to start a casual conversation that would become heated and then “out of control.”

  Jenny tried to use his tactic to her advantage. “Ben and Rachel hate each other. What’s new, right?” She hurried to the balcony doors and flung them back, acting as though she only wanted to exorcise the oppressive air. Two gray Adirondack chairs sat side by side, facing the beach. She rounded them and pressed her torso to the wooden railing. “Baby. Check out this view!”

  Jenny didn’t bother looking at the ocean. Instead, she searched the backyard and beach for witnesses: neighboring renters, couples strolling along the shore, late-night surfers, anybody whose presence might keep their fight from becoming too violent. Strangers were more likely to report Louis’s behavior than people they knew. Friends and family members, Jenny had learned, feared upsetting their social circle too much to intervene.

  She imagined her neighbors downstairs justifying whatever they saw or heard during the trip. Jenny tumbled off her mattress, poor thing. She must have scratched that bug bite and increased the swelling. Well, I bet she had a good time last night with Louis, given all that shouting. As long as Jenny didn’t publicly accuse her husband of hitting her, the neighbors would avoid the inconvenient truth about their friends.

  Except, of course, for Ben. He’d seen through her excuses six months ago.

  The backyard below reminded her of a high school party abruptly shut down by the cops. Half-empty wine glasses shone in the dim light. Food scraps littered abandoned plates. Bottles rolled back and forth in the breeze. No one was sitting in the yard, but that didn’t mean someone wasn’t lounging outside on the neighboring property, able to hear her shouts.

  “Jenny.” Louis said her name in a singsong manner, like there was something amusing about it—or what he intended to do.

  “You picked a great room.” She aimed for a childlike mix of sweetness and awe, the way Ally sounded when she was excited. Louis had never hit their kid.

  “Come inside.” A growled tone replaced the musical tenor. He wasn’t asking. Jenny continued playing like she was too dense, or drunk, to pick up on his anger. She looked out over the water and described what she saw, or what she would have seen were it not for the tears clouding her vision. “There’s this beautiful shade of violet on the horizon. I think I can see the moon rising.”

  Motion pulled her gaze to the jetty stretching into the water a quarter mile past the yard. A small figure walked atop the boulders. Jenny rubbed away her tears to make out the individual’s feminine outline and the billowing kimono behind her. Rachel stopped a third of the way to where the waves swallowed the jetty’s edge, a few feet beyond the shoreline.

  “I want to talk to you,” Louis said from right behind her. Jenny turned to see him blocking her exit, pressing the balcony door to the wall with an outstretched arm.

  “Rachel is on the beach.” She pointed to the jetty, a last-ditch effort to entice Louis outside.

  “Who cares? She’s a bitch.”

  The epithet had preceded enough vi
olent arguments to trigger Jenny’s fear response, despite its direction at someone else. Moisture evaporated from her throat. Her pounding heart picked up its already frantic rhythm.

  “I’m more interested in the conversation before Rachel came back to the table,” Louis went on. “Ben kept asking about the spot beneath your eye. He seemed convinced that it couldn’t be a bug bite. That I was a liar.” He smirked, as though he found Ben’s impression of him funny.

  “I don’t know what was up with him,” Jenny scoffed, trying to sell her disdain. Sports commenting hadn’t taught her enough about pretending. Whenever she tried to fake an emotion, she overacted like a cast member in a nineties telenovela. “I mean, to say those things to Rachel, in front of everyone? He must have been plastered.”

  Louis tilted his head side to side, performing nonchalance. He was so much better at faking it.

  “I guess we should get ready for bed,” she said. The words came out like she’d pressed them through sandpaper.

  Jenny tried to smile as she walked into the room. Louis caught her as she passed the threshold. Thick fingers wrapped her bicep like a blood pressure cuff. She tried to pull away, but Louis held on, his nails digging into her flesh. He twisted her forearm behind her, pulling her back against his chest.

  “Stop, you’re hurting me!” Jenny screamed in spite of herself. She knew that yelling would only make Louis angrier, that he’d accuse her of trying to alert their friends. Still, she couldn’t hold it in. She couldn’t go through this again after the horribleness last week that had resulted in the black eye. Louis was usually on his best behavior for months after a bad fight. She was supposed to get recovery time.

  “Quit with the role-playing, babe.” Louis directed his normal speaking voice over his shoulder, out the open balcony doors. “People might get the wrong idea.”

  Jenny tried to kick at Louis’s shins as he carried her into the room, but he clamped down harder on her arms, cutting off the circulation. With one foot, he hooked the door and pulled it shut. He lifted her higher, until suddenly she was hurtling forward.

  She landed facedown on the bed with enough force that even the foam mattress didn’t fully cushion the impact. Her nose throbbed as she pushed onto her hands, intending to crawl off the bed and run from the room. Before she could move, Louis grabbed a hand from under her and flipped her onto her back. He straddled her torso, pinning her arms to her sides with his thighs. Jenny knew she wasn’t strong enough to push him off her. She struggled to lift her hips regardless, to jam her pelvic bone painfully into his groin.

  “When did you tell him?”

  “What?” Her question sounded hollow. “I didn’t say—”

  “So, you talked to Rachel then? What, you picked the girls up from a playdate and decided to have a midday bottle of wine?” He leaned forward, pushing his chest against her own, constricting her lungs as his weight crushed her diaphragm. “The big celebrity hadn’t had enough admirers with basketball season over. Huh, that it? So you decided to play the victim for some extra attention. You sobbed to Rachel so she could go blabbing our private business to Ben and God only knows who else?”

  She shook her head, able to move it an inch despite the closeness of his face to hers.

  “I know what you’re doing. You want to emasculate me.” His low voice wriggled in her ear. “To control me. You already make more money, even though I’m the one saving fucking lives. All you need is to turn our friends against me. You think you’re so fucking smart.”

  He sat up, releasing the vice on her chest. Jenny filled her lungs with as much oxygen as possible. “I didn’t say anything. He must have guessed.”

  Louis let go of one of her wrists. Before she could use it to pull herself from beneath him, he cupped her throat. “You’re smart enough to lie, Jen. But not to me.” His voice raised to a near shout. Spittle sprayed her face. “I know how women scheme. And I’m not going to let you control me.”

  The pressure on her throat made her want to gag, but her muscles couldn’t move enough to execute the reflex. Tears, hot as blood, filled her eyes. She knew Louis had to be satisfied at the sight. Each drop was a form of compensation for the embarrassment she’d caused him. All the pain was really just to make her pay.

  Louis retracted his hand. A heaving followed Jenny’s every inhalation, as though she breathed in water with air. “I’m sorry,” she sputtered. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  She repeated the words like a waving flag, whispering them over and over. Fighting his accusations would only make Louis continue to battle with her physically. And she couldn’t win that fight. Louis was thin but sinewy. A pulsing cord of muscle and testosterone. He was stronger and far angrier. Moreover, he already knew she’d lied. Ben, obviously, had known the origin of her bruise. But at least the explanation Louis had invented for that was better than the truth.

  “I’m sorry,” she continued whispering. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Louis’s thumb scraped beneath the left side of her face where her bruise was still healing. She closed her eyes, bracing for him to slap the wound. He could suggest that the swelling had worsened overnight. Ben and Rachel, he’d assume, would be too busy with their own relationship issues to worry about anyone else’s, and Susan and Nadal wouldn’t know any better. The Ahmadis were the couple Louis really cared about, anyway. When Nadal’s company eventually went public, his family might be worth many multiple millions. Someday soon, Nadal could need a doctor for a prominent C-suite position, perhaps to handle the medical troops when they got restless from all the unpaid travel. Her husband would think himself perfect for such a role and the equity that came along with it.

  Louis’s hot breath enveloped her ear. “You’re not sorry yet.”

  Jenny’s eyes snapped open. She didn’t have any more apologies in her. “I swear, Louis. You hurt me anymore and I’ll scream so fucking loud that Ben will come rushing in here, and then everyone will know what you are. You think Nadal will want to talk shop with you after? You think Susan won’t call the cops? What’s your hospital’s rule on hiring doctors that beat their wives, huh?”

  For a moment, Jenny thought her threat had scared Louis enough to stop the fight. His eyes widened as though he were seeing his future self: jobless, reputation in shreds, booted from their home.

  Then both of his hands went to her neck.

  The edges of Jenny’s vision blurred, leaving only Louis’s wild eyes. His irises seemed to melt into his pupils, two black holes rimmed with dying stars, sucking the light from the room, pulling her into darkness. Jenny felt her consciousness rip from her body. Silence filled her ears. Louis faded to black.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE DAY OF

  “That was some fight, huh?” A loud spatter punctuated Nadal’s words, followed by the sound of a running faucet. Susan kicked a leg from the milky liquid in the freestanding bath, letting the splash answer for her. They’d both witnessed the blowup, so Susan felt no need for a deep dive through the wreckage. In fact, she was certain that the only way to rescue the vacation she’d painstakingly planned for weeks was to blame the argument on alcohol and hope everyone tried to forget all about it.

  Nadal shut off the faucet. “You don’t think Rachel and Ben have an open marriage, do you?”

  Water spilled from the tub as Susan moved to the other side, where she could have a better view of her husband. He examined his half-naked reflection in the glow of an LED-framed vanity. The artificial halo made it difficult to parse his expression.

  “No. I think Ben might have a bit of a roving eye when it comes to attractive women,” Susan said. “And Jenny is obviously a very attractive woman.”

  “As is Rachel,” Nadal added.

  Susan felt a stab of jealousy. Did he have to put such a sharp point on it?

  “Sure. If you like short blondes.” Susan rose from the water. She extended her arms behind her like Degas’s dancer, showing off her chest in the soft spotlight from the overhead wind
ow. Nadal didn’t appear to notice her dangling her nakedness in front of his face, fishing for a compliment. She sighed and stepped from the tub onto the cool tile floor. “Anyway, like any wife, Rachel is probably sensitive to Ben checking out other women, particularly given that phone call with her daughter.” She lowered her voice, nervous to speak about people staying in the same house, even if they couldn’t hear her. “It sounded like Chloe might have seen something inappropriate between Ben and a neighborhood mom.”

  Nadal reached for the razor glinting on the pedestal sink. “But Rachel said she was already seeing other people.”

  Susan grabbed a towel from a pewter bar behind him. “I’m sure she only said that to hurt Ben because she thinks he’s been unfaithful. She’s competitive and a litigator. She knows how to fight dirty.”

  Nadal stroked his jawline, already dark with stubble despite shaving that morning. Her husband grew facial hair so fast that he had noonday shadow. “She sure does,” he said, still examining his reflection. “She fights filthy dirty.”

  Something about the wording unnerved Susan. Maybe it was because filthy dirty wasn’t a phrase anyone used. It sounded like something barrel-chested men said in pornos. “Why all this interest in Rachel and Ben’s marriage?” She tried to sound teasing as she wrapped the towel around her body. “Are you intrigued?”

  Rather than stare at Nadal as he responded, betraying the seriousness of her question, Susan strode over to the tub and released the stopper. Water drained in loud gulps.

  “Come on, Susie. Of course not.”

  She looked back at her husband, hoping to see an earnest, honest expression accompanying his denial. Instead, Nadal painted a white foam on his cappuccino neck, indifferent to her need for reassurance. She watched him shave, his strong hand confidently scraping the blade against his angular jawline. Back home, on the West Coast, she’d always been able to admire him without any accompanying nervousness. But back then, she’d been more of a prize: an attractive, young lawyer at a thriving criminal defense practice, not to mention the woman who’d borne him two perfect boys, as far as they’d known.