The Assistant: A gripping psychological thriller with a nerve-shredding ending

by Cathryn Grant

  Driving home, her heart continued its heavy thudding, but her body temperature was stabilized, her lips no longer felt as if they were about to split open and start bleeding. There was a rush of pleasure that made her want to spend the evening doing something more exciting than usual.

  Waiting, as the clerk stood there, staring, not speaking, had been one of the most terrifying moments she could recall. But now, now! She reveled in the thrills pulsing through her. This was the best ever.

  AT HOME, MATT was in the kitchen, a bottle of wine opened, the cork still impaled by the corkscrew lying on the counter. “I started dinner.” His voice was proud, as if he’d harpooned a swordfish, strapped it to the roof of his car, carried it home, and cleaned it himself. The smell of fish was strong, the cutting board littered with red pepper flakes and bits of garlic he hadn’t managed to scoop into the pan.

  “What are you making?” Vanessa asked.

  “I stopped for a bottle of wine and they had trout on sale.”

  “Nice.” She smiled and kissed his cheek. His skin smelled comforting and she let her lips linger there. Finally, she moved away. “I’ll be back in a second.” She went into the bedroom, yanked the scarf out of her purse, and stuffed the scarf and gloves into her bottom dresser drawer. She peeled off her sweater, pulled the tank top over her head, and folded it awkwardly. She shoved that in the second drawer. She tossed her sweater into the dry cleaning bag, flung open the closet door, and pulled out a silky navy blue top with a scooped neckline, craving air against her skin.

  When she returned to the kitchen, Matt handed her a glass of wine. He tapped the edge of his glass to hers and held it there. “You look good.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Why are you so amped up?”

  “What do you mean?” She took a sip of wine.

  “Your cheeks are all red.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the cold.”

  “I’ve never seen them like that before.”

  She shrugged and took a small sip of wine.

  “You’re kinda late.” He turned toward the stove and put his glass on the counter. “I guess you had a long meeting with Hank?” He slid the spatula under the trout and turned it gently.

  “He’s in Europe, remember?” Was it possible Matt thought there was truth behind the rumor? There was no doubt in her heart that Matt was her one and only. She hadn’t wanted to hurt him. Maybe telling him what they were saying had been a mistake. The thing with Hank was just—

  “I forgot.” He lifted the lid off one of the pots. The sweet aroma of steamed carrots filled the kitchen.

  “What should I do?” she asked.

  “I have it under control.” He replaced the lid. “If Hank’s gone, why are you late? You didn’t go shopping again, did you?”

  “Not really.”

  “That’s not an answer. You don’t need more nail polish and stuff.”

  She laughed. “A girl always needs more stuff.”

  “You look great the way you are. You don’t need more paint.” He came around the counter and ran his hand through her hair. “Unless you’re on the market, why do you need to keep advertising?”

  “I’m not advertising anything.” She stepped away. She took a sip of wine and walked to the table. She set her glass down and pushed the placemats so they were aligned with the chairs.

  “I thought we’d eat in the dining room,” he said.

  “Okay.” She hated what he’d said. It was cruel, and spoken so casually. Was she supposed to let herself go? Not wear any makeup, not care about nice clothes that looked good on her? She walked into the dining room.

  If he had it all under control, he could set the table and serve the meal. And then he was going to apologize for that comment. She lit the candles at the center of the table, sat down, and took a sip of wine.

  The fish was half eaten before she conceded he wasn’t going to take back those degrading words without a prompt from her. “Why are you so mean?”

  “What?”

  “You said I’m advertising.”

  “I was only making an observation. Don’t overreact.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I just think you buy too much stuff. Seeing all that nail polish was weird. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “I like to paint my nails.”

  “So you need two hundred colors? And three of every color?”

  “Is that what you really think of me? That I’m advertising?”

  “You get awfully dressed up for work.”

  “I thought you liked the way I look?”

  “I do. When you’re with me. The women I work with don’t dress like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “All the makeup, high heels.”

  “I like to look good. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Not whatever. I’m trying to talk to you.”

  Matt put down his fork. His face was partially concealed by the shadows outside the candlelight. He picked up his wineglass and swallowed the rest of the contents. He refilled it but didn’t raise the bottle in her direction to suggest a refill of her glass. He took another sip.

  “Why did you say that?” She placed her fork across the plate and pushed it away from her.

  “I’m just upset by all the crap you buy.”

  “It’s my money! And I don’t spend that much.” Half of her wanted to shout that she hadn’t spent a dime on any of it.

  “It’s just weird.”

  “Most women have lots of makeup. It’s fun.”

  “Not like you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I checked.”

  “You checked what?”

  “I asked some women at work.”

  “You complained about me to your co-workers?”

  “I didn’t tell them why I was asking. I was curious. It freaked me out. What if you went in my drawers and found three hundred…I don’t know…three hundred condoms.”

  “That’s completely different.”

  “Okay, bad example. But too much of something.”

  “This is a stupid conversation,” she said.

  “I just don’t understand why you need it. What you’re trying to accomplish.”

  She stood and picked up her plate.

  “Is this something about Hank?” His voice was low, as if he was afraid to say the words. All of his going on about nail polish and too much of something had been the stepping stones to the real conversation.

  She put her plate back on the table. She picked up her wine and took a long swallow. She had to change direction before she got upset and said something she didn’t want to. She couldn’t sort out the hurt and anger twisting around each other. Maybe she’d gone too far. It was possible Matt truly thought she was sleeping with her boss, or trying to. He sounded like Laura, putting it all on her. They both had it backwards—Hank was drawn to her.

  It was so confusing. She loved Matt. She really did. She didn’t want to lose him. “If you don’t want me on the market, as you call it, why aren’t we married?”

  “You have that not-too-shabby diamond.”

  She looked at her ring. It was gorgeous. Breathtaking, one of her mother’s friends had said. “For six years.”

  “So. What’s the rush?”

  “What’s the delay is a better question.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t seem like you really love me. You’re hedging your bets.”

  She laughed. “This isn’t gambling.”

  “Life is a gamble.”

  “Well, aren’t you clever. A little fortune cookie.” She picked up her plate and carried it into the kitchen. She returned to the dining room and walked to his side of the table. She picked up the bottle and refilled her glass. Matt held up his glass and she added a splash. Without taking a sip, she set her glass beside his. She moved behind his chair and put her hands on the sides of his jaw. She bent over and pressed her face into his hair, inhaling the sweet smell of him. Fa
miliarity. A scent that made her feel grounded. She ran her lips across the top of his head, letting the soft strands of hair caress her skin.

  She had no idea what she wanted from him, what she wanted from life, really. Excitement was one thing. Maybe they’d been together too long and there just wasn’t anything left to get excited about. That’s what made Hank interesting. It wasn’t that she wanted an affair, although she certainly felt a subtle melting in her belly when he looked at her, or stood close to her. And she liked the not-knowing. From one word to the next, one gesture to another, she never knew what was coming. Everything else in her life was delivered as expected—the tasks in her job, her evenings and weekends with Matt…A wedding would be exciting, but only temporarily. Going to a new store had been exciting. More thrilling than she’d expected. The intensity grew when more fear was added to the mix. “Are you bored with me?” she said.

  “Of course not.”

  She wove her fingers through his hair.

  After a moment, he said, “I should ask you that question.”

  “I’m not bored,” she whispered. It was a lie. If he would just do something different. Anything. Something shocking would be even better. She knew it was greedy. He was terrific. How many guys came home and thought about cooking dinner? Yet, she wasn’t surprised. Maybe if he stood up right now, slid his hands up her shirt and unhooked her bra, pulled down her jeans, and bent her over the dining room table. That would be exciting. And surprising.

  Wasn’t she too young to be bored? There weren’t any children keeping them in the house every night and most weekends. They might be hovering around thirty, but they behaved as if they were sixty—eating the same meals, watching the same TV shows, shopping, drinking wine, going to work. Once a year they took a vacation, but even those were pedestrian—a condo on Maui for a week, a trip to Lake Tahoe…Once they’d gone to Puerto Vallarta, a bit of a cliché. But what did she want?

  She stepped away from him. He reached for his wineglass. The back of his neck looked tender. She pulled off her blouse and dropped it onto the floor. She unhooked her bra and let it fall on top of her blouse, a white streak across the dark blue. The room was warm, but still a cool draft washed across her breasts. She stepped closer to Matt and pulled his head back. His neck stiffened, resisting her pull. “Relax,” she whispered. She turned his head gently to one side so his cheek touched her skin.

  He sat up straighter. “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t know, mixing things up?”

  “I’m not in the mood.” He swallowed his wine and eased away from her. He picked up his plate and went into the kitchen.

  Without his body in front of her, the cool air bit at her breasts. She knelt and picked up her clothes. She put on her bra and slipped the blouse over her head. It was twisted out of place, but she left it alone.

  18

  Laura

  LAURA AND BRENT were supposed to be reviewing the slides for her presentation at the offsite. The event was only two weeks away, but she hadn’t been able to focus on putting her analysis into a presentable form, couldn’t seem to make the key takeaways flow in any coherent fashion, and wasn’t even sure what was wrong with the ordering of the slides. She couldn’t ask Brent those questions—he’d see that she hadn’t put in much effort for the first go-around, he’d realize she was in such a fractured state, she couldn’t even figure out where to start. She was hoping he’d tell her what to do without her having to admit she wasn’t paying attention to her responsibilities.

  She and Brent were sitting in a small conference room, the blinds angled toward the ceiling so the sun didn’t create glare on the large screen at the front of the room. It was the first day of full sun in a while and she hated keeping the blinds closed. She was beginning to feel like a sewer rat—spending all her waking hours in dank, murky surroundings.

  She’d turned into something unrecognizable, for sure. Never in her life until that horrible moment would she have believed she could kill a man. Not only kill him, but beat him to death with a vicious rage that exploded out of her. Sometimes, she hoped she’d dreamed the whole thing—she hadn’t really left his broken body, a skeleton covered in dried skin like discarded chicken bones wrapped in used butcher paper.

  When she’d woken at two or three in the morning these past few days—seventeen days—her thoughts were suspended in that moment when she’d realized he was dead. She’d taken a human life, although she preferred to think of it as putting him out of his misery.

  She hadn’t seen a word about the man’s death in the weekly paper, or heard anything beyond what her neighbors had said. The police hadn’t come to ask if she had running shoes with a particular configuration on the soles. Yet, those things were all she thought about. Had her life always been this small? Limited to racing toward some vague goal line in her career, running miles a day, feeding and watching her fish?

  And during all this time, no one had said any more about the director position. She’d interviewed with Sandeep and the others, and then, nothing.

  “Focus,” Brent said.

  She looked at him, wondering whether her eyes looked similar to the glistening, staring eyeballs of her fish.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “It seems like you’re not really here.”

  “I’m here.”

  “I don’t even know what to say about these slides. They need a lot of work…a lot of work.”

  “Can you be specific?”

  “You shouldn’t need me to tell you. These aren’t even ready for feedback. Twenty slides with spreadsheets pasted into them? Where’s the analysis?”

  “This is to give a sense of the areas I’m covering and the flow. I wasn’t going to make charts and provide the insights until I got your feedback on the scope.”

  Brent stared at her as if she were under water, silently opening and closing her mouth. “You seem distracted. More than distracted, actually. You seem completely out of touch.”

  “Do I?” Along with telling her what to put in the slides, she’d wanted him to tell her it was the pressure she was facing, that her sloppy work was understandable, that she wasn’t having a breakdown, her brain ceasing to function in a way that allowed her life to continue as it had been. She pressed her thumb and index finger on the bridge of her nose and bent her head forward. “Do you ever wonder if it’s a mistake?”

  “If what’s a mistake?”

  “Trying so hard to succeed. Making your whole life, or most of your life, about your job?”

  “My whole life isn’t my job.”

  “What do you do in the evenings after work?” she said.

  He shrugged. “Watch a game, catch up on email.”

  “And what do you do every morning?”

  “Read The Journal and The Times. Work out. Okay, so my week is devoted to Avalon. But I love it. What else should I be doing?”

  She shrugged. “What do you do on the weekends?”

  “Errands, go out for dinner with Tara. Watch a game, go hiking. Play tennis.”

  “Who do you play tennis with?”

  “Ken, from biz school. You know all this. Why are you asking me?”

  “And you talk about…?”

  “Don’t make it sound so dull. I love what I do. And so did you, until a few weeks ago. What happened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you get bad news about the director position? Or is something else going on?”

  “I haven’t heard a word about the position. Hank is ignoring me.”

  “I guess it’s on hold while he’s in Europe.”

  “That’s the point of email. And texting. And video conferencing. The rest of your work doesn’t need pausing just because you’re traveling.”

  Brent grabbed the chair to his left and wheeled it away from the table. He stretched out his legs and rested his heels on the seat, crossing his ankles. Despite the casual pose, he looked every bit the executive
with his slightly faded jeans, button-down shirt, and black suit coat. He still wore his silly slip-on shoes with the narrow toes. Black leather. They looked as comfortable as bedroom slippers. If she wore shoes like that she’d look ridiculous. The style was ridiculous, but he managed to achieve an executive air in spite of them.

  It was said you should dress for the job you wanted. At some point after he was promoted, Brent had changed his clothing style, losing the khakis and polo shirts, adding the suit jackets. A confidence had come over him that made his clothing look completely appropriate. But if you took that advice too far, it came across like posturing. She worried that her suits and high heels gave that impression, but somehow the jeans and jacket combo didn’t work as well for women. Besides, it was almost impossible to adopt the confidence that came with the title.

  “In my experience, the best thing you can do is concentrate on the job you have,” Brent said. “Be a star in this role and stop obsessing about getting promoted.”

  Laura folded her arms. She glared at him, but he was studying the slide displayed on the screen and didn’t appear to notice her gaze locked onto the side of his head. She waited for him to turn, but he was oblivious. She coughed carefully so her voice didn’t sound rough, or worse, laced with hysteria. “Easy for you to say.”

  He turned. “It’s the truth.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Laura asked.

  “Doing what?”

  “I thought you were my friend.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then why are you treating me like I’m crazy?”

  “I’m trying to give you advice. You seem desperate.”

  “I do not.”

  He took his feet off the chair and raised his hands, palms facing her.

  “Wow,” she said. “That is unbelievably condescending.”

  “I’m the only one who’ll be straight with you. And I’m telling you—chill out.”

  She stood. “Fuck you.”

  “Calm down, Laura!”

  “Condescending. Again. What am I, a hysterical female?”

  “You said it.”

  “A guy can get pissed and he’s the man. But a woman gets angry and she’s hysterical. Desperate. Unhinged.”