Best Friends Forever

by Margot Hunt

  I drew in a deep breath. “He might have told his girlfriend.”

  Detective Demer set down his pencil and looked at me. “His girlfriend?” he repeated.

  “I thought you said that as far as you knew, the Grants had a happy marriage,” Oliver said. “I thought you said they weren’t headed for a divorce.”

  This wasn’t information I had planned to share with the police or anyone else. But they, and Kat, had left me no choice.

  I ignored Oliver and instead looked directly at Detective Demer. “Howard Grant was having an affair.”

  11

  Twenty Months Earlier

  Kat had asked me to meet her for lunch in downtown West Palm Beach. Somewhat unusual for her, she’d called at the last minute and, even more strange, had asked if we could go to Brio Tuscan Grill at CityPlace. We usually chose lunch spots that were closer to one of our homes or to Kat’s gallery. I was happy to make the drive, though. Kat had spent the summer in Nantucket, and I hadn’t seen her since she’d returned home a week earlier.

  Kat was already at the restaurant when I got there, sitting at a high-top near the bar. She waved at me.

  “Hey,” I said once I’d reached her table. I noted that Kat had already ordered a bottle of wine, set in a marble cooler on the table.

  “Hey, you!” Kat grinned and stood up. She opened her arms to embrace me warmly. She smelled, as always, like her favorite lemon verbena–scented soap.

  “I’ve missed you,” she exclaimed. “Thanks for meeting me.”

  “Are you kidding? I’ve missed you, too! I’m so glad you’re back. Having lunch with you is much more fun than spending the day folding laundry.”

  “Ah, the glamorous life of a mother,” Kat said, and I smiled, even though I was fairly sure she had never folded laundry in her life, before or after she became a mother. “Would you like a glass of wine? I hope so, because I went ahead and ordered a bottle.”

  “Sure.”

  Kat plucked the bottle from its cooler and poured me a glass. The waiter had already brought a bread basket and dipping oil.

  “This is a new spot for us,” I said. “Were you down here running errands?”

  “I suppose you could call it that,” Kat replied. “An errand of sorts.”

  “That sounds mysterious.” I took a sip of my wine.

  “No, I’ll tell you all about it. But first, what have you been up to?”

  “Nothing much,” I said. “Same old, same old. I’m just glad the kids are back in school.”

  The truth, which I had already decided I was not going to share with Kat, was that the summer had been simply awful. There was the heat, which had been stifling and muggy and made any midday errand a misery. My children had participated in a few camp sessions—basketball for Liam, sailing for Bridget—but those had ended in mid-July, and anyway, at over $200 a week per child, they had stretched our budget to its breaking point. I’d spent most of August tripping over the kids while they bickered endlessly. Then our ancient Volvo wagon had suffered the dual insults of a blown tire and, a week later, a broken radiator. The subsequent repair bills meant that we were now a month behind on our mortgage payments. Just thinking about it made my chest tighten and my breathing shallow. I knew I needed to go back to work, but Palm Beach Atlantic University didn’t have any openings in its math department. There were more universities down south, but there was no way I could swing the commute to Miami and still get back in time to pick the children up from school.

  I decided to see if I could pick up some work tutoring students in math. I’d spent the past two weeks since school had started circulating flyers to everyone I knew with middle school–aged and older children. True, it was not exactly my dream job, but if it helped keep my debit card from being declined at the grocery store—which had actually happened at one point in mid-August—I would be...well, no, not happy. That would be an overstatement. But at least I might get some sleep at night.

  While Kat and I might tell each other everything—or at least, most things—I wasn’t going to tell her about our financial problems. At best, she’d pity me. At worst, she’d judge me. I could just about manage to cope with the difficulty of our current situation as long as I wasn’t forced to explain it to anyone else.

  “I thought you went out of town for a few days,” Kat said. Kat wasn’t much of a texter or emailer, so we’d been mostly out of touch while she was gone.

  “We only drove up to Jacksonville to visit my in-laws. It wasn’t exactly a dream vacation.”

  “You should have come with me to Nantucket,” Kat said. “My parents’ house there is huge. There was more than enough room, especially since Amanda only ended up staying for a week before she went back to Vanderbilt for summer session.”

  This struck me as an odd comment, since Kat had not invited me to go to Nantucket with her. Did she expect me to ask myself? To show up without warning, husband and kids in tow, hoping for a free vacation?

  I just smiled and replied, “Maybe next time.”

  “Anyway, it was nice to get away from the heat. And from my darling husband.” Kat smiled icily.

  “I thought Howard went with you.” I was surprised by her disclosure.

  “He did. For the first weekend. But then he supposedly had some sort of ‘crisis’ at work, and so he just had to fly home,” Kat explained, making quotation marks with her fingers on the word crisis. Her lips twisted, and it was clear just what she thought about that.

  “Maybe he really did have a work crisis.” I was no fan of Howard’s, it was true, but for Kat’s sake, I wanted him to be a better man than I suspected he was.

  “Maybe. Or maybe he was fucking that blonde bartender over there.” Kat nodded toward the U-shaped bar. I followed her gaze.

  The young woman tending the bar was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen outside a magazine or a movie. She was curvy in a lush, almost old-fashioned way, with a small waist and full breasts and hips. Her face was a perfect oval with no sharp angles. Just large, round eyes and full, pouting lips. She couldn’t have been much older than twenty.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  Kat laughed, spluttering her wine and then raising a hand to wipe her lips.

  “I knew there was a reason I loved you,” she said. “You always know the perfect thing to say.”

  I smiled, but for just a moment. “You think she’s sleeping with Howard?”

  Kat shook her head. “I know she’s sleeping with Howard.”

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “That girl—” I pointed my chin at the goddess “—could have anyone. Why would she pick Howard?”

  Kat tilted her head to one side and looked at me quizzically. “Why do you think?”

  I considered this question. There was, of course, only one answer. Howard could be considered handsome if you completely ignored his personality. But even then, Howard could really be considered attractive only for his age. How could he have caught the attention of a girl this gorgeous?

  Except for the obvious fact that Howard was very, very rich.

  Actually, I wasn’t even sure how accurate this was. I knew by now that Kat came from an exceedingly wealthy family, and that Howard had some measure of professional success. But was he as wealthy as Kat? I had no idea. Kat never talked about it. And if I didn’t know, I was pretty sure the blonde bartender didn’t, either.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  And so Kat did.

  She had been suspicious even before their trip to Nantucket. There had been a lot of unexplained absences, times when Howard was supposed to be home or somewhere with Kat and had begged off at the last minute, claiming work emergencies or last-minute client dinners.

  “My darling husband thinks he’s much cleverer than he really is,” Kat mused. “He assumes that if he tells me he has a client meet
ing, no matter what time of day or night it is, I’ll believe him, even if he doesn’t get home until midnight. But besides that, he was acting odd even before we left for Nantucket.”

  “How so?”

  “I can’t put my finger on it, really. Moody. Distant, I guess. And his temper was awful.” Kat sighed, picked up a bread stick from the basket and crumbled it onto her plate. “Worse than usual, which is saying something. He’s fine if he sticks with wine, but when he starts knocking back the scotch, he gets ugly.”

  “Because he drinks more of it?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t think so. I’m not sure there’s science to back me up, but I do think that certain types of alcohol affect him differently. He doesn’t get argumentative—or at least, not more so than usual—when he’s drinking wine or rum or vodka. But once he gets deep into the scotch—” Kat shook her head and exhaled deeply “—it’s not pretty.”

  “Why did he go with you at all if he was going to bail after one weekend?”

  “Who knows? It’s not like he’s going to tell me the truth about any of this.”

  After they’d been at her parents’ Nantucket house for a few days—Kat threw in some random descriptions here, including beachside cocktail parties, a clambake and leisurely hours spent lounging on the beach, all of which sounded wonderfully glamorous, especially in contrast to the miserable summer I’d just endured—Howard had suddenly announced that he had a work emergency that required him to return to Florida immediately. When Kat pressed him for details about the nature of the emergency, Howard had been defensive.

  “He didn’t even have a convincing story planned,” she said, tucking a strand of dark hair behind one ear. “When I asked him why he couldn’t deal with the problem remotely with his laptop and cell phone, he went into a rage. He said I had no idea how difficult it was to run a business. I pointed out that I’ve run a successful art gallery for twenty years, and he rolled his eyes in the most patronizing way possible and told me it was hardly the same thing.”

  I was not on Howard’s side in any of this, of course, but I did think he might have had a point there. While I didn’t know anything about his financial investment business, I was pretty sure that in all the time Kat had been running her gallery, she never truly had to worry about whether it was making a profit. This was not to say that she didn’t run it in a professional manner, or that she wasn’t successful. But it was not like she wondered how she’d keep the lights on and her family fed if K-Gallery went under.

  In any event, Kat had not been able to convince Howard to stay in Nantucket and work out his business emergency from there. Instead he departed quickly, booking a flight back to Florida that very night. On his own. To an empty house, unencumbered by either wife or daughter. Free to do whatever he wanted.

  “And I take it this all made you suspicious.”

  “Yes, it did,” Kat agreed, raising her wineglass to her berry-glossed lips. “My husband has never been one to give up a vacation in favor of work. Especially a free vacation.”

  “How did you find out what he was up to?”

  Kat hesitated, toying with the gold bangle on her wrist. “It’s actually a little embarrassing.”

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” I said, although, of course, I was dying to know.

  “I hired a private investigator,” Kat said.

  “Seriously?” I asked. Kat nodded. “How did you find one?”

  “My father gave me the referral,” she said, as though everyone’s father knew a private detective or two. I was fairly sure that my father, who was a retired history professor, didn’t know any.

  “What was the private detective like? Did he call you a dame and keep a bottle of whiskey in his desk?” I asked, picturing Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. I had gone through an old black-and-white noir film phase when I was in my twenties.

  Kat looked at me blankly. “I have no idea. I didn’t go to his office. I hired him over the phone, and then he emailed me his report. Which, by the way, included photos.”

  “Of Howard and—” I stopped and tipped my head discreetly in the direction of the bar.

  “The very same,” Kat said, her lips curving in a humorless smile. “Her name is Alana. Can you believe that? A-la-na Du-pree.” She sounded it out, exaggerating the vowels. “Doesn’t that sound like something a stripper would be called? Nineteen years of marriage and building a life together, raising a child, and my darling husband decides to turn me into a cliché just so he can bang a woman half his age.”

  Kat smacked her wineglass down so hard, I was surprised it didn’t shatter. She lifted one hand to flag down our waiter. As always when Kat summoned pretty much anyone to do anything, he hurried over. I’d never been able to figure out how she was able to command such instant attention. Certainly she was an attractive woman, but was that the only reason? It was as though Kat was able to communicate silently her status to the world around her, and it responded as it should. In the time I had known her, I’d witnessed people fawn over Kat’s clothes, her jewelry, her car. It still struck me as strange that the mere owning of things should somehow be so praiseworthy.

  “This wine is terrible,” Kat said, pointing to the bottle. “I think it’s gone off.”

  “I’m so sorry,” the waiter said obsequiously. He was wearing a name tag that read STEVE. Steve took the bottle without commenting on the fact that it was half-empty.

  “It’s not your fault,” Kat said, smiling warmly at him. “I’m surprised the bartender didn’t notice it when she opened the bottle. It’s practically turned into vinegar. The cork must have been degraded.”

  “The bartender is young and, unfortunately, not very experienced. I’ll let her know that in the future, she can’t miss things like this. And I’ll have a replacement bottle out for you immediately,” Steve promised.

  “Thank you so much,” Kat said.

  Once Steve had rushed off to berate Alana for her neglect, I looked at Kat.

  “There wasn’t anything wrong with that wine,” I said softly.

  “Oops.” Kat smiled, pleased with herself.

  “How did he not notice that we drank almost half the bottle?”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t care. It’s not like it’s costing him anything. And by taking care of this problem for us, he’s basically guaranteeing himself a good tip.” She looked over at Steve berating Alana the bartender. I followed her gaze. We watched as Alana sniffed the wine and shrugged. Steve shook his head in disgust. He spoke louder, although still not loud enough for us to hear what exactly he was saying, but he waved his arms demonstrably.

  “I think he’s enjoying this,” Kat commented. “He probably thinks she’s a stupid little twat, too.”

  “Kat!” I said, mildly shocked at this coarse language. To be honest, I was almost amused. This was not how the PTA mothers at school described one another, even when they were ready to scratch each other’s eyes out.

  “What?” Kat said mildly. “Do you have a better term for a grasping little gold digger who sleeps with married men?”

  I did not.

  “Have you told Howard that you know?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” Kat said.

  “Why not?”

  “I haven’t decided what I’m going to do yet.”

  I tried to imagine myself in her position. Would it be possible for me to know Todd was having an affair and continue to live with him—handing him mugs of coffee, making dinner, chatting about the children—without confronting him about it? I was surprised to realize that it might be. If I’d been asked this when I was a new bride, I’m sure I would have said that I’d never be able to tolerate infidelity. That cheating would automatically be the end of my marriage. Any woman who chose to look the other way was foolish and weak. But now...now I wasn’t so sure. It would depend on the details, of course, and I wouldn’t
just ignore the affair. But I didn’t think I would be too quick to put my children through the trauma of a divorce.

  “Is this the only time Howard’s been unfaithful?” I asked.

  “No, it’s not,” Kat said. But then she paused, thought about it and qualified her response. “At least, I don’t think it’s the only time. I’ve had my suspicions over the years, but Howard’s always denied it.”

  “What sort of suspicions?”

  “There was a woman he worked with a few years ago, someone in his office, who was just...overly present in his life. They’d go to lunch all the time and she would call him her work husband.”

  “Gross,” I said.

  “I know, right? But I thought the fact that they weren’t sneaking around, and would even joke about people thinking they were having an affair, meant they couldn’t possibly actually be having an affair.” Kat paused, looking down at the table. “I suppose that sounds idiotic.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I assured her.

  “If that doesn’t, this will—a woman once came into the gallery and told me that she and Howard were in love.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Her name was Beth. She was a chiropractor. Howard saw her for some back issues he was having, or at least that’s what he claimed at the time. Anyway, she came to the gallery that day to announce that they wanted to be together, and to beg me to let him go. According to her, Howard had told her I’d hurt myself if he left me. She thought I was standing in the way of their true love.”

  I shook my head, speechless.

  “Howard denied the whole thing, of course. He insisted she had a unrequited crush on him, but that he’d never led her on, and he’d certainly never slept with her. And I believed him.” Kat sighed. “Dumb as that may sound.”

  “He’s your husband. You’re supposed to believe in him,” I said, although I was pretty sure that was bullshit. Howard had cheated before, and he was cheating now. I wondered yet again why Kat stayed with him.