Sophie (The Boss Book 8)

by Abigail Barnette

  Damn. I didn’t have anything to say to that.

  “Let’s talk about drug use in the home,” she said, moving smoothly forward.

  “We already told you. There is no drug use in the home.” I folded my arms over my chest. “Like we said, Neil did have a drug problem and a drinking problem, and those got worse when his daughter died. Like they do.” Talking about it behind his back felt icky.

  “But have you ever found drugs hidden in the home? Perhaps in a drawer or a bookcase?”

  That was specific. And eerily accurate.

  Valerie.

  Realization exploded through my furious brain and shattered my heart. Valerie had helped me clean out Neil’s little stashes when he was in the hospital after his suicide attempt. She knew about them.

  Why would she do this?

  “I have,” I answered flatly. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure,” Jenna said.

  “You’re not going to find anything here today. So, I’m not asking this because I’m worried. I’m asking this because I’m trying to understand why the person who made this call would have made this call. And I’m not going to ask you for their identity. I know you can’t tell me. I just want to know what would happen if you decided today that Olivia is in a bad situation.” I added, “Which she is not.”

  “It all depends on whether or not I felt the child was in immediate danger. If I’d walked in here and found cocaine on the coffee table, I would have considered that an obvious case of endangerment. I would have petitioned the court for an ex parte order to remove the child.”

  “And she would be remanded to a relative before a foster home, right?” I stared Jenna down, so there was no way she could bullshit me.

  She didn’t answer fast enough for her non-committal, “Sometimes,” to qualify as a denial. “Tell me about the drugs you found in the home. Where were they?”

  “Hidden places. This was before Olivia could even walk, by the way. Between pages of books. Tucked into old prescription bottles in the medicine cabinet in a guest room. I can’t remember all of the places. Nothing in the kitchen or the nursery, obviously.” Maybe not obviously, considering the other cases Jenna must have handled. “Nowhere that Olivia could have accessed them at that time.”

  The emotional whiplash of being torn between truly understanding the horrors lurking out there in the world, feeling intense sympathy for this woman who had to deal with them, and resenting her presence as that of a dangerous enemy suddenly broke me. Fatigue weighed down my shoulders.

  “Do you believe there is any possibility that Neil is using now?” she asked.

  I shook my head vehemently. “Absolutely not. He has worked too hard. And frankly, I’m afraid something like this might set him back.”

  “I can leave you with some numbers he can call if he needs support,” Jenna offered.

  “He has a therapist, thank you.” And he would be calling him as soon as this nightmare interview and search combo was over.

  El-Mudad accompanied Neil to the living room, looking just as blindsided as we had been.

  “I hear you would like to talk to me now?” El-Mudad asked Jenna with a frown. “And my daughters?”

  She nodded. “Yes. But it’s been suggested that it might be in your daughters’ best interest for you to bring them to me.”

  “This is bloody ridiculous,” Neil muttered under his breath.

  El-Mudad put his hands on Neil’s shoulders and held his gaze. “This is all a mistake. Everything is going to be fine.”

  With a nod and a stoic sniff, Neil stepped away, and we watched El-Mudad leave.

  “We were just talking about our home environment. And drugs,” I said, trying to sound funny but coming off like a total bitch.

  “We’re here because there was a concern that Olivia might be in an unsafe situation,” Jenna translated into bureaucracy. “I’m just asking questions and having a look around.”

  “As we’ve said before, there are no drugs in the home,” Neil repeated flatly.

  “He’s sober,” I insisted. We’d already been through that.

  Maybe that was the point. Perhaps she’d asked more than once to see if the answer changed.

  “That’s great. It is,” Jenna said in the face of Neil’s stony glower. “People underestimate how difficult it is to overcome addiction. Congratulations.”

  “Would you like to pat us down? Turn our pockets out?” Neil asked. “To make sure we’re telling the truth?”

  She shook her head. “No. I don’t do those types of searches.”

  “Who does them?” Neil demanded.

  She typed something into the laptop. “I’ll do a walkthrough of the home, but the police will do any actual searching. Not of your persons, but opening things up, looking inside, etcetera.”

  Police? Everything had just gotten way, way too real. “Um. I’m sorry, are you saying the police are coming to search our house?”

  Jenna nodded once. “If they can spare someone today.”

  “But if they came back tomorrow, we could have like, flushed all our drugs.” God damn it, Sophie! “If we had them. I was being hypothetical.”

  She maintained businesslike eye contact. “Believe me, I’m used to people being nervous or angry or shaken up by my visits. I’m not the person most parents or guardians want to see. You’re not on trial with me. I hope you understand that we both have Olivia’s interests at heart here.”

  “We do understand,” I said softly. “It’s just...unexpected. And it seems kind of extreme.”

  She nodded. I wondered if they trained social workers to pretend to be sympathetic or if it was just something she was good at. It couldn’t be a great feeling, walking into someone’s home and knowing you were going to be hated on sight just because you were trying to protect their kids.

  I closed my eyes. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “We don’t have anything to be afraid of,” Neil asserted. “Except for the bill we’ll have to pay the cleaning service for the overtime once the police ransack our home.”

  Oh, Neil. He had no idea how much of a privileged snob he could come off as sometimes.

  “This is a huge inconvenience, I understand.” Jenna didn’t sound all that concerned about it. “But we have to treat every allegation seriously.”

  “The police will have a search warrant signed by a judge, right?” I asked, hoping to clear that up before Neil raged at the police on arrival. Every single outraged rich man instinct in him was probably roaring like a steam engine.

  Jenna’s gaze flicked between the two of us. “There is a warrant.”

  Neil turned to me, helpless. “Well. It appears this has been in motion for some time.”

  So, he saw the writing on the wall, too.

  It was a slow crime day in Sagaponack; four officers arrived to search the place. They at least allowed me to get changed before I froze to death in my gross, sodden running gear. When I exited my dressing room, I watched an officer open our bedside table drawers and dump them out onto the bed.

  Having a stranger paw through my vibrators wasn’t exactly how I’d wanted the day to go.

  I thought about the time I’d walked to the gas station Burger King after school with some friends. We’d passed by a house on the corner of 6th and Mine Street and spotted a sophomore standing in the yard with her younger sister, watching as the police carted all of their belongings onto the lawn. Word had gotten around fast that it was a drug raid and that their parents had been arrested for selling prescription pills. I’d always wondered what had been worse for those kids: their parents being drug dealers or seeing all of their stuff pitched into their yard in front of God and all the people in the Pamida parking lot.

  But we were rich. No one would doubt our innocence, and if they did, we had an army of lawyers to buy away that doubt. Someone would come to help us put our things back. We would be shaken up, but this would blow over once the law was satisfied. Rich people didn’t get t
reated the same as poor people; I’d seen enough evidence of that even before I’d married a billionaire. The class divide that put impoverished people under more suspicion than those who had the means to support their criminality made me furious. Even worse, I was thankful for that divide now that it affected me directly.

  Jenna asked Neil and me to wait in our bedroom while she completed her walk-through, and the police did the living room and kitchen. I went into the dressing room, where all my jewelry had been dumped onto the floor. I knelt with a sigh and started picking up tangled necklaces.

  “It was Valerie,” Neil said, a muscle in his jaw twitching as he took in the pile of shoes, his and mine, mixed in a big heap.

  And I wanted to say that it couldn’t have been Valerie. That she wasn’t like that. That she and Laurence had their problems with us, but they would never do anything like make a false CPS report.

  But I couldn’t do that anymore. Now, I could only despair that she had been so cruel. Had this been what they’d envisioned? Had they hoped the cops would find something to incriminate us? To rip Olivia away from us?

  “Are you sure?” I asked quietly.

  Neil scoffed bitterly. “I didn’t want to believe it, either. But the search warrant… Sophie, Laurence is a prosecutor for the State of New York. It’s too much of a coincidence.”

  My stomach dropped to my feet. “No.”

  With a grim nod, Neil said, “I was afraid it would be something like this. I expected it. I just didn’t think Valerie would participate. Or that it would be conducted with such outrageous overreach.”

  I took both of Neil’s hands in mine and stepped in front of him. “Baby...I have to ask you something.”

  He closed his eyes. “No, Sophie. I do not have any drugs in the house.”

  That he’d already known what I’d planned to ask somehow made his answer more painful. “You know I had to.”

  “I do.” He pulled his hands back and put them in his pockets, instantly building his patented Neil Elwood emotional barrier.

  “Don’t do that. Please.” I reached for him and held onto his elbow. “Be angry. Be hurt. But be something.”

  “Sophie, if I get angry now, I’ll do something I regret. I’ll call Valerie and argue. I’ll threaten Laurence. I’ll…” He cut himself off. “I am angry. I’m furious. I’ve only felt this dangerously close to losing all control once before, and you...you know what I tried to do.”

  He didn’t mean his suicide attempt. After Emma and Michael’s accident, Neil had tried to have the other driver killed. He hadn’t gone through with it, but he’d given it enough consideration that he’d frightened himself. That it was so close to the back of his mind now scared me.

  “You wouldn’t do that,” I whispered, not just because I wanted it to be true, but because it was true. Neil wasn’t that man, not even when he’d been facing the worst pain of his life.

  “If something happens...if Olivia is taken from us…I don’t trust myself.” He couldn’t finish whatever his next thought was, his voice choking up and dying off.

  I put my arms around him. “It’s going to be all right.”

  Mentally, I ran through everything I knew about child custody, which wasn’t a lot. But I did know that everyone rolled their eyes at the phrase, “grandparents’ rights.” Maybe Valerie and Laurence didn’t have a leg to stand on. I suspected that working for the government provided Laurence with quite a few extra legs, though. Like the slimy millipede that he was.

  “Baba? Neil? Sophie?” Amal’s voice echoed from the hall outside our room.

  It was too early for her to be home from school. El-Mudad hadn’t left to pick them up that long ago. Neil raced from the dressing room and pulled the blankets over the pile of sex toys on the bed just quick enough to avert disaster.

  “Did everybody just forget I had a half-day today?” She stomped into the room, red-faced and sweaty. “Nobody was there to pick me up. I had to Uber home, and security wouldn’t let the Uber driver on the property without your permission, and nobody was picking up their phones! I had to walk from the gate!”

  “Lower your voice, please,” Neil said calmly.

  “No! What are the cops doing here?” Amal demanded. Her eyes were wide with fear. “Where’s my father?”

  “Your father is picking up Rashida.” Though my neck ached from tension, I managed to sound super mellow. “The police are here because someone contacted CPS.”

  She looked confused and said nothing.

  “Child Protective Services,” I supplied, not sure if she was familiar with the concept. “They’re an agency who–”

  “I know who they are. We have TBS. I’ve seen SVU. But what are they here about? Is it…” She swallowed visibly.

  “It isn’t about our living arrangement,” Neil reassured her. “Amal, please don’t overreact when I ask you this. You’re a teenager. I won’t be mad if the answer is yes, but I need to know right away: do you have anything in your room that you shouldn’t? No grass, no pills?”

  “No!” she shrieked. “What the fuck, Neil?”

  “Watch your language!” he snapped back, then pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “I apologize. I’m a bit tense, and I shouldn’t take it out on you.”

  “The police are here looking for drugs. Because someone suggested that the children in this home have free access to all the illicit substances they want,” I huffed, finally losing my patience. Not with her. I didn’t know why but Amal’s terrified reaction made me angrier at the situation than when the cops were rifling through my underwear. “The social worker wants to talk to you and ask you some questions.”

  “Not without a lawyer.”

  Amal moved for the door, and I stopped her. “They asked Neil and me to wait here while they search—”

  “Well, they didn’t ask me!” she said, still stomping ahead.

  “Please, Amal, you’re not thinking. You can’t just rush a police officer,” I reminded her.

  She turned to me, her eyes filling with tears. “Why is this happening to us?”

  I hugged her because I didn’t know what to do. And because she didn’t know what to do, she let me.

  The search took two hours, but Jenna remained far later, interviewing Amal and Rashida and El-Mudad. Amal went last, as she had refused to speak to anyone without a lawyer present, a move that had impressed the hell out of me. Neither Neil nor I had thought of it in the heat of the moment. My upbringing had instilled a knee-jerk reaction where lawyers were concerned—why did you need one unless you did something wrong? But I recognized in hindsight that legal representation every step of the way probably would have been prudent. After Amal sat down with the social worker and her legal representation, Neil immediately called our attorney, as well.

  I used the opportunity to contact Mariposa. As I’d predicted, Olivia hadn’t been traumatized in the least by the attention. Since she had no frame of reference for custody and investigations, there had been no reason for her to be alarmed. That might have been different if she’d seen the cops tossing the nursery looking for our non-existent stash. Mariposa and I agreed that as long as Olivia was fine, her day should continue as originally scheduled.

  It would keep her out of the house, at least, while we dealt with the situation.

  It was around six-thirty when Jenna finally gave us her card and some papers our lawyer had asked for, then drove off to determine our fate. Knowing the police wouldn’t have found any evidence didn’t make me feel more secure. With his job, Laurence had enough to pull to make something show up, I was sure.

  Neil stood in the foyer, his back to the door he’d just closed. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other like a child waiting for a scolding. “What should we do? I feel like we should be doing something.”

  “I think we’ve done everything we can do, at the moment,” he said, never meeting my eyes. “I’ll call our attorney in the morning. He has someone more experienced in custody cases who’ll meet wi
th us.”

  I hated the numbness in his tone, the stiffness in his posture. It was a sign that the wall had come up, that he’d isolated himself completely. He stood still for a moment longer. His eyes met mine for the briefest blink. Then he turned for the coat closet.

  “What are you doing?” I asked warily as he reached for a jacket.

  “I’m going out.”

  “Not to confront Valerie, right?” My heartbeat accelerated at the thought of him storming off to the city and causing an even bigger problem than we already had.

  He shook his head. “I’m not a fool, Sophie.”

  “I didn’t say you were.” Was there a single thing that could come out of my mouth that wouldn’t sound patronizing or confrontational? “And I trust you completely. I’m just worried—”

  I’m worried that you’ll go out and get drunk or score some drugs.

  I’m worried you’ll kill yourself.

  I didn’t have to say it for him to understand. His jaw set hard. “If you trust me completely, then you don’t need to worry.”

  “Have you ever met me?” I tried to laugh, to inject some humor into a moment that was quickly becoming a catastrophe. “Can you tell me where you’re going?”

  “I don’t know where I’m going. I just need…” He checked to make sure he had his wallet and phone, cursing under his breath. “I just need time, Sophie.”

  When he walked toward the door, any cool I might have had was gone.

  “Don’t go!” I caught his arm and held on like he was falling over a cliff.

  And he kind of was. Because if he left…

  He gently pried my fingers from his sleeve. “I have to go. I need to go breathe.”

  “Please don’t. Please. Please!” I begged, my hands clasped together so tightly my knuckles ached. “Promise me you won’t do anything stupid. See Rudy! I’ll call Rudy!” My voice tore from my hysterical throat, every word lined with razor blades. Tears made my vision watery. This was it. It would be back to the alcohol and the pills and the rehab and the hospitalizations—the suicide attempt. The entire thing would start over, like a hellish carousel we could never get off. “Please, don’t. Please.”