by Shari Lapena
He puts his head in his hands and says, “If I’d only known what was happening. If I’d checked on her first, before putting the shovel away, going upstairs to get the luggage—” He collapses into ragged sobs.
Stephanie stirs herself out of her shock and goes to Patrick, putting her arms around him. She doesn’t know what to say. She watches him break down, his face in his hands. The babies start to cry too. She’s numb. She had no idea. No idea that he’d been carrying this awful burden the whole time that she’s known him. She clasps him in her arms as he sobs, his body heaving. “Shhhhh,” she whispers, holding him tight. It’s the saddest thing she’s ever heard. She can’t even imagine—
“It was an accident,” she whispers, holding him tight until his body stops trembling. She has never seen him like this, in such inconsolable grief. As if he’s been torn apart.
He looks up at her finally, his eyes wet and red. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
The babies are bawling now and together Stephanie and Patrick wipe the girls’ faces and hands and unbuckle them from their high chairs. Then they carry them through to the living room and put them in the swings so that Stephanie and Patrick can talk. The twins like the swings, and they’re distracted, at least for a few minutes.
Patrick collapses onto the sofa as if all the strength has gone out of him. Stephanie sits down close beside her husband and turns to face him. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asks softly.
He looks back at her, completely spent. “I was too ashamed. I can’t tell you the guilt I carry around. I didn’t think. I didn’t know it was even possible to get carbon monoxide poisoning that way.”
She nods. It wouldn’t occur to her either. It was a simple but tragic mistake.
“I was only twenty-three. I was almost destroyed by grief, by guilt. I left Colorado after the funeral, came back to New York. It took a long time to just begin to feel normal. I still think about it, about what happened, every day.” He looks at her, his face overwrought. “And then I met you three years ago, and started to feel like living again.” He turns away. “I’m sorry. It isn’t fair to you. To dump it on you like this.”
“You don’t have to apologize to me,” she says. “I wish you’d told me before, but I’m glad you’ve told me now.” She wonders why he chose today to do it.
“I didn’t want it to be part of our life together. I didn’t want to burden you with it too. It should be mine to bear, alone.”
She reaches out, takes his face in her hands, and says, “Patrick, I love you, and I always will. We have two beautiful little girls together. What happened is horrible and I’m so, so sorry.” She pauses and then goes on. “I don’t mean to minimize it in any way, but it’s in the past. You have to let it go, forgive yourself. We’re building a future together.”
He looks back at her, but his face is still bleak, and he turns away and stares at the floor. “I want to put it behind me. God knows I’ve suffered enough for it.”
“You can put it behind you. Have you ever seen anyone, a grief counselor, to help you with this?”
He shakes his head, sniffs. “No.”
“Maybe you should,” she says gently.
He’s still looking down; he takes a deep breath. “There’s a bit of a problem that you need to know about.”
She waits, worried.
“Lindsey had a friend, Erica. She’s recently moved near here, to Newburgh. She got in touch with me a couple of days ago and wanted to meet for drinks.”
“Okay,” Stephanie says, remembering the smell of alcohol on her husband’s breath, wondering where this is going, feeling uneasy.
“She’s threatening me.”
9
Erica leans back in her bathtub, the hot water up to her neck, breathing in the smell of lavender. Her mind drifts to Niall. He’s an attractive man, surprisingly good in bed. She’d enjoyed herself.
She’d applied for the job at Foote and Kilgour only to freak Patrick out; she wanted to catch him off guard. But there was an undeniable attraction between her and Niall in the interview. Plus she couldn’t help noticing that Niall was married, with a child—she’d seen his ring, the photos on his desk—and most married men, especially those with children, don’t want their wives finding out if they’re getting a bit on the side.
Her mind shifts to Patrick. Of course he said he wouldn’t pay her. But he doesn’t mean that.
* * *
• • •
STEPHANIE STARES BACK at her husband, alarmed. “Threatening you, how?”
He sighs deeply, miserably. “She threatened to tell you what happened, and I said I’d tell you myself. I have nothing to hide.”
Stephanie is silent, her anxiety spiking.
Finally he says, “She wants money, or else she says she’ll go to the authorities in Colorado and try to get them to look at the accident again, maybe reopen the case.”
“What?” Stephanie says in disbelief. “She’s trying to blackmail you?”
He nods. “Yes.”
“What is she talking about, reopening the case? What case?” Stephanie cries, feeling a terrible anxiety creep over her.
He’s not looking at her. He’s staring at the floor again. “It was an accident, and it was officially ruled an accident, obviously. There was never any suggestion that it was anything else! But now she says she can go to them and get them to reopen it. She says she might tell them that—that I did it on purpose.”
Stephanie is stunned. She can hardly process what she’s hearing. “Why would she do that?”
“For money! She’s just trying to frighten me into paying her.”
“But she can’t do that, surely? She can’t just ask them to reopen a case. That’s absurd.”
“Of course it’s absurd. She’s out of her fucking mind.” He looks at her then. “And that’s what I told her.”
“But”—Stephanie doesn’t know how to put it—“but . . . can she do that? Do we have anything to worry about?”
“I don’t know.” He looks more worried than she would like. “She’s just doing this because she knows we have money. She found out about your inheritance somehow. She would never have shown up here otherwise.”
Stephanie has kept her inheritance very quiet. How would this woman know? “Wouldn’t she have to have some grounds?” Stephanie protests. He’s silent for a long time. He’s not looking at her. “She doesn’t have any grounds, does she?”
“Of course not, but . . . she says she does.”
“What?” She feels like she can hardly breathe.
“It’s too ridiculous.”
“Tell me.”
He shakes his head, as if at the absurdity of it all. “She says she’ll tell them that I wanted to get Lindsey out of the way.” Now he looks terribly uncomfortable. He glances at her uneasily.
“Why would she tell them that, Patrick?” Stephanie is feeling sick to her stomach.
He swallows. “She says she’ll tell them I was in love with her, which is absolute bullshit. I know it and she knows it. But she’ll tell any kind of lie if she gets something out of it.” He looks at her desperately. “I really think she might be a sociopath, Stephanie. She has no scruples, no conscience at all. Who knows what she’ll say, what she’ll make up? It’s obvious she just wants money, but when she talks, it’s like she believes her own lies. She’s a hell of an actress.”
Stephanie’s mouth is dry. She tries to swallow. “How did you know her?”
“She was Lindsey’s best friend,” Patrick says.
“And how well did you know her?”
He looks her in the eyes and says, “I was young, just a kid, really, and very stupid. I don’t want you to think . . .” He hesitates.
“Think what?” She’s nervous now, afraid of what he’s going to tell her. She thinks she knows. He doesn’t an
swer her. She says sharply, “Did you sleep with this woman?” His silence is all the answer she needs. “Oh my God.” She gets up off the sofa and stands in front of him, looking down at him, aghast. “You slept with your wife’s best friend and now she says you were in love with her. Were you? Were you in love with her?” Her voice is accusing.
In the swing, Jackie begins to cry. Almost instantly, Emma joins in. They don’t like hearing their mother speak this way.
“I slept with her a couple of times,” Patrick admits. “That’s all it was. We were drunk. We were kids. It meant nothing. Nothing! And now she thinks she can use that against me, because she needs money.” He stands up, too, running a hand wildly through his hair. “She never said anything before. Because she knew it meant nothing. She knew it was an accident! She knew I was devastated by what happened.” He reaches out to her, pleading. “You have to believe me, Stephanie. I would never cheat on you, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m a different person now.”
But her thoughts are reeling. He cheated on his first wife. She can hardly believe it. It was almost ten years ago, she thinks, but do people ever really change? She says, with absolute conviction, her voice cold, “If you ever cheat on me, I’ll leave you and take the twins with me.”
He looks at her in surprise, as if taken aback at her tone. “Okay. I know that. I will never be unfaithful to you, I swear. I never have been and I never will. Let’s not even go there, because that’s not going to happen. What we have to deal with now is—this situation.”
She takes a deep breath. It’s hard to think straight because both babies are crying. They’ve had to raise their voices to be heard over the din. She walks over to the swings and turns on the timers again to set the babies back in motion. That calms them for a bit. Then she paces around the living room, suddenly filled with a nervous, restless energy, her exhaustion gone. She turns to him. “What are we going to do? If she goes to the police with her lies, that would be—” She can’t even imagine what it would be like. “She’s accusing you of—murder!” Stephanie says, her voice strained. “Think of what that would do to us, what it would do to us personally, to your reputation—”
“It would be in Colorado, not here,” Patrick says, his voice tense. “Worst case is I’d have to go back to Colorado and give my side of the story, which I’ve already done. They believed me then. They won’t believe her and they won’t reopen it. I don’t think anyone here would find out.”
“I think that’s naive, Patrick,” Stephanie says.
His face darkens. “Fuck.” He begins to pace as well. “She can’t be allowed to get away with this! It’s all lies!”
“Should we talk to an attorney about this?”
Patrick shakes his head. “Not yet. Maybe she’ll give up when we don’t pay her.”
Stephanie thinks for a minute, her breathing fast and shallow. “You said you think she might be a sociopath. Do you really think so?”
“I don’t know.”
“If she’s crazy, no one’s going to listen to her.”
He exhales deeply. “But she doesn’t seem crazy. She comes across as completely normal, but I know she’s lying,” he says. He adds tentatively, “I don’t know—maybe we should pay her something, just to make her go away.”
“No way,” Stephanie counters. “If we pay her once, she’ll ask again. She’ll be after us for money for the rest of our lives. She’ll drain us dry.” They have to stand up to her, come what may. She feels ill at the prospect of what’s ahead. “We’re not going to use my parents’ hard-earned money to pay off some woman who’s trying to blackmail you over something that you didn’t do. Think about it, Patrick! This is insane. I can’t believe you’d even consider paying her anything.”
“No, you’re right,” Patrick says, nodding.
“Maybe I should talk to her,” Stephanie says suddenly.
Patrick looks taken aback. “Why?”
“To show her that I believe you, that I’m standing by you. That might take the wind out of her sails. Maybe I can reason with her,” Stephanie says.
He shakes his head. “No! There’s no reasoning with her. I don’t want her anywhere near you, or the twins. She’s toxic—and possibly dangerous.” He adds, “I mean, who in their right mind would make up something like this?”
10
Nancy Foote has put her son to bed and is now gathering up the day’s laundry to pop in the machine overnight. She picks up the shirt her husband wore that day—he’s thrown it on the bed, he never bothers to put anything in the laundry hamper—and a faint smell of perfume wafts from it. She freezes.
No. He wouldn’t. Not after last time.
In disbelief, she brings the shirt to her nose and sniffs. A woman’s perfume—floral and exotic, very faint. She tells herself that it doesn’t necessarily mean what she thinks it means. Maybe someone at the office was doused in scent today. . . .
But Nancy can’t stand being lied to, and she won’t lie to herself either. She hasn’t smelled anything like this on her husband or his clothes since she forced him to break off his affair with Anne O’Dowd.
She sinks down onto their bed, her heart racing with the fear of betrayal. She hasn’t trusted him since she caught him cheating. She’s been keeping an eye on him, slipping her hands into his trousers and jacket pockets at night, looking for signs—a receipt, a cocktail napkin, a note . . . but there’s been nothing. She doesn’t know the password to his phone, unfortunately.
She sits on the bed feeling like the wind has been knocked out of her. She doesn’t want to go through this again. Should she confront him? She knows from experience that he’ll deny it. He’ll deny it until there’s incontrovertible proof, like last time.
She’d told him she’d forgiven him for Anne, but it isn’t really true. She hasn’t forgiven him. But she wants to stay in her marriage. She still loves him, and they have a young child to think about. Henry is only four years old. She doesn’t want to be a single mother, making arrangements week in, week out, reminding Niall to make his support payments, because she knows—she has divorced friends, and she knows what it’s like.
He’ll be smarter this time, more cautious. Because he wants the marriage to survive too. He’d been completely undone, before, when he realized that his little fling might cost him his marriage, his family. He’d been shattered. He wasn’t lying about that.
So why does he do it? Why does he cheat on her?
* * *
• • •
PATRICK CLIMBS INTO BED just after midnight. Stephanie shooed him away as she sat on the sofa with the twins, one propped up on each breast. He knows they’ll be quiet while they’re feeding, but soon after, the crying will begin again, and she will have her hands full for a while yet before they finally cry themselves to sleep. This is their routine—he gets a couple of extra hours at night and she gets the afternoon nap. They’re both functioning on about six hours of sleep a night and have been for months. Even so, when he gets into bed now, he can’t sleep.
They’d walked in circles while holding the crying babies all through the long evening and night. He’d longed for his bed, but now that he’s here, he can’t shut off his mind. To pay Erica would be a stupid thing to do. They must stand up to her, call her bluff. But what if she doesn’t give up? What if she goes to the authorities and they take her seriously? Would they, after all this time? Surely it will make them doubt her, the fact that it took her so long to come forward. He’ll tell them that she’s tried to blackmail him. Surely that would put an end to it right there. He really shouldn’t have anything to worry about.
Even if nothing comes of this, though, Erica has already done enough damage. He could see the doubt in his wife’s face—not about the accident, but about him. He’d been unfaithful to his first wife; he could see the calculation behind Stephanie’s eyes—Would he be unfaithful to her?
He
’d had a fright when Stephanie suggested she meet Erica. No, they mustn’t meet. He must make sure of that. He’d always sensed something dangerous coiled inside Erica. Maybe that had been part of the attraction all those years ago. But now he has so much more to lose. What if Erica comes around to the house, spouting her lies? She can be very convincing. He has to trust Stephanie. Trust that she loves him enough to tell the truth from the lies.
Finally, he drifts into a troubled sleep.
* * *
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING, Nancy pours herself a cup of coffee and decides she is not going to be made a fool of. If her husband is starting to see someone else, she has to know what’s going on. This morning when Niall left for work, he was whistling—a bad sign; he used to whistle when he was seeing Anne.
Now, she sits down at the kitchen table with her cell phone. She’s never been very good with technology; she learns only as much as she needs, and beyond that she tries to ignore it as much as possible. She doesn’t use apps. She can work her computer, and she’s adept enough at social media, but she’s not one to adopt new technologies with enthusiasm. Unlike her husband, who has an app for everything and who’s in love with his flashy new Tesla Model X with its gull wings and futuristic features. She’s afraid to drive it—she finds it intimidating. She has her own car, anyway. Still, when he bought it, in his first flush of enthusiasm, he’d given her one of the black key cards to keep in her wallet, installed the app on her phone, and tried to explain to her how it all worked, but she’d glazed over and hadn’t looked at it since.
