Apparently, Derek and Marin got the house for a steal during the housing market crash. Over a decade later, he’d still been puffed with pride as he recounted for her the story of how he’d lowballed the previous owners, who were on the verge of foreclosure due to some shady financing deal they’d arranged to buy the house in the first place.
“Didn’t you feel bad about that?” Kenzie had asked him. “It was such a tough time for everyone.”
Derek snorted. “You’re cute. In every negotiation, someone wins, and someone loses. They couldn’t afford the house to begin with. They were part of the problem.”
This is crazy, of course. If Kenzie is going to do this, she’d better move fast, and she’d better commit to it. No second-guessing, no panicking. She walks across the street, directly to the front door. The exterior is well-lit. If stopped by a neighbor, she’s prepared to say that she works for Marin at the one of the salons and is just dropping something off.
But as far as she can tell, nobody sees her. The alcohol in her system is making it hard to concentrate, but she manages to enter the four-digit code into the pin pad: 1-1-2-0. The pin pad clicks. She twists the lock, pushes the handle, and just like that, she’s inside. She shuts the door behind her, locking it again.
Exhale. Deep breath in. Exhale.
The house is quiet save for a low, almost undetectable beeping sound that she realizes is coming from somewhere deeper inside. Her shoes are wet, and since the floors are pristine, she removes them. It doesn’t seem right to leave them on the mat in the entryway, so she shoves them inside a hallway closet. In her socked feet, she pads softly through the dimly lit house and into the kitchen, where the beeping is louder.
Oh shit. They have an alarm.
Another keypad is mounted on the wall of the kitchen near the door to the mudroom, which is probably the entrance they normally use, since they both park in the garage. By her estimation, the alarm has been beeping for over twenty seconds. She has no idea how much longer she has until it goes off. But she has to try something, and quick, before the alarm company notifies the police, and Derek’s and Marin’s cell phones ring in Canada.
She punches in the same code as she did for the front door. 1-1-2-0. The keypad flashes red. Shit shit shit. Think. God, it was a terrible idea to do this drunk. In a panic, she punches in the only other number sequence she thinks it could be: today’s date, Derek and Marin’s anniversary. The keypad turns green briefly. The beeping stops.
Jesus Christ.
Her armpits are damp from sweat, and the adrenaline seems to have burned off whatever alcohol she had in her system. Her heart is tachycardic, and her throat is screaming for water. An empty water glass sits on the counter beside the fridge, and she presses it against the refrigerator’s water dispenser, filling it to the top.
She pulls out her phone and checks her Instagram to reassure herself that Derek and Marin are still in Whistler. They are. In fact, they’re now at a late dinner. They’re sitting next to each other in a round velvet booth, glasses of red wine in their hands and plates full of steak and vegetables in front of them both. The white tablecloth is sprinkled with some kind of metallic confetti—hearts and flowers, by the looks of it. The caption reads, 20 years down, 40 more to go? Sounds like heaven to me.
They look every inch the glamorous couple they are, and Kenzie feels tears well in her eyes.
It’s not that she didn’t always know he was someone else’s. It’s that she didn’t think she cared until now. It hurts to look at them, knowing the life they have will never be hers.
There’s only one comment so far, as Marin posted the picture only fifteen minutes before, but it’s from an account Kenzie didn’t know even existed.
sebastiansdad76: I love you so much, baby. Cheers to us. Happy anniversary, my love. Here’s to 40 more.
Baby. Derek calls Marin baby. He calls Kenzie babe. She never realized how much of a difference one letter could make in an otherwise generic term of endearment.
Kenzie needs to stop looking at their pictures. She needs to get off Instagram. She needs to get out of their house.
She also needs to pee.
Hell with it. Might as well check out their bathrooms.
The house has been remodeled from top to bottom, and the budding furniture designer in Kenzie can’t help but notice the clean lines and tasteful use of space. What’s not decorated matters as much as what is. The house feels traditional, but with a modern take.
“I grew up in a trailer park,” Derek had told her the first night they slept together. They were at the Cedarbrook Lodge, lying naked, legs intertwined. “We had nothing. Less than nothing. My dad split when I was two, and my mom had three boys to feed, and I was the youngest. Never had new clothes. Never had a new bike. Never had new anything. We were always hungry. There was never enough food.”
“Wow,” Kenzie said, touching his watch. A Rolex. “And look at you now.”
“It’s why I’m so particular about how I live.” Derek took her fingers and kissed the tips of each one. “I like nice clothes. I like having a nice car. I like having cash in my wallet, even if I use my credit cards for everything. I like not being poor, and I guess I have a chip on my shoulder about it.” He was quiet for a moment. “But that chip is what drives me. It’s what got me here.”
“And what got you here?” Kenzie asked, gesturing to the bed, the room, herself.
He rolled on top of her, the length of his naked body pressed up against the length of hers. Automatically, her legs parted. They’d already had sex, but he was ready again. He looked right into her eyes.
“I like that you don’t know that part of me,” Derek said. “I like that you only know me as the person I’ve become, and not the person I used to be. It’s nice to not have history with you.”
She understood that. Completely. She gets what it’s like to want to reinvent yourself, but it’s not always easy, especially when family and old friends take it personally.
“I don’t have twenty years of mistakes with you,” he whispered, and she could feel him sliding into her again. She parted her legs farther, placing her hands on his ass, guiding him as far as he could go. “You’re a blank slate, and you don’t know how much I need that.”
It wouldn’t take a psychologist to understand that Kenzie’s an escape for him. Their relationship has always been highly compartmentalized. When Derek is with her, he doesn’t have to think about his wife, or his missing son, or this house, or any of the things he feels obligated to, and responsible for.
The problem is, it’s near impossible for Kenzie to understand why anyone would want to escape from this. You poor, sad, wealthy man. The house is gorgeous. Ten-foot ceilings, gleaming hardwood floors, light fixtures that probably cost more than her rent.
It even smells like money in here.
She wonders if the bathroom is near the mudroom, but there’s only a laundry room, and it’s the fanciest one she’s ever seen in real life. There’s an oversize washer and dryer, and built-in cabinets for everything unsightly, like detergent, dryer sheets, cleaning products. What a luxury it must be to have a laundry room that isn’t shared with a hundred other tenants, especially one as nice as this one.
In the mudroom, there are three cubbies. They’re labeled with hand-painted wooden signs. The one on the left reads MARIN. The one on the right reads DEREK. And the one in the middle reads SEBASTIAN.
Sebastian. Wow. His coat is still hanging there, his rubber boots lined up neatly beneath it, and in the basket below is a small backpack covered in cartoon dogs. Paw Patrol. She finds herself reaching out to finger his coat, then yanks her hand back. No. She shouldn’t touch it. It wouldn’t be right.
Her bladder threatening to burst, Kenzie exits the mudroom and continues on her self-guided tour, getting lost in imagining what she would decorate differently if she were living here with Derek. Truthfully, not much. Marin has excellent taste.
As she heads up to the second level, she pauses on
the curved staircase to look at the framed photos mounted on the wall. They’re all of Derek and Marin’s son, depicting him at all different ages.
The last one, closest to the top step, must be the most recent. In it, Sebastian is wearing the exact reindeer sweater that he was wearing in his Missing Child poster, but in this photo, he’s sitting on Santa’s lap with a huge grin on his face. It hits Kenzie how horrific this whole thing really is. It’s easy enough to not think about it when Derek refuses to talk about it, but here, in their house, there’s an entire side to Derek she’ll never know or see.
He’s a father. Who lost his child. Who’s married to a mother. Who lost her child.
Kenzie stares at the photo, reminded that Sebastian disappeared on the last Saturday before Christmas. They would have had a tree up, probably in the front living room, where it would shine in the window for the neighbors to see. They’d probably finished all their Christmas shopping, most of the presents wrapped and ready, with a few hidden away to be revealed on Christmas morning.
But instead of waking up to the sounds of little feet thundering in the hallway and down the grand staircase, and then the whoops and shrieks at the sight of all the bounty under the tree, there would have been silence. No little boy was in the house to open those presents. No little boy has been here since.
It makes Kenzie feel sick, and she takes a few seconds to breathe.
On the wall at the top of the stairs is an 8-by-10 black-and-white photo of Derek and Marin on the beach on their wedding day. She’s wearing some kind of bohemian-chic wedding dress. He’s wearing light-colored pants and a white button-down with the sleeves rolled up. They’re laughing, holding hands, their hair whipping in the wind. In this photo, Marin is younger than Kenzie, and breathtakingly beautiful.
She walks through the second level slowly, passing a bedroom that she can only assume must be Sebastian’s. The door has a little sticker on it, and when she peers closer she sees that it’s another Paw Patrol character. Every other door upstairs is open except this one.
She will not open it.
The master bedroom is the only thing Kenzie really wants to see, anyway, and it’s at the end of the hallway, with double doors. When she enters, the hardwood changes to carpet, but it’s not the cheap kind like in her apartment. It’s the thick, knotted kind that never shows vacuum lines or footprints. The square footage of their bedroom alone is probably the size of her and Tyler’s entire apartment. A king-size bed sits grandly against the far wall, with matching mirror-paneled nightstands flanking each side of the bed. One nightstand is piled with books—a few self-help, the rest fiction. The other is bare save for a phone charger hanging limply off the edge. Kenzie can guess which side Derek sleeps on. He’s not a reader.
She enters the ensuite, which smells like lavender and looks like something out of a magazine. Tile laid painstakingly in a herringbone pattern. Glass-enclosed shower, big enough for two. The vanity is the widest she’s ever seen, and there’s a claw-footed tub by the window, so deep that there’s a little footstool beside it to help you step in. The toilet sits in its own room with a door just next to the shower, and Kenzie makes a beeline for it to relieve herself.
She can’t even begin to process the walk-in closet. Derek’s side is full of suits, no surprise there. But Marin’s side . . . The woman has so much stuff. Dresses. Coats. Suits. Pants. Blouses. All sorted by style and color. There’s a center island—an island!—with drawers for socks and underwear and workout clothes and jeans, and the entire back wall is just for bags and shoes. And to think Kenzie fretted when Derek bought her a Dolce & Gabbana bag in New York, the only designer bag she owns, and so nice she’s only allowed herself to use it when she’s with Derek. In contrast, his wife only owns designer bags. Gucci. Ferragamo. Chanel. Vuitton. And one budget-friendly Tory Burch, well worn and clearly well loved.
Kenzie pulls out her phone, unable to resist taking a picture of herself in the most spectacular closet she’s ever been in. She takes several angles, wondering what would happen if she posted the pics on Instagram. Would either of them even know? This closet is exactly the kind of thing she’d see on Million Dollar Listing, that Bravo reality TV show she and Tyler were addicted to last summer.
“Why the hell do we watch this?” she’d asked her roommate, stuffing her face with microwave popcorn as a rich couple no older than thirty declared on camera that their 2,200-square-foot Manhattan apartment was a bit too tight for themselves and their bichon frise. “This just makes me feel shitty about my life.”
“Because it’s aspirational,” Ty answered, and he was right. “We watch because these are the people we wish we were.”
A pair of red-soled high heels catches Kenzie’s eye. Christian Louboutins. They’re works of art, black satin with a crystal bow at the toe, four-inch heels. Size 8. Kenzie is an eight and a half. Close enough. Peeling off her socks, she slips the shoes on. They’re a little tight, but she snaps a picture of her feet in them anyway. She puts them back on the shelf, then decides they look even more glamorous in front of the purse collection. She arranges the pair artfully and snaps several more photos. Why? Because it’s aspirational.
She walks back into the main area of the bedroom, her feet making no noise on the well-padded carpet. She pictures Marin reading in bed and Derek sliding in beside her, back in happier times, when their child was asleep down the hall and they finally had some time to themselves. Marin’s wearing pajamas, or maybe a college T-shirt of Derek’s. He’s wearing old basketball shorts, shirtless, maybe fresh from a shower after a long day. Maybe they make love. Maybe they just spoon. Maybe they talk about their day, quietly and lightheartedly, until one of them falls asleep. Derek would be the one to close his eyes first, and once he does, sleep would come fast. Marin would take longer, because women always do, her brain firing for a few more minutes about the hundred different things that happened over the course of the day and the two hundred things that will happen tomorrow.
Kenzie doesn’t belong here. It’s time to go.
Chapter 20
Not knowing how to reset the alarm, Kenzie leaves it off. She exits the house the same way she came in, quietly and carefully. What she just did was stupid and reckless, and she can never allow herself to lose control like that again.
The air smells fresh from the rain and she decides to walk for a while to clear her head. Her last boyfriend, Paul, had lived in a neighborhood similar to this in Boise—quiet, pretentious, suburban, white. The last time Kenzie saw him was three weeks after his drunk wife tried to push her way into the apartment. Paul had already tried to end it with her—over the phone, no less—and when she protested, he’d offered her ten thousand dollars “as a parting gift.”
As if.
Kenzie had showed up at Paul’s house a couple of nights later, crying, begging him to be with her, pretending to be drunk and heartbroken. His wife and daughters were at home, and when he answered the door and saw her, his face paled. He shut the door behind him and yanked her over to the side of the house, where it was dark and full of bushes, where nobody could see them.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Paul hissed.
His hand gripped her arm, and later, she would discover bruises where his fingers had pressed into her skin. She’d never seen him so angry. He’d always been gentle with her . . . soft, even. It was amazing how much strength someone could muster when they felt threatened.
“You’re hurting me,” she whimpered, and he let her go.
“You can’t be here.” Paul glared at her with a look so fierce it could have detonated stone. “I have a family, McKenzie.”
“I want us to be together. I love you.” She reached for his hand. “And you love me.”
“It was never love,” he said, backing away from her. “I see that now. I was unhappy and needed someone to . . . make me feel wanted again. Leah and I are starting therapy, and we’re going to try to make it work. I’m sorry, okay? Now please go. My kids are inside.”
“So that’s it?” She stared at him. “You’re done with me, so you’re just going to throw me away? Like I’m garbage?”
He softened, and for a moment Kenzie worried that she’d overplayed her hand. She had zero desire to continue their relationship, and she had no intention of actually winning Paul back. Whatever attraction she’d felt toward him had dried up the moment the spittle from his drunk wife’s mouth sprayed her face. What she wanted was for this to end on her terms.
What she wanted was to get paid an amount she deserved.
Paul straightened up, his expression hardening again. “Whatever it is I needed from you, Kenzie, I don’t need it anymore. I’m not trying to hurt you, but there’s nothing I can give you. Now, please. You have to leave.”
She looked up at the side of his huge house, and then around the corner at the driveway where his cars, a Jaguar and a BMW, were parked. “Must be nice, sleeping with girls half your age and then tossing them away when your wife finds out,” she said. “Waving your money in their faces, keeping them interested, treating them like whores.”
“What them?” Paul frowned. “There’s no them. There was just you, and I never should have—”
“You offered me ten thousand dollars to go away. How do you think that made me feel?”
He looked mortified. “I know, I shouldn’t have said that—”
“I’ll take fifty.”
He blinked. “What?”
“Fifty thousand,” Kenzie said. “And you’ll never hear from me again. After everything you’ve put me through, I think it’s the least you can do. Not to mention everything your wife put me through, screaming at me and my roommate in our hallway like a fucking lunatic, like I’m the villain. You’re the one who started this, Paul. You’re the one with the family. This is your betrayal, not mine, and you got caught. If your wife hadn’t found out about us, you know what we’d be doing right now? We’d be having sex, Paul, that’s what. So while it’s all well and good that the two of you are working things out, you’re not going to get out of our relationship that easily.”
Little Secrets (ARC) Page 20
