The First to Lie

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  “Stay back,” Ellie ordered. “But look in the reception room. That is freaking Meg.”

  “What the hell is she doing here?” Gabe whispered.

  Ellie felt his body pressed against her back, his coat against hers, his breath in her ear. The fragrance of the cold Monday morning lingered on him, a chill laced with sunshine.

  “I can find out,” he said, his voice low. He came out from behind Ellie, then turned to her, frowning. He put a hand on her shoulder, as if setting her in place. “You stay here. We’re still early for Fiddler. Hang on.”

  He left her no time to protest. She plastered herself to the dark paneled wall as he walked away, hardly daring to show herself but incapable of resisting a peek. She craned her head around the corner a fraction of an inch, no more, standing on tiptoe and trying to keep her balance. Not the best outcome if she toppled over into the reception room. Gabe was already past the couch and the mums and approaching the desk. Playing visitor, she figured. So far so good.

  Meg turned to him with a quick appraisal, then a slower one. The ponytail bobbed as her expression changed from cold assessment to warmer approval. Ellie rolled her eyes. The woman was so predictable. But maybe now that was a good thing.

  Gabe said something, looking amiable. Meg answered, ponytail bobbing again. Gabe smiled as he responded, engaging her.

  Much as Ellie tried, she couldn’t hear what they were saying. Gabe gestured to the empty desk, as if questioning, and Meg laughed, though nothing Gabe could possibly have said could be that funny. Gabe looked at his watch, shaking his head with a wry expression. Meg gestured prettily and said something again. Maybe commiserating about having to wait.

  Heart pounding, Ellie turned slowly and peered the other way down the corridor. All she needed was to have someone demand to know what she was doing. What could she say?

  She straightened, smoothed her hair. Amused at her own confusion. She was Nora Quinn. She worked here. No need to hide. Except from Meg, of course. That she couldn’t risk. But she felt her shoulders relax, and her face take on Nora’s confidence. When she eventually entered the reception area, she’d be Nora. But Meg could not be allowed to see her as Nora. Ellie’s pretense only worked when people knew her as just one person—only Gabe had seen Ellie and Nora. She risked another look around the corner.

  Meg was lifting her briefcase, and put it on the reception desk, talking as she did. Explaining something?

  It was like watching an old silent movie, but without the captioned slides to explain the action and dialogue. She trusted Gabe, though—and then she frowned. Did she trust him? Until recently, all he’d done was lie to her. Maybe that hadn’t stopped.

  Because now here he was with Meg, chatting amicably, almost as if—she paused, another disturbing possibility washing over her. Almost as if he knew her? Ellie observed them through a different filter, as the two discussed something she could not hear.

  If Gabe knew Meg, what was the connection? She pulled out her cell phone: 8:37. They still had time until their appointment with Detta Fiddler. She texted Gabe’s number, watched him react to his phone’s vibration, watched him read the text.

  WHAT UP?

  Without flinching or smiling or reacting, he put the phone back into his pocket. Meg took a pen and notebook out of her tote bag, ripped out a sheet of paper, then wrote something on it, using the reception desk as a table. She folded it into thirds and handed it to Gabe. Without looking at it, he tucked it into an inside pocket of his overcoat.

  They shook hands, with Meg offering the most Megian smile Ellie had ever seen. She was up to something.

  Gabe gestured toward the elevator, then made a sign with his hand—the universal signal for I’ll call you. Or—you call me. Inexplicably, Meg was leaving.

  Which meant Ellie had to hide again. Or head down the long corridor. The nearest door was metal and labeled FIRE STAIRS. An alarm would ring if she opened it. A sign just beyond offered the ideal solution: the silhouette of a person in a skirt. She could only hope Meg wouldn’t head the same way.

  Ellie hurried into the ladies’ room. Into a stall, closing the door, she took a seat and put her feet up against the brownish metal wall of the enclosure. She closed her eyes. Counted to thirty.

  Nothing.

  Texted Gabe. All clear?

  He texted back. She’s gone. Come back. I’ll explain later.

  She opened the stall door, slowly, peeking out. No one. Taking a deep breath, she checked her Nora hair in the mirror, then touched a finger to each side of her mouth, making sure her Nora lipstick was reasonably applied.

  Eight fifty-five, according to her cell phone screen. Her colleagues, sister pharma reps like Lydia, were no doubt already selecting the day’s samples and giveaways from their ninth-floor lockers. What was Meg doing in the key-card-access-only, rarefied atmosphere of the twelfth floor? She opened the bathroom door into the corridor.

  Empty. Quiet. No one. Heart still racing—she couldn’t calm it—she tried to look normal as she walked toward the reception area. The morning had already been uncertain enough without the surprise appearance of Meg.

  Ellie approached the corner of the reception area. Gabe sat on one of the armchairs, swiping through his phone.

  Ellie—Nora, she reminded herself—squared her shoulders and lifted her chin, channeling Nora’s elegant posture and infinite confidence. With an unnecessary toss of her head, since no one was there but Gabe, she strode into the room, like any woman who’d just hit the ladies’ and was ready for her day.

  She wondered where Meg would tell her she’d been this morning.

  “All set?” She asked a benign question, in case anyone was listening, though no one but Gabe was in the reception area.

  He stood, then sat down again. He gestured to the chair beside him.

  “I have to keep checking your hair to remember what to call you,” he whispered.

  “What the hell was that about? I almost had a heart attack.”

  Gabe pressed his lips together, staring at the vase of white mums.

  “Gabe?”

  “So, uh. Meg. She told me she was here to apply for a job.”

  “Not as someone from Channel Eleven?” Ellie watched the closed doors of the elevator as if they might open again and reveal Meg, ready to pounce on them.

  “Nope. She said she’d convinced the guard to let her up here. She wanted to just drop off a résumé. Said she thought if she could wrangle her way to the twelfth floor, they’d be impressed with her … gumption, I think, was the word she used.”

  “That’s weak,” Ellie said. “But just delusional enough to possibly be true.”

  “I told her I worked here and I knew Detta Fiddler, and that she wouldn’t be here for a while. Then I told her my name was Will Faraday—to make it tougher to track me down—and offered to take her name and number for Detta. Which,” he patted his pocket, “I now have. Though unlikely that I’ll pass her message along.”

  Ellie tilted her head, thinking. “Will Faraday? Sure. Whatever. But if she were job hunting, wouldn’t she have given you a résumé? So why would she truly be here?” Ellie shrugged off her coat. “Who ever knows with that woman. Anyway, drama over. And it’s still only five till nine.”

  “Ellie?” Gabe set his phone on the table.

  “What?” Ellie sat down too.

  “So, your Meg…” Gabe put one palm on each knee, his dark shoes flat on the carpet, his shoulders hunched. He turned toward her, his head only, like an owl.

  “What about her?” Ellie couldn’t read his expression.

  He looked at the floor, and then, as if he’d made a decision, at her. “I think she’s Brooke Vanderwald.”

  BEFORE

  CHAPTER 31

  LACEY

  Not ever? Not ever? Lacey, wrapped in a thin blue paper robe—a johnnie, they called them—her bare thighs against the clear plastic cover of the doctor’s exam table, felt her eyes well with tears. She shivered in the air-conditioning
and couldn’t quite make her brain comprehend what this doctor was trying to explain. It was impossible that he was telling her she could never have children.

  Impossible.

  She erased that from her mind. Thought about other things. She focused on her wedding ring, the velvety-patinaed rose-gold band that had belonged to Trevor’s paternal grandmother, Lissy. On the icy engagement diamond, a carré cut in an Edwardian setting, from Trevor’s mother’s mother, Grandmère. These were the objects, heritage indelibly attached, that branded Lacey as family. But no precious stones or metals could bond her to the Vanderwalds the way children would.

  She saw Dr. Sheppard’s mouth moving, but he could not be telling the truth, so she would not listen. She would not.

  His blubbery face and his open white coat and his black stethoscope and the too-bright lights buzzing over her head, it all went blurry, and the soft yellow wallpaper with butterflies all over it, why were there butterflies? Her brain seemed to float up through the butterflies and out into the sky.

  “One of the things that’s difficult to predict…”

  She heard the doctor’s voice through a wash of waves or the rustle of trees, or maybe it was the sound of her heart breaking. She wanted children, Trevor wanted children, she wanted Trevor, she wanted her life, she wanted their life, she wanted what she’d dreamed of. What she deserved. What had been so close.

  “It may be that you have an allergy which causes…”

  And Brinn. Lacey had left her sitting in the plush white leather of one of Dr. Malcolm Sheppard’s private waiting areas. Here, in his tastefully furnished office disguised as a genteel suburban home, there was no congregation of patients trying to salvage some privacy by barricading themselves with magazines. Dr. Sheppard provided separate grasscloth-papered cubicles, where worried mothers-in-waiting and their loved ones could protect their secrets from the prying and imaginative eyes of their neighbors.

  “He knows best,” Brinn had assured her as they’d left the car with a white-visored attendant. Apparently even the cars were given privacy. Lacey wondered what Brinn was planning now. How she would handle this diagnosis. How she would manage it.

  After Lacey’s first miscarriage, Brinn, consoling and reassuring, had explained it was nature’s way, and Mother Nature realizing she’d made a mistake, and that Lacey and Trevor should try again. Lacey did not feel like it was a mistake, but managed not to say so. After the second miscarriage, with Lacey’s eyes dark-circled and her skin ashen, Brinn had allowed a moment of worry, suggesting doctors and tests and genetic assays, all of which proved Lacey was … healthy, but unlucky.

  “Try again,” Brinn had urged, “third time’s the charm.” The third time, she’d offered Pharminex doctors, advice, experimental treatments.

  When Lacey had repeated that conversation, Trevor had chugged the last of his National Bohemian. Natty Boh was as household here in coastal Bayellen as Schlitz had been in her childhood.

  “Can’t hurt.” He’d tossed the bottle into their bedroom wastebasket. “And Lace? Don’t try to fight Mom when it comes to ‘modern medicine.’ It can fix anything, she always says.”

  “She used those words with me too,” Lacey remembered. “Modern medicine.”

  “Got to remember why she is where she is, Lace. Pharminex.”

  Lacey heard the opening of the bedroom fridge, heard the hissing twist of another bottle opening.

  “‘Take three instead of two of whatever you need.’ That’s Mom. Empress of the medicine cabinet.”

  The doctor was still talking, but now Lacey’s brain could only manage to retrieve some of the words. Never, sometimes, always. Permanent.

  “I don’t understand this,” Lacey replied, honestly not knowing whether her tears were rage or sorrow or loss or an enduring bafflement that at every turn the world seemed to be conspiring against her. Was there a destiny, a set path, that some deep force chose for you at birth? No matter how determined or driven you were, no matter what road map to life you created for yourself, you could only go so far until the universe, laughing, yanked you back where you belonged.

  Putting on airs, Lacey’s mother would have said. Like when Lacey had appropriated the more socially acceptable last name of her mother’s newest husband, Karl Grisham, instead of keeping her birth name. She’d studied in high school—yes, she had—but also made sure her advisors had given her special recommendations, a well-placed phone call or two, in exchange for other favors Lacey could bestow.

  No matter how you achieved it, success was all about getting in. Lacey had deduced that early on. Finally at a prestigious-enough college, her sorority sisters had embraced Lacey’s blond-by-then voluptuousness as well as the heartbreaking story of her valiant determination after her parents’ tragic accident and the resulting clash of predatory lawyers. Luckily, no one asked too many questions. Lacey was in. And Trevor had clinched it.

  And then, as Lacey was on the verge of getting accepted into the Vanderwald world for ever and for good, came miscarriage number three.

  Two months afterward, Brinn had invited her to go shopping. But instead of taking Chestnut Street to Violetta’s, Brinn had pulled up in front of this white-shuttered Bayellen home, hedges artfully trimmed and a bluestone path to a filigreed front door. A tiny engraved sign, barely noticeable by the silver doorbell, said: BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.

  “What’s this?” Lacey asked.

  “It’s my special gift for you.” Brinn had raised one eyebrow, Cheshire-cat conspiratorial. “For you and Trevor.”

  “But—what?”

  “Honey, honey, honey.” Brinn brushed Lacey’s hair from her forehead, sweetly maternal. “You and I? We have access. Pharminex has an entire research department constantly looking for ways to help women. Women like you. And this is so perfect. Darling. Trust me. I promise, this will make…” Cat with cream. “Everything work.”

  And soon Lacey was perched, in blue paper, on Dr. Sheppard’s vinyl examination table. That first day, he’d given her an injection. Then another.

  “This will help you,” he’d promised. “And come back in two weeks.”

  And now she was hearing this impossible thing. And all because Brinn had … tricked her. Lied to her. Manipulated her. Like she always always always did. Lacey, a fully formed college-educated intelligent human being, should have been able to make her own decision—but Brinn had taken over her life, like a predatory animal, a tawny lioness desperate for cubs. Or for control.

  “Would you like some water, dear, while we talk?” Dr. Sheppard, apparently attempting to be paternal and comforting, seemed genuinely concerned. She’d told him her body had never been what the books called normal. But was there something truly wrong? She’d been embarrassed to talk to her mother about that kind of thing, and certainly couldn’t bring it up to her doctor at home either. He’d known her since she was a girl, and how could she ask Doc Melander about her periods, for heaven’s sake? She could not even say the word.

  But after the wedding, she’d needed her body to work. When she found Trevor, she knew, in her soulest of souls, it all had to be perfect. For their family. It was the only way she could succeed. She knew it. To be a part of the Vanderwald family, there had to be a family. Wives were disposable, forgettable, replaceable. Children were blood.

  Dr. Sheppard, his lumpy shape balancing on a leather swivel stool, interrupted her thoughts, looking up at her behind those old-fashioned glasses. Since she was still on the table, sitting up, her lap right at his eye level, Lacey felt like the doctor was looking straight into her naked private parts. She shifted in her paper outfit, adjusting, trying to stay decent.

  “In basic terms,” he was saying, “your reproductive system was not producing enough eggs—enough viable eggs. And it appeared from my initial examination and subsequent testing that you might have difficulty staying pregnant.”

  She winced at the word.

  “So you and I, together, decided it might be prudent to try a medication that’s sh
own some efficacy in helping women become pregnant, and carry to term. That’s why you signed the consent form last time. As we said, though this drug, Monifan, is generally used for another purpose, there’s impressive gynecological research indicating it could have the result of making your uterus more receptive to the…” He looked up at her, pausing.

  “Ms. Vanderwald? May I call you Lacey?” He stopped, searching for words. “I know this is difficult for you, and I know you’ve been trying. To have a baby.”

  Which was completely true. She had counted and calculated and decided. She and Trevor had made it a game, an adventure, a Fifty Shades experiment. They’d tried positions and places, and giggled, every time, that people would assume all they thought about was sex and each other. And Lacey would throw back her head and laugh, and say it’s true, darlin’ Trevor, it’s true, I live for it, and she’d hold out her arms and beg him for more when the true truth? It wasn’t about pleasure at all, it was about insurance.

  “But Lacey? Let me put it this way. Sadly…” Dr. Sheppard eyed her up and down, seemed to be considering how to finish his sentence. “In rare circumstances, because of a hormonal imbalance that’s impossible to predict, this drug can have a detrimental and permanent effect on the very reproductive system we are trying to enhance.”

  “Permanent?” Lacey could not cry, she couldn’t, even though she was watching a movie in her head of her entire future life as a black hole, an endless series of lonely, unfulfilled days, like one of those forgotten plastic bags, stuck, forever, forgotten, ignored, fluttering on a jagged tree branch. She could never have children? This was completely wrong. Completely unfair. “Isn’t there anything we can do? Something I can take to reverse it? Or, I don’t know.” She scoured the universe for guidance. “Surgery?”

  Sheppard was shaking his head. “I’m afraid not.”

  She put her hands over her face, wishing that when she took her hands away she’d be somewhere else entirely, with Trevor and baby Trev in Paris or on a beach maybe, but when she took her hands away to see her family, there was only potato-faced Dr. Sheppard.