by A. J. Banner
“It was a surprise to me, too,” he said. “She was excited about the new treatment, and then . . .”
“What?” My heart began to pound. “What new treatment?”
He wrenched out the old lock, got up, and put it on the table. Brought out a shiny new brass locking mechanism. “She didn’t tell me all the details. But I thought you knew.”
“No,” I said, the breath thickening in my lungs. “I didn’t know—I had no idea. What did she say about it? What treatment?”
“It could’ve bought her some time. That’s all.”
“How much time?” I said, as he drilled the new lock into the door, the noise grating in my ears.
“I don’t know—months or years? It was a promising clinical trial . . . Wait.” He stood up, rubbed his beard. “How could you not know?”
“She didn’t tell me. I don’t know why. Why would she tell you and not me?”
He tugged at his beard now. “Maybe she didn’t want to get your hopes up.”
“She still should’ve told me. I could’ve been here for her.”
“Your mom was hardheaded. I thought it was sad that she died before she had a chance to start the treatment. I really thought you knew.”
“No, I didn’t,” I said, inhaling sharply. I felt as though I’d just been hit by a bus. “That’s all you know, about the treatment? I mean, maybe she ultimately decided not to go through with it. She’d already been through so much.”
“No, she was going to do it. She seemed set on it.”
“But there was nothing in her medical records. I got them from the clinic. Everything was in there . . .”
“There should’ve been notes about the trial. I don’t know what to tell you.”
Kieran could’ve been responsible for withholding pages from her records, I thought. Destroying them. He was the one who had given me her file. But that didn’t make any sense. Why would he have kept the information from me? Maybe she hadn’t been accepted into the experimental trial, after all. She’d died at age seventy-six, not that old in today’s world, but had the researchers thought her too old? How would I know?
“I should go,” I said to Brandon. “There’s something I need to take care of.”
“You okay? You look pale.” He rested a hand on my shoulder. His dark eyes reflected my face in tiny, distorted images. He was so tall, his hand heavy.
“I’m okay,” I said. “I need to make a call . . . and I might need Chantal’s help with something. You’re working for her, right?”
His face flushed. “Small project. I was planning to head over there later. She’s home, I think. Anything I can do to help?”
“Not in this case, but thanks for offering. I need her particular expertise. Can you finish this up on your own?”
His face fell. “You call me over here so urgently, and now you’re leaving?”
“Leave me an invoice,” I said. “I’ll catch you later.”
“Yeah.” He gave me a brief hug, and I was surprised at how solid he felt. I could sense that he wanted to hang on, but he reluctantly let me go. “I’ll leave the front-door keys under the mat. We should talk about a surveillance system.”
“Okay. I’ll take a rain check.” I hurried out to my car, feeling his gaze on my back. As I drove away, a flash of memory came to me, of a night months after the divorce was final. Brandon bringing over a book I’d left at the house, disappointed to see me leaving for a dinner date. He’d been freshly showered, and I’d smelled cologne. “I just got here,” he’d said, “and now you’re leaving? What are you wearing?”
“What?” I’d said, looking down at my little black dress.
“You shouldn’t go out looking sexy.”
“We’re divorced, Brandon.” I’d shaken my head, gotten into my car, and driven away, leaving him standing on the porch, holding the book.
Before that, he’d brought over other items I’d left behind. He’d shown up at the pharmacy just to say hello. At our wedding, his older sister, who had flown in from Wall Street only for the day, had said, before flying out again, “My brother wanted you, and he got you. When he sets his mind on something, he will never let go.” But in the end, he had let me go.
Still, I felt a touch of worry. Kieran’s accusation played in my head, his certainty that my ex-husband returned to the island only because of me. That was ridiculous, but had Brandon misinterpreted my request for help? No, he hadn’t bothered me in a couple of years, not since my mother’s death. I was sure—I hoped—he’d finally moved on.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“He’s over there now?” Chantal said, standing in her open front doorway. She was in a sleek black exercise outfit.
“I left him there to finish changing the locks,” I told her. “So will you help me?” I’d just told her what I wanted her to do.
“I could, but isn’t it risky?” She ushered me inside and shut the door. Her house was spacious and sparsely, efficiently furnished in wood and pastels.
“If you don’t want to help me, I understand,” I said. “I could try different passwords and hope one of them works.”
“If he’s smart, you won’t be able to guess his password. What if he comes by the farmhouse while we’re there?”
“He’s at work. He said he’s got patients backed up to see him. We were supposed to go away for our anniversary. But . . .”
“You want to break into his house instead.”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“Don’t you have to open the shop?”
“I put a ‘back later’ sign on the door.”
She opened the front closet and shrugged on a black coat. “What exactly are we looking for?”
“Evidence that my mother was accepted into a clinical trial before she died. And anything else I might not know about. More debts? Not that I need additional proof.” I pushed aside my grief, the devastation, knowing Kieran and I should’ve been sharing a bottle of wine on the boat, making love in the cabin. Celebrating a year together. That my life should’ve been so very different.
She flipped her hair over her shoulder, buttoned up her coat. “Why would your mom’s information be on his laptop?”
“I just called the clinic, and his receptionist, Mona, practically admitted to it . . . I asked her if anything might be missing from my mother’s file. She said no. But she said to ask Kieran, that he had been taking work home, that he keeps files in the cloud . . .”
“She actually said that to you? Isn’t it illegal for him to take patient records . . . ?”
“Kieran has been breaking a lot of rules,” I said.
She motioned me to follow her into her office down the hall, uncharacteristically cluttered. I glanced at a photograph of her son and daughter on the desk. Jenny, dark haired and gorgeous, pressed her cheek to her brother’s, taking a selfie. Nick was a handsome young man—he looked very much like Chantal. She followed my gaze, her eyes darkening. Then she rummaged in a drawer and produced a small USB stick. “I can boot his computer with this. It’s got Linux OS on it. I can change all kinds of things, and I can even log in as an admin.”
“Could you repeat that in English?” I said as we left the house.
She locked the door. “It’s easy to hack into a Windows machine. If we’re able to get our hands on the actual machine.”
“It’s there, I hope.” I got into the driver’s seat, started the car. “But he can’t know we were there.” I pulled out of the driveway.
“He won’t. But this is seriously messed up. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “If you’re getting cold feet—”
“No, I’m all over this. But I do have a question.” She gave me a perplexed look. “Why would he exclude the information about the trial from your mother’s file?”
“I don’t know.” I tried not to speed down the road. On the way, I told Chantal about his debts. “He was barely making minimum payments.”
“It does happen. Bill’s a dentist, and he wa
s in debt for a while. He knows doctors who owe craploads of money for their big houses, their cars, for their kids’ college tuition.”
“What I don’t get is . . . if he wanted to make more money, Kieran could’ve taken a job on the mainland.”
“Maybe he needed to hide away for a while,” she said. “Wasn’t he living in LA before? Didn’t his ex-wife die? Maybe he was grieving.”
She was being so charitable, defending this man who had hurt me so deeply. But maybe she was right—and Kieran was just a doctor in debt who had slipped up and slept with . . . a patient.
“When I woke up this morning, he was watching me from the doorway. He said he liked to watch me sleep.”
She laughed. “That’s creepy, although . . . it could be lovely under other circumstances. I wish Bill had been like that, but he wasn’t romantic. He was so . . . practical.”
“I’d do anything for practical right now. As long as it comes with ‘loyal.’”
I floored my Honda across the island to the protected northeast coastline, where Kieran’s beige farmhouse sat back from the road in the forest, the Salish Sea glinting through the trees. The restored historic structure had been his home on the island for almost five years before I’d ever met him. He’d left behind his fast-paced California life bathed in sunlight and palm trees. He’d claimed to need a change of scenery, away from memories. And he’d wanted to help Dr. Burns, who owned the clinic. She’d needed a new physician ASAP. Kieran had known her from medical school at UC Davis, where they had both studied internal medicine.
There was no sign of a car in the farmhouse driveway, but I didn’t stop there. I drove past the house, around the corner, and parked on the shoulder of the road, out of view. The way Diane had parked down the road from our house, just yesterday.
Chantal and I walked back a few hundred yards to the farmhouse. I glanced up and down the road, feeling lucky that Kieran didn’t have any immediate neighbors, that he owned the few acres of forest surrounding the house.
I opened the front door with his key, and we went inside. The wood floor gleamed, the walls newly painted. Kieran’s deep voice played in my head, the enthusiasm in his tone when he’d told me Diane would be staging the house.
“Whoa, nice place,” Chantal said.
“Yeah, he’s into nice things.” I felt like a stranger gazing into the living room at the soft couch and armchair, throw pillows, tables and reading lamps, a game of Scrabble on the coffee table. A memory flooded back to me, of the first time I’d set foot in here. We had dated a few times in town before he had finally invited me over for dinner. I’d spent two hours trying to choose what to wear. He’d served angel hair pasta with an exquisite wine-based sauce. The evening had been perfect, the night, too. He’d been so attentive to my needs. I couldn’t bear to think of it now. My memories were marred by images of Diane here in my place. Had he wooed her the same way, with wine and romance?
“Kind of sterile, though,” Chantal said, lowering her voice. It was true. There was nothing personal remaining in the room, nothing revealing. No pictures of the lovely, ethereal mother who had raised him or of his wayward father, whom she had divorced when Kieran was three. It was almost as if nobody lived here, but that was the idea of staging, to allow potential buyers to imagine the house as theirs.
“We need to find his laptop,” I said. “I’m hoping he left it here. He sometimes takes it to work, but not usually. We have to be quick.”
She nodded, helped me check each room on the first floor. In his office down the hall, a table, shelves, and a tilted armchair remained.
“I think that might be an Eames armchair,” I said, pointing at the large office chair with a matching ottoman. “He owes a few thousand dollars on it.”
She crouched to examine the chair. “There’s no brand name, but I bet you’re right.”
His laptop computer was not in the room. “Look at this,” I said. On the desk, he had printed his curriculum vitae on white cotton résumé paper.
“Is he planning to apply for a job?” she asked, peering over my shoulder. “He lists the clinic as part of his professional ‘history.’”
His volunteer background included short stints in community service in Guatemala, Thailand, and Mexico. He’d worked in private practice in Covino, California. “Skill highlights,” I read aloud. “‘Fabulous listener,’ ‘heightened empathy,’ and ‘excellent bedside manner.’ Right.”
Chantal touched my shoulder. “We don’t have to be here.”
“No, I do need to be here. I need to know the truth.” Nothing on the paper indicated his moral character, or lack thereof. “Come on, let’s go upstairs.”
We left the CV on the desk and ascended the wide staircase. I was aware of my breathing, every molecule alive inside me. With each step toward the master bedroom, I counted a month that I’d known him. At its threshold, my breathing grew shallow. The bed was immaculately made, but he’d dumped the suitcase and bags on the floor before rushing off to work.
“There it is,” she said, rushing to his laptop, which was open on a table in the corner, the screen turned off. She sat at the desk and powered it up. The home screen prompted us for a password. The background image showed a faded photo of Kieran as a kid of maybe eight or nine, hiking with a woman on a trail in the woods. “Who’s that in the picture?” she asked.
“His mother,” I said. He must’ve scanned in the image from an old print. “But I’ve never seen pictures of his dad. His parents didn’t come to the wedding. His mom lives down in Bandon, on the Oregon coast. We visited her there twice in her condo. She’s a retired nurse. He’s an only child.”
Chantal looked closely. “She’s like a pretty version of him.”
“She once told me to accept him the way he is. Now I have a better sense of what she meant. She said he could be impulsive.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“She adored him, though. He could do no wrong. When we were staying there, he never cleaned up or helped with the cooking or did the dishes. I helped his mom, but she never asked him to do anything. She did his laundry, hung on his every word. She adored him.”
“He probably manipulated the hell out of her,” Chantal said, pulling out the USB stick, plugging it into the side of the laptop.
“We mailed her a wedding invitation, but she never responded, so I called her. She said she never received it, but I know she did. I tracked the envelope. I invited her over the phone, and she said, ‘Are you sure, dear?’ I thought she meant, was I sure we wanted her to come to the wedding. I said, yeah, we wanted her there. But she canceled at the last minute. She said she was sick. Kieran didn’t seem surprised. He came right out and said she was jealous. She barely tolerated his first marriage. But now I wonder.”
“You think she was asking if you were sure you wanted to marry Kieran.”
I nodded. “His dad was supposedly traveling in Europe. Kieran didn’t even bother inviting him. He said his dad was an absent father who had cheated on his mom. But I was stupid. I didn’t make the connection. His mom divorced his dad early in the marriage.”
“Do you think she knew he was like his father?”
“Yup, probably, but she loves Kieran unconditionally, the way a mother loves her only son.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to love him unconditionally, too,” Chantal said. She gestured to the screen. “Do you want to try a few passwords first?”
I took her place at the desk, clicked on the sign-in window, and tried a range of possible passwords, from his social security number, his July birthday, to the name of his first pet, a dog named Rambo. No luck. Nothing worked. I was locked out.
We traded places again. I hovered over her. She motioned me away. “Give the maestro a little space to work, please.”
I stepped back. “How often do you do this kind of thing?”
“Oh, every day. Kidding. Pretty much never.” Her fingers flew across the keyboard, various command-prompt windows popping up a
nd disappearing, and then the desktop screen magically appeared against the background image of Kieran with his mom.
“We’re in,” she said. Several file folders were haphazardly arranged on the desktop.
“Wow, you’re a genius.” I leaned over her shoulder again. “Are you sure you don’t have any qualms about doing this? Have you changed your mind?”
“Hell no. Let’s see what’s in here.” She clicked through the tree of folders on the hard drive. “He didn’t organize anything. This could take forever. You’re hovering again.”
I stepped back, glanced out the windows. A truck passed slowly down the road, carrying bales of hay in the back. “How long will it take to look through his files?”
“I can try certain search parameters. It won’t capture everything, but it will be a start.”
“Go ahead,” I said, pacing, glancing out the window now and then while she typed. Occasionally, I glanced at the screen, watching windows and lists pop up.
“Okay, I’ll look in the documents,” she said.
“Wait.” I pointed at a subfolder. “Quick look at his photos first?” I couldn’t help my curiosity—and a touch of dread at what we might find.
“Your wish is my command.” She opened a subfolder. “Looks like he’s got his iPhone photos automatically downloading to this laptop from the cloud.” She pulled up a series of photos of Kieran and me from the previous year, wedding pictures that made my stomach drop.
“Leave the wedding photos,” I said. “Go back. I know he dated women here before I met him, but go back to his ex-wife. There, that folder, six years ago.”
She opened the folder of photographs—clicked through several shots of cars, boats, hikes, parties, group shots. Pictures of Kieran in medical school with his colleagues, with various girlfriends. As a child with his mother in California, then in Oregon. “No pictures of Dad,” Chantal said. “Wait, there’s one.”
“He looks exactly like his father,” I said, peering closely at the man in the suit, CEO of a hybrid-aircraft company. “Not much in those eyes.”
“Can you even tell?” Chantal said. “He looks like a nice man to me.” She clicked through to other photos.