by A. R. Torre
A year ago, I’d have found joy in her fear, but now, with everything I knew, I felt only guilt. Guilt over torturing a woman who was clearly mentally unhinged. Guilt over ruining her marriage with the one man who could live with her faults. She had set out to destroy my marriage, but I had succeeded in destroying her life.
“I want to give you this.” I held out the gold envelope, the paper limp with use, the document inside one I had read a hundred times. It hadn’t been just a will—it had also been a murder confession, twenty years in the past. “I never shared this with anyone, and I never will.”
The fight left her body, and she sagged against the closest shopping cart. Taking the envelope carefully, almost reverently, she held it against her heart.
“I found your childhood home and bought it. There is a deed in there that puts it in your name, along with the will. If you sign it and send it to my attorney, he’ll complete the paperwork. I think you should have it.”
“I don’t want that house,” she whispered. “You don’t know the memories I have in it.”
“Still . . .” I shook my head. “It’s too risky, having someone else own it. All it takes is them deciding to put in a pool, and they might dig up his body.”
She studied me, and it was the first time we’d had eye contact since the night the intruder came. “Have you seen Matt?”
I don’t know what I expected. A thank-you for the generous gift. An acknowledgment of my covering up her crime. Something other than the hitch in her voice when she said his name. Was it possible that she loved him? Had ever? Still did?
“Matt moved to Foster City. I speak to him occasionally if he’s in town.”
The last time Matt had been in Palo Alto, we’d gotten drunk at a Mexican bar, and he’d confessed his undying love for Neena. He’d also told me the truth about her father, a truth that conflicted with the confession in her will.
They hadn’t been high school sweethearts. Instead, Matt had been Neena’s next-door neighbor—the chubby guy she’d never looked twice at, the social outcast who had listened to muffled sounds of her verbal and physical abuse, the guy who did nothing until the night he couldn’t help himself. The night he’d rescued her. The night he heard her scream for help and beat and strangled her father to death after he found the man drunk and naked on top of her.
In that night, he became her hero, and by the time they dug a hole and buried her father in her backyard, fresh rosebushes planted over the grave, he was in love, and she was tripping over herself with gratitude. Grateful enough to go to prom with him. Grateful enough to ride to school with him. Grateful enough to publicly date the chubby boy with the goofy hair until the point where she fell in love with him. Married him. Took his ring and his name and then slowly and methodically turned into the woman who would try to steal my husband.
I swallowed the bitter taste that still lay on my tongue and reminded myself that a decade ago, Neena had done the right thing. She’d met with an attorney and penned a confession that gave intimate details of the crime, put the full weight of the killing on her, and exonerated Matt completely. She gave Matt a copy for their tenth wedding anniversary and filed backup copies with her attorney. With this exchange, Matt’s copy was now back in her hands—probably the only thing she’d ended up with in the divorce.
“If you talk to Matt again, will you tell him that I love him?” She glanced down and flushed with embarrassment. “He changed his number. And when I call his business line, they won’t put me through. I just want him to know that I do love him. That I’ll—I’ll always love him.”
“Are you sure?” I gave an awkward laugh. “Neena, you never really seemed to like him, much less—” My voice fell off at the heartbreak on her face, and I think it was the most honest reaction I had ever seen from her. “Yeah,” I said quietly. “I’ll tell him.”
“Okay. Thanks.” She raised the envelope. “And, uh, thanks for this. Though you shouldn’t have taken it to begin with.”
I nodded and watched as she folded the envelope in two and pushed it into the back pocket of her khakis.
Leaning forward, she pushed at the handle of the cart, then paused. “It was you, right? All of it?”
I didn’t respond. I had planned, upon driving here, to lie if confronted, but now, looking in her eyes, I couldn’t.
She let out a low laugh, and her gaze darted away from me, back to the store. “I’d have done the same thing if I’d thought of it.” She glanced back at me and stepped forward, pushing at the long line of carts. “Bye, Cat.”
“Bye.”
I waited until she was inside, the supercenter’s doors swallowing her up, and then I walked back to the car and got inside. I shut the door and took a long moment to collect my thoughts. Inside, my emotions warred over what I had expected versus what I had seen. Finally, I let out a breath and turned to face Matt. “She asked about you.”
“She did?” There was such painful hope in his voice. How did he still love her, a year later? A year full of blind dates, and one-night stands, and eating whatever he wanted, and pure freedom, and yet he wanted her back. Yearned for her. Called me in the middle of the night, drunk and heartbroken, aching for her.
“She said to tell you”—I sighed, terrified to open his emotional floodgates—“that she loves you.”
He froze in the seat, his eyes pinned on a spot on my dash. I could sense his mind working, could feel the emotional war of decisions in his head. He looked at me helplessly, and maybe her dictatorial manner was what he needed in his life. “What do I do?”
I reached over and gave him a long, firm hug. “You go to her,” I whispered in his ear. “And you let her win you back.”
That night, I crawled into bed beside William and allowed him to pull me into his chest, his arms wrapping around me, his leg sliding in between mine. I rested my head on his shoulder and relaxed into his warm embrace, the huff of his breath against my neck, the beat of his heart, solid and sure, against my shoulder.
I thought of our adoption applications, pending in the system. The children whose photos we’d looked over, the interviews we’d had, the nursery three doors down that I hadn’t yet placed a baby into.
I couldn’t pull the trigger. Couldn’t sign the paperwork. Couldn’t adopt a life. My therapist says that I don’t believe I’m worthy of a child, and I think she’s right. I don’t think either of us are. William was ready to throw us away over an ego boost. I was ready to destroy a woman’s life out of protective spite. How can I raise a baby if I can’t even control myself?
I expected, at this point in time, to feel happy. And I have, at times. Brief moments with William, when he told me he loved me, and I really felt it in his gaze. Brief moments when I looked out on our gardens and heard the silence in our life, the heartbeat of peace that seems to foreshadow another storm.
Brief moments. To be honest, I’m not sure I deserve anything more.
AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wrote this book for all those who have ever been cheated on. Those who have felt the rage against others and wanted to punish them in a hundred ways but felt helpless to do any of it.
Different women and men will read this book in different ways and associate with different characters. Some of you may hate it. Some of you will love it. If I made you feel something, then I’ve done my job. I will tell you this—I love every one of these characters. I’ve known every one of these characters. Built into their personalities and stories are a hundred minute moments of interactions, and I hope you enjoyed living in their world and experiencing their emotions.
This book changed a great deal in its many different drafts. I moved it from a small mountain town in North Carolina to Atherton, California. I changed Neena’s job from that of a psychiatrist to a business/life coach. I added in Neena’s father’s storyline and tweaked her personality traits to be less anal and more relatable.
I owe a tremendous thanks to Megha Parekh with Thomas & Mercer and Maura Kye-Case
lla with Don Congdon & Associates for weathering countless discussions over these characters’ journeys and their fates. Thank you, Charlotte Herscher, for fine-tuning the elements of the story and raising the bar it needed to jump over. In addition, thank you, Susan Barnes, Amy Vox Libris, Terezia Barna, and Tricia Crouch—all of you read and dissected early drafts and gave this book the love and attention it needed to reach one of the biggest publishing houses in the world.
An additional thank-you to the Thomas & Mercer team: Gracie Doyle, editorial director; Sarah Shaw, author relations manager; Laura Barrett, production editor; Oisin O’Malley, art director; and Erin Mooney, marketing manager.
I am indebted to many, but most of all to you, the reader. Thank you for picking up this novel and reading this story. Please consider leaving a review and recommending it to others. Your continued support is appreciated more than you will ever know.
If you would like to be in the loop on my novels, please subscribe to my email updates at nextnovel.com.
Until the next novel,
Alessandra
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2013 Eric Dean Photography
A. R. Torre is a pseudonym for New York Times bestselling author Alessandra Torre. Torre is an award-winning bestselling author of more than twenty novels. Torre has been featured in such publications as Elle and Elle UK and has guest-blogged for the Huffington Post. In addition to writing, Torre is the creator of Alessandra Torre Ink, a website, community, and online school for aspiring authors. Learn more at www.alessandratorre.com.