by Margot Hunt
“What time is it?” she asked groggily. She sat up, supporting herself on one elbow. “Why are you up so early?”
“I have a busy day. Clients, partner meeting. Usual drill.” I grabbed my jacket off the wing chair in the corner of the room. “You don’t mind taking Charlie to school?”
“Of course not.”
“Good.”
“Hey...are you going to be okay?”
I was overcome with an unexpected rush of gratitude. Nat had noticed how distraught I was and was worried about me. I turned to her, ready to spill out all the dark and terrifying thoughts that my mind had been playing on repeat, when I saw her expression. It was not one of warm concern. Instead, it was coolly appraising, as though she were trying to decide if I was going to be a liability. The impulse to confide in her drained away.
“I’ll be fine.” I left our bedroom and closed the door firmly behind me.
My appetite had still not returned, so I left the house without consuming anything other than a cup of coffee from the pot I brewed. It churned acidly in my stomach the entire way to my office. I drove to work by rote, glad that the traffic was light at the early hour.
The law offices of Romano, Krall, Ricci, Peters, Anderson, Clarke & Miller, LLC, were unsurprisingly empty at seven o’clock in the morning. I closed myself into my office, which was located at the end of a hallway—not the corner office, which still belonged to Gil Romano, but one office over. I turned on my computer, and once it hummed to life, I began going through my emails. The familiar routine soothed me. I’d recently been hired by Arthur Santos, who owned a chain of Cuban restaurants, to completely restructure his estate—trusts for the kids, philanthropic legacies, the whole works. He’d had his assistant send me a ton of documents to go over, and this was the perfect time to let myself sink into them. This was what I did. This was what I was good at. As I sorted through the papers, scanning and processing the information within, my mind calmed. I felt comfortably numb for the first time since Friday night.
“Will?”
I started and looked up. Jaime Anderson had cracked open my door and was looking in at me. Jaime had been at the firm for a few years longer and had made partner just ahead of me. She was a very attractive woman—long, dark hair, high cheekbones, full lips that smiled easily. I’d had a crush on her for years.
And then, five months earlier, we’d started sleeping together.
“Hey,” I said, leaning back in my chair. I rubbed my hands nervously on my knees.
“You’re in early.” Jaime leaned a hip against the door frame, shifting her weight onto one leg. Jaime always wore heels, the higher the better, a detail I found exquisitely sexy. She cocked her other leg behind her at a forty-five-degree angle and lifted a hand to one hip. She had glorious hips and she knew it—they were soft, rounded, incredibly feminine.
The affair had taken me by surprise. I certainly hadn’t been looking to cheat on Nat. I hadn’t even fully admitted to myself how unhappy I was with my marriage. But then one night, Jaime and I were both working late at the office on separate projects. She asked if I wanted to order food in. We’d shared containers of moo shu pork and chicken fried rice, and washed them down with glasses of pinot noir from a bottle that one of Jaime’s clients had gifted her. One minute she was sitting across from me, laughing, her cheeks flushed, and the next thing I knew we were making out like a couple of hormone-addled teenagers. It had escalated from there, at times to the point of recklessness. We’d checked into local hotels a few times together, but even more often, we ended up making love on the couch in one of our offices. I knew if we kept it up, we were going to eventually get caught. Lisa Sing, one of the paralegals, had given me a few pointed looks that made me wonder if she’d already figured out what was going on.
I kept thinking I should just end it. I knew it was the right thing to do, but before it began, I hadn’t fully thought through the consequences of having an affair with someone I worked with. Were we supposed to just stop sleeping together one day? Just return to our previous roles as coworkers both married to other people who occasionally flirted too much at the firm holiday party? But I hadn’t been ready to give Jaime up. She was a delicious, fizzing secret that had transformed my boring, colorless life into something exciting.
Anyway. I wasn’t up to dealing with that particular thorny issue today. I had enough to cope with.
I gestured toward my laptop by way of explanation. “I have a seriously busy day. I wanted to get some work done before the office cranked up to crazy.”
Jaime looked back over one shoulder, checking to see if anyone was around. She stepped into my office, closed the door behind her. Jaime folded herself into one of the visitor’s chairs in front of my desk, crossing one leg over the other. “What happened on Friday night? You took off so suddenly.”
I nodded and tried to take a deep breath, but it caught in my chest. Robert lying on the couch... The pillow in my hand... The moment when his body stopped twitching... I had to force myself to push aside the horrible montage of images that kept flipping through my head.
“Natalie wasn’t feeling well. She had a bad stomach bug and asked me to stop at the drugstore on my way home to get her some medicine. She was in pretty bad shape.”
Jaime pursed her lips into a moue. My leaving her to rush to Nat’s aid obviously irked her. But she said, with the practiced deceit of any seasoned lawyer, “I’m so sorry to hear that. I hope she’s feeling better.”
“She’s fine now,” I said, wondering if I should have gone off script by adding in the part about stopping at the store on my way back to the house. I had a feeling Nat wouldn’t be a fan of my making alterations to the carefully gone-over timeline for Friday night. Then again, Nat wouldn’t be happy to know I’d left out the not insignificant detail that I’d been out on a date with another woman when she called me from Robert’s house.
“And then I didn’t hear from you all weekend,” Jaime continued. She looked at me with dark, inscrutable eyes. “I thought you would have called me to explain. Or at least texted.”
“I...had hoped I’d...be able to,” I faltered. With everything that had happened on Friday night, I hadn’t even thought about Jaime. “The weekend got away from me.”
Jaime continued to hold my gaze. “Is that really all you have to say? After bailing on me like that Friday? Jesus, Will, I was mortified. The waiter thought I’d been ditched middate. He actually told me how sorry he was when he brought the check, which you stuck me with, by the way.”
My shoulders, that had finally started to relax while I was in my work-induced fugue, tensed up again. I should have known this was coming. Yet I had failed to prepare a plausible response for the woman I was having an affair with about why I had run off and left her in a restaurant, on her own, on a night we’d planned to spend together. We’d purposely picked a restaurant in the next town over. One that was made up of a maze of small rooms, where we could eat tucked away in a corner. It had been a risk since someone we knew might still have seen us. But that had actually made it even more exciting.
The idea that a mere three days ago I had been looking to add excitement into my life made me feel faintly nauseous.
“I’m really sorry about leaving you like that.”
“You know, if this,” Jaime made a circular motion with her hand, “is getting to be too much for you, just tell me.”
It sounded like she was offering a way out. Just say the word and the affair would be magically switched off. But nothing was ever that simple. Besides, Jaime said things like that only because she wanted me to insist that no, breaking up was the last thing I wanted. She loved the idea that I found her irresistible, perhaps even more than she liked me. It had surprised me that despite how gorgeous and sensual she was, Jaime required a lot of reassurance. In that way, she was the opposite of Nat, who was perhaps the most self-contained and self-reliant person I
knew. Sometimes I wondered if I had purposely picked a mistress who was in many ways the polar opposite of my wife.
“Of course it’s not.” I lowered my voice. “You know how I feel about you.”
Jaime smiled, dimples appearing in her cheeks. “I’m not sure I do, after Friday night.”
I stood, walked around my desk and leaned down, bracing my arms against the Jaime’s chair. She looked up at me, her hair falling back behind her. I smiled—or gave my best impression of a smile—then leaned forward to kiss her on the mouth. She resisted only for a minute, before giving in and returning the kiss. Jaime pulled back, and looked at me.
“I was worried something had happened,” she murmured. “I thought maybe your wife had found out about us. I spent the whole weekend wondering if she was going to call Thomas to tell him we’re having an affair.”
A few short days ago, that would have been my worst-case scenario for the weekend, as well.
“No, I would have told you if something like that was happening.”
“Would you?” Jaime shrugged. “How would I know that?”
“Because I would never let you get ambushed like that.”
“Oh.” Her shoulders dropped a bit, and her expression softened. “I didn’t know what to think, honey. You just disappeared.”
To kill a man, I thought, the words bubbling into my head, against my will. To hold a pillow over his face...while he struggled for his life...making a keening noise that didn’t even sound human...
Fucking A, Clarke, get a grip, I told myself.
“Again, I’m really sorry about that.” I kissed her again. This time, she kissed me back more passionately, winding her hands into my hair. I felt the familiar rush of arousal her touch always brought, and was shocked that my body was still capable of this sort of response after everything that had happened over the past few days.
Jaime broke away first and stood. Even with her heels, she only came up to my midchest, so she had to look up at me, arching her neck back.
“Just don’t ever do that to me again,” she said. And even though she smiled when she said it, I wondered if there was a more menacing warning behind the words. My stomach dipped and swayed, as it occurred to me that this woman knew I’d rushed off in a panic on the night Robert died. She was one of the loose ends that Nat had worried about...and that I couldn’t tell Nat about.
Jaime kissed me again, briefly but warmly, before turning to sashay out of my office. “I’ll catch you later, handsome. I have a settlement conference this morning. I have to go get ready to do battle.”
Once Jaime had left, closing the door again behind her with a soft click, I sat back down behind my desk. It wasn’t until I picked up the glass on my desk and saw the water sloshing around inside that I realized my hands were shaking. I set the glass back down.
Had Jaime really just threatened me or was the epic stress I’d been under the past few days making me paranoid? Jaime had on more than one occasion mentioned the possibility of our both leaving our spouses in order to be together. These comments always came at intimate times, almost always postcoital, and they’d seemed like a harmless fantasy.
Now I wondered if she was more seriously invested in our relationship than I had realized.
I stared down at my hands, still shaking, and wondered when my life had turned so horrifically unrecognizable.
My phone beeped. I looked around, wondering where I’d put it—at home, I tended to carry it with me all the time, because it was often Jaime texting me—but once I was in the office, I didn’t keep track of it as carefully. It beeped again, this time coming from the direction of my suit jacket, which I’d shed earlier and draped over my office chair. I pulled out my phone and saw that the incoming texts were from Nat.
The first one read,
Have you seen the news?
The second one:
The police found Robert’s body.
Chapter 22
I quickly went online to search for news of what happened. The website for our local newspaper didn’t have much in the way of detail. The story simply said that the body of Robert Gibbons, a private school principal in Shoreham, had been discovered on Sunday night...which was less than forty-eight hours after I’d killed him. Someone—not identified in the story—had gone to his house after being unable to get ahold of him by phone.
I wondered who’d discovered his body and desperately hoped it wasn’t the school mom Robert had been secretly dating. Michelle Cole, Nat had said. I remembered the name, although still not the face. If it was her, it meant that she was already in contact with the police...which meant it would be only a matter of time before they knew Robert had called Michelle on the night he died from the same phone Nat had used to call me.
I forced myself to read on. Whoever it was who found Robert had peered through the window, saw his motionless body and called the police. Robert’s body had been taken to the coroner’s office for an autopsy. Results were expected within the week.
I spent the rest of the day in a blind panic. Robert’s body had been found too quickly. The police would almost certainly know the date of his death and probably even the time frame on that day. Anything that narrowed their investigation was bad news for us. And again, there was the phone linking Robert to me.
I went through the motions of what I had to do that day—talking to clients, giving Lisa Sing detailed instructions for a document she was drafting for me, attending a partners’ meeting—without remembering any of it. The entire time, my heart was thumping painfully in my chest, and there was a weird rushing sound in my ears. I was pretty sure I wasn’t hiding it well, either, from the concerned glances Jaime kept shooting me during the partner’s meeting. It was too hot in the conference room, with the afternoon sun streaming in through the double-glazed windows, and I started to perspire, to feel my face flush. I wanted to take off my jacket, but didn’t want anyone to see that I had sweat through my button-down shirt.
When it was just nearly five, I bolted from my office, not able to sit there for one moment longer. That morning, I couldn’t wait to get away from Nat. Now all I wanted to do was get home to her, so we could hash out the implications of Robert’s body being discovered.
Nat was in the kitchen when I got home, standing at the island and chopping vegetables for the salad we were having with dinner. I poured myself a large bourbon and sat on a stool, watching her work. The knife flashed up and down as she sliced carrots and quartered cucumbers.
“Where’s Charlie?”
“Around here somewhere, so be careful what you say.” She glanced up at me. “You look completely freaked-out.”
“I am completely freaked-out.” Why aren’t you more freaked-out? I wanted to ask. “All I’ve been able to think about all day is what if it was Michelle Cole who fo—?”
She cut me off. “It wasn’t.”
“What?”
“Dottie Fischer found him,” she hissed.
“Who?”
“You know, the school secretary. Mrs. Fischer.”
“Her name’s Dottie?”
“Yes. Did you think her first name was ‘missus’?”
“I never thought of her as having a first name. How do you know she was the one who found him?”
“Mandy told me. She was in the school office, picking up her girls for a dentist appointment, and heard then. Apparently, Mrs. Fischer was so shaken up, she took the day off, which is practically unheard of for her.”
I could feel my panic, which had been spiraling all day, let up a bit. “Why didn’t you tell me? I’ve been freaking out that it was Michelle Cole who found him. Which would mean that she was in touch with the police. That she’d tell them about the phone call.”
“I told you not to worry about that,” Nat said.
“Of course I’m worried! I can barely eat or sleep or even see straigh
t! And won’t the fact that they found his body mean—” I lowered my voice then to a whisper “—that the police will know when Robert died?”
“Probably. But it is what it is,” Nat answered.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Of course it would have been better if they hadn’t found him so quickly,” she said quietly. Her head was bent over her work, her short, dark hair curving alongside her face. “But we can’t engage in magical thinking. We have to deal with the facts as they are.”
The “magical thinking” comment stung. It wasn’t the first time she’d accused me of engaging in it. Once, when we were in law school, I’d decided to go out drinking the night before our torts exam. I explained to Nat that it made more sense to relax and unwind the night before a big test, rather than cram. Nat replied that this was magical thinking, also absolute bullshit. Being prepared was far more important than being relaxed, and besides, it was never a good idea to go into a test hungover. Nat got an A in the class, while I squeaked by with a C+. Also, I knew Nat liked to think of herself as the cool, logical, rational one in our relationship, and me as the shallow former frat boy who’d never fully grown up. It was irritating as hell.
“I still think it’s terrible news.” I glanced around to make sure Charlie hadn’t appeared. “You said that the more decomposed the body is, the harder it would be to determine the exact time of death. And maybe even the cause of death, too. If a few weeks had gone by, they might have bought that it was a suicide.”
Nat glanced up at me. “Yes, I do know that. But it wasn’t realistic to think it would take weeks to find the body. Robert does—did—have a lot of connections. Eventually someone was going to get worried when they couldn’t reach him. The most we could have hoped for was a few additional days.”
“And you don’t think their finding him early is an issue?”
“It’s not an issue until it’s an issue.”
My temper flared. “That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one who—” I stopped and looked around again, then lowered my voice to an angry growl “—is guilty of murder.”