Justine wasn’t a murderer.
“Tell me about growing up all over the world,” Justine said to Constantine, leaning forward just a bit. “It sounds terribly exciting.”
“You have the terrible part right.” Constantine laughed. “Every time I had to pack up my model airplanes and stuffed bears into this old green duffel of my dad’s, I thought, ‘This is the last time.’ Of course it wasn’t. We never stopped moving.”
“And your mother? Did she enjoy moving house and having new adventures?”
His face changed slightly, becoming at once harder and more vulnerable. “She died when I was eight. We were in Düsseldorf. She caught pneumonia and was gone within the week. She never had time to say goodbye. One day she was fine, a little glassy-eyed and coughing. We were playing Hearts—the card game, you know it? We’d played at least fifty rounds, all afternoon, and she hadn’t cooked dinner, and my dad was so mad when he got home to a cold stove. They had a fight, she went to her room pleading a headache. Dad and I cleaned up the cards, ate toast and beans, which was fine by me, I loved toast and beans. I knocked on her door and shouted good-night, not knowing she was so sick. They told us later that by then, when I knocked, she was already too far gone to save. She never woke the next morning, and died a week later.” He shook his head, gave her a rueful smile. “I’ve never told anyone that before. I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”
“The Scotch, probably, or the pollen from the cherry blossoms.”
Justine was witty! Imagine that.
“I think it’s you,” he said, those electric eyes on her mouth. “I think Justine Holliday is making me senseless.”
“Pas possible, mon enfant.” God, why had she called him that? A pet name, already? They hadn’t even known each other for twenty minutes. Don’t be an idiot, Justine. She sipped her champagne casually. “We’re simply ships passing in the night.”
An offer, passed on. She noticed Constantine relax a bit, saw right into his thoughts in the uncanny way she had. (Justine isn’t like that, Sutton warned herself.)
He’d been trying very hard to make this a romantic moment, something to remember, perhaps a wonderful anecdote to trot out at parties and tell their grandchildren. “Your grandmother fell in love with me over champagne at a tiny table in a seedy café in Paris, children. Watch, and learn.” He was a man on the make, a man looking for love in the most romantic city in the world. He’d found a willing target and was going to work hard to sweep her off her feet.
He probably had genital warts. Or herpes.
His smile was more relaxed now, too, and his eyes had gone from predatory to warm, inviting, comfortable. She could sink right in, like walking through waves into a deep, blue ocean.
“So tell me about you, Justine.”
“About me?” She touched his bare forearm with a curious finger and the voice in her head said, Watch out for sharks.
A BABY IS BORN
Then
Dashiell Ethan Montclair came two weeks early, practically in the parking lot of the post office where Sutton had just dropped their check in the mail. Thank goodness Ethan saw her double over as she exited the building with their PO box mail in her hand. He managed to get her to the hospital with fifteen minutes to spare.
Dashiell was always in a hurry.
Ethan complained the name sounded like a hero from one of Sutton’s novels. She explained, in unending detail, why she’d chosen the name. After Hammett, of course. A crime writer. A man’s writer. A man’s man, Hammett. For heaven’s sake, Ethan, you call yourself a writer?
After the nearly inauspicious beginnings to the child’s life, Ethan caved. Whatever Sutton wanted, Sutton got. That was their deal.
Dashiell was an adorable baby. All fat cheeks and pink lips and deep blue-gray eyes, just like his mother. He was a watcher, quiet and calm, easily amused, with a gurgling, contagious laugh, always willing to go down for a nap so Sutton or Ethan could work. Sutton kept him in a basket on the floor next to her desk, like a cat, or a dog. She’d tap the edge with her foot, set it to rocking, and Dashiell would lie content and sated in his nest.
Ethan adjusted to their new life faster than Sutton. She was—admittedly—a selfish woman. She liked their old life. Parties at night, late-sleeping mornings, sex anytime they wanted, travel galore. Liked not having to answer to anyone, not having a boss, nor having a get up and leave the house and sit in traffic and make jokes at the watercooler about last night’s Dancing with the Stars job.
They had freedom still, yes, and now they had a child, which made Ethan happier than anything before.
But after the “Summer of Acclaim,” as Ethan called it in his most condescending voice, things were a bit rocky.
Rocky. What a silly term to describe a marriage on the rocks. Tumultuous was a better description. Stormy. Torturous. Of or relating to Tantos, the pits of hell.
I got that bruise when I walked into the refrigerator.
Of course you’re sorry and it will never happen again.
Yes, I still love you.
That phone call? Just some fan, wanting to meet for coffee. They’re so very aggressive these days.
They built a house, a life, on lies.
There were good moments. Great moments. Calm moments.
Croissants with butter in bed, flakes getting on the sheets.
Walks along the river, with blossoms from the trees raining down in the breeze.
The trip to New York, that night at the Waldorf Astoria, after too many bottles of wine at dinner with Ethan’s agent and editor. They’d had fun, damn it all. They pretended it was their first time, reenacted the events of their first fateful meeting. He left her in the hall waiting to come into the room, without her panties, for ten minutes.
That trip.
Sutton knew better than to get pregnant to save their marriage. That’s something desperate women did, and she wasn’t a desperate woman. She had a rocky marriage, but they were trying to smooth the jagged edges. They’d turned the page in New York, she was sure of it.
Turned a page, yes. Then they’d driven the car right off a cliff, holding hands and crying hallelujah.
Dashiell truly was a surprise, an accident. No, not an accident, Sutton, a blessing. He was a blessing, then and now. An angel. A cherubic little angel, a gift from God.
The Lord giveth. He giveth more than we can handle, sometimes.
Her doctor told her there was a reason the birth control pill had a 3 percent failure rate, even for women who took them religiously. Which she had. She’d even set an alarm on her phone and carried them in her purse. She was never a moment behind schedule. She ran her birth control like she ran her life, seamlessly, organized, structured.
She didn’t like to think of her baby as a statistic.
But the cracks were forming before the pregnancy. The mangled car was at the bottom of the cliff, still smoking.
Dashiell, while adorable, was a thorn in her already rocky marriage. A baby meant scheduling—for the sex, for the trips, for their (her) work, for their life. They were no longer carefree, untethered. There was a constant flow of things that needed to be handled, from diapers to feedings to naps to babysitting. To nannies. Many, many nannies.
It was her Goldilocks nature again. This one was too strict, this one too loose. This one she walked in on getting high in the laundry room. Sutton blamed herself for that one; the girl’s name was Moonshadow, for heaven’s sake.
Finally, finally, they settled on a genuinely lovely young woman named Jan, Just Jan, as Sutton liked to think of her. She was plain, with pale blue eyes and white-blond hair done in two braids that swung on either side of her neck like a butter-churning dairy maid. She had a degree in elementary education, but hadn’t liked teaching. She was better off one-on-one. Sutton thought she probably had a t
ouch of Asperger’s—her social cues were severely lacking—but she was devoted to Dashiell, and he to her.
With Just Jan on board, things returned to a more normal routine. The sex got better, and more frequent. They took a few trips, all together: Just Jan down at the pool with Dashiell under an umbrella, covered head to toe in light layers and a tiny floppy hat; Sutton and Ethan on the balcony, eating grapes and drinking champagne. It almost felt familiar. It almost felt right.
So right, Ethan started a new book. He started many new books, and generally grew tetchy and bored after a few weeks. This time, though, he’d stuck to it, and there were pages, actual pages, on the floor of his office, waiting patiently in their manuscript box for their brethren to arrive.
Ethan was a madman when he wrote, comically Einstein-esque in his eccentricity. He worked for hours, paying no attention to the normal order of things; sunrises and sunsets and bedtimes of others were irrelevant. His hair stood on end; he forgot to shower. He needed odd foods at odd hours. Eggplant parmesan at ten in the morning. Pecan-maple pancakes and crispy bacon at four in the afternoon. Always from scratch and with high-end organics, nothing premade, store-bought, or delivery would do.
Sutton cooked whatever he wanted, because that’s what good wives did. She cooked and cleaned and mothered him, and sometimes she even had time to mother her child, as well.
She began to wonder if she was in an abusive relationship. What would she say to a therapist? He pays for everything, hired me a perfectly wonderful nanny. But now he won’t let me do my work, and he makes me cook for him. All the time.
She couldn’t tell the truth, obviously. That would never do.
She decided, pound for pound, her life was simply comical. Her career could wait. Once he finished the book, she’d be able to return to her schedule. What was a few months, after all? She did so love to cook.
And then he’d gotten stuck. Ethan always got stuck. But this time, it was deeper into the meat of the novel, the important part, where the main character reveals himself to the reader for the very first time, and is judged. A seminal moment. In her brand of novels, it was called a plot point, but in his, it was seminal. Even their language had to be separate, different, his more important, always, always.
As sudden as an unexpected storm and an ear-shattering clap of thunder, his flow ended. No more fingers clattering on the keyboard at all hours, no more random food requests. He slunk around the house, hollow-eyed and pale-cheeked, pulling books off the shelves in the library, leaving them scattered on the chairs by the window that overlooked the front porch.
She offered to help. She’d helped him before. Tell me what the issue is. Let me see if I can come up with something.
She couldn’t leave the house for a week, even had to avoid Just Jan. Her swollen, bruised nose took forever to heal. There was so much blood, so many apologies. The fallout haunted them forever. It seemed fitting that she would ruin the marble she so loved with her own blood.
It had been a stupid mistake to offer like that. Everyone makes them. She hadn’t thought. And she’d paid the price.
The story should have ended right there. With the black eye and the broken nose and the baby screaming from his withy basket because Just Jan had the day off.
But that was where the story really began.
CAFÉ AU LAIT IN BED
Now
Sutton opened her eyes. The view was startling—to the left, the man beside her, and to her right, the Tour framed like a picture postcard in the window.
You wanted a new life. You’ve got it. You’ve started it. With a motherfucking bang, no less, sister.
Her fall from grace hadn’t taken long. Sutton—Justine—was simultaneously furious with herself and wallowing in the glory of sex with a new person, in a strange bed, in a strange but all too familiar city.
Constantine felt her stir and put a hand possessively on her hip. She stopped moving and he fell back asleep.
She shut her eyes, too, blocking out the world, and thought about Ethan.
It was wrong to. She knew that. Thinking about a man while in bed with another wasn’t a good, healthy way to live. It seemed she’d done it once too often lately, too.
They’d been happy in the beginning. She remembered telling her mother how very happy they were.
“We are happy. So very happy. Happy, happy, happy.
“We’re perfect for one another. Both writers, both creatives. We are on the same schedule—we both like to write first thing in the morning, like to stay up late, watching movies and TV shows. We both like action movies, and despise horror films. We don’t read the same authors, so we’re able to expose each other to new ideas.
“Money? Well, not to brag, but he has plenty, but you know, Mother, so do I. Maybe not quite as much as he—okay, Mother, if I tell you a secret, will you swear not to say anything? I actually made more than he did on my last contract. It’s just the nature of commercial fiction versus literary. We genre writers are always seen as being so vulgar because we actually make money at our art. But don’t tell a soul I told you that. You promise?
“Yes, he loves me, Mother. He really does.
“Yes, he knows.
“Yes, I told him.
“Oh, for God’s sake. I need to go.”
Her mother. Was it ever possible to have a normal, loving conversation? Always dredging up the guts of the past. Threatening and cajoling.
Once, as a teenager, so fed up with her life and needing a little sympathy, Sutton concocted a fantasy for her friends. She confided that the woman she called Mother, Siobhan Healy, wasn’t her real mother. Sutton had no idea who her real mother was. She had a name, of course, off the birth certificate, but that woman had left Sutton behind on the steps of a fire station in Indiana and hadn’t ever come back. Finally, when she was old enough, Sutton had done the research and learned who her biological mother was. She’d tracked her down, saw the woman’s shiny new life, with her shiny husband and three shiny children in a shiny house with two shiny cars and a shiny fucking dog, and had known she’d never fit in there. So she’d gone home, back to her decidedly nonshiny trailer with Maude, her foster mother—she hadn’t yet changed her name to Siobhan—who was between husbands and needed a little extra cash, and so gamed the system to allow her to foster. Maude, pedestrian old Maude, who smoked Pall Mall cigarettes and drank rotgut vodka out of Coke cans because she thought that vodka didn’t make your breath smell like alcohol and her boss at the Kroger didn’t know she was showing up shit-faced.
It had been fun while it lasted, pretending not to belong to her reality, but word got back to Maude, who set the friends and parents straight, then grounded Sutton for lying.
Still, Maude was a poor substitute for a real, loving, kind, gentle, guiding mother. The woman thought of when she thought of mothers, and had an urge to have a conversation with a maternal figure, was her aunt Josephine—a cousin to Maude once removed by marriage—who’d swooped in to rescue Sutton after Maude was sent to court-ordered rehab for a DUI. Josephine had raised her for a while, made sure she was fed and clothed and had a roof over her head, until Maude got out of rehab and went to AA and found God and straightened out and changed her name to Siobhan and found a boyfriend named Joe, who had a nice two-story split-level near Nashville, and moved them in with him before he could change his mind, lickety-split.
No more Aunt Josephine. No more loving, motherly conversations.
Instead...Joe. Joe the Schmo.
Her mother didn’t know what Joe was saying to Sutton behind her back, or didn’t care.
Oh, stop already. Enough of that train of thought. You’re supposed to be thinking about Ethan, not Joe the dickhead Schmo and the consequences of your mother’s inability to see him for what he was.
Ethan was good in bed. Electrifyingly good. He knew exactly wha
t turned her on, which buttons to push, and didn’t ever miss a chance to take her screaming over the edge into oblivion.
Constantine hadn’t been awful. He’d actually been pretty good. A little wider than Ethan in terms of penis girth (she was a bit sore), and she’d been exactly right about those long fingers and what they could do and how they would feel.
The thing was, as much as she hated to admit it, no one else would ever be quite good enough for her. Ethan was mind-blowingly spectacular in the bedroom. There was some truth to the old adage, it’s not the size of the ship, it’s the motion in the ocean. Ethan may not have had the biggest dick on the planet, but man, oh, man, did he know how to use it.
The first year they were together, Sutton made a small dot in her journal every time they had sex. They were so far above average it wasn’t even funny; she stopped keeping track.
The second year, she started tracking again, and noticed it had dropped off. The third year, well, that was the year of the first incident, the house, and that little cunt, so it shouldn’t have counted at all.
Because inevitably, Ethan’s eye began to wander. He was beautiful, with a great accent, a sharp wit, and a brilliant mind, and he was being pushed up against pretty young things at the conferences and book signings and private teaching gigs, and he was a man, after all. A man like any other, designed to go forth and propagate his seed in every available fertile vagina.
Did he have any other children?
The thought brought her up short. Nausea spiked. She’d never thought to ask, or to accuse. Except for the one time, he always denied cheating on her, but she knew he lied. It was nice of him, in a way, to try to protect her feelings by not openly admitting the humiliation. She expected the worst of it happened while she was in the hospital (that damnable place) when they wouldn’t let him in to see her for a week. She’d been in bad shape and had made it very clear she didn’t want him to see her this way, and the staff listened. When she got home there was a pair of skimpy undies under the bed. Red. Thong. Barely anything but string and a scrap of lace. The kind an expensive whore would wear, or perhaps a graduate student in English wanting to impress her favorite writer by showing him how very inventive and free she was.
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