He looks up and sighs. “Remember I once told you about my college girlfriend? How we’re still friends?”
“Yeah,” she says, irritated at his abrupt change of subject. “You said she dumped you for—” She stops, her eyes widening. “That was Marin?”
“Christ, catch up.” He’s back in his phone again.
If it were anyone else, Kenzie would be across the room, yanking the goddamned phone out of his hand so he would pay attention to the conversation.
“How could you not tell me? Did you already know who he was when I told you about him? Did you . . .” She pauses. “Did you set this up?”
“When you said his name was Derek, and that he had a metallic black Maserati, I knew. Not too many rich douchebags in Seattle named Derek with a black Maserati. You’d already been with him for a month at that point, so how could I have set it up?” J.R. shakes his head in disgust. “Use your head, M.K.”
“But you still lied to me,” she says. She can’t believe what she’s hearing. She’s been talking about Derek for months and months, and not one word from J.R. that her married boyfriend is the husband of the ex-girlfriend who broke his heart. Even Lorna’s said that she wishes her son had married his college sweetheart.
It explains why J.R. always seemed so interested in her relationship with Derek. It also explains why he backed away. He wanted her to end up with Derek.
So that he could have Marin.
“I didn’t lie,” J.R. says. “I withheld. And now you know.”
“So this isn’t really about the money for you, is it?” Kenzie feels a tingle go through her. “This is personal. What is this, some kind of sick game you’re playing to try to break them up? To, what, punish her for daring to leave you for the guy she married and had a kid with?” Another thought occurs to her, and the next words are out of her mouth before she can stop herself. “Holy shit, J.R., did you take their kid?”
He’s out of the bed so fast, she has no time to react. He shoves her up against the wall, causing the back of her head to smack solidly against it. His hand is back on her jaw, squeezing twice as hard as he did before, and his dark eyes bore into hers. She can’t move. She can’t look away. All she can do is close her eyes, feeling his hot breath on her bruised cheek.
“If you ever say anything about the kid again,” he says, “I will fucking kill you. Do you understand me, McKenzie?”
He never calls her by her first name.
Kenzie would nod if she could move her head, but all she can do is whimper, to let him know she understands.
Chapter 30
Marin has no idea how to start this conversation.
She can’t decide where to begin. There’s so much they haven’t said to each other in the past four hundred ninety-four days that it doesn’t feel right to just leap in. But Derek ends up speaking first.
“Was there someone here?” He places his laptop bag down on the kitchen island and looks around. “I saw a car parked by the curb.”
She’d asked Castro to leave before Derek came in, and the PI exited the house through the front door, the same way she’d entered. Derek came in through the mudroom. They did not meet.
“Yes, there was.”
He waits. She returns his gaze almost defiantly, daring him to ask her to tell him more. Then she notices the bags under his eyes, the hollowness of his cheeks, the pallor of his skin. Has he been like this for a while? Or just today?
“Are you going to tell me who it was?” he asks.
“It was the private investigator I hired last year to find our son.”
He jolts.
“The same one,” Marin continues calmly, “who told me about your affair with McKenzie Li. Six months, Derek. Wow.”
He opens his mouth to speak, then shuts it again. He seems to not know what to say, and she can only imagine the flurry of emotions competing for dominance inside his head as he tries to decide what to tell her. Does he deny it, or confirm that it’s true? If he acknowledges that it’s true, does he tell her the whole story, or only part of it? If he denies it, how does he explain it away?
It’s interesting to watch a liar when you know they’re lying. The tiny facial twitches, the spotty eye contact, the little vibrations of various body parts. Things you might not notice if you didn’t know they were lying. Things you would never think to look for if you trust them, because you’re assuming everything they tell you is true. Someone who loves you isn’t supposed to lie to you.
Marin and Derek are standing on opposite sides of the large granite island, five feet away from each other. It might as well be five miles. A full minute passes, and he still doesn’t speak. Absurdly, another line from The Princess Bride pops into Marin’s brain. The Man in Black is facing off with Vizzini in order to decide who gets Princess Buttercup: “All right. Where is the poison? The battle of wits has begun.”
Finally, Derek whispers, “I’m sorry.” His voice is hoarse, and he hangs his head, placing both hands on the island for support. “She didn’t mean anything to me . . . I don’t love her.”
Marin pulls her phone out and taps on the Shadow app. She slides it across the cold granite so Derek can see the photo of McKenzie’s beaten face displayed on the screen. He nearly crumples.
“So?” Marin asks. “Are you going to pay it?”
“Oh god,” he chokes. “Oh my god, I never wanted you to know. Marin, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She ignores him, impervious to his obvious pain. “They want two hundred and fifty grand. I know we have it, so that’s not the issue. What are you going to do? Pay it? Or do you think this photo is fake, and she’s extorting you, the way she did her other rich boyfriends? I heard the last one gave her fifty thousand. She’s clearly leveled up with you.”
He stares at the photo again, then looks at Marin, blank. “What are you talking about? What other boyfriends?”
“Oh,” Marin says, and for the first time all day, she smiles. It’s not a kind smile at all. It’s vicious, which is exactly how she feels right now. “You didn’t know. Allow me the pleasure of telling you. Your little sugar baby is a pro. She dates married rich guys and then demands payment when they try to end it. What, did you think she really loved you?”
Derek doesn’t answer, which is probably wise.
“But the bruises, the whole being-tied-up thing, the ransom demand, that’s all new,” Marin says. “So, what do you think? Real or staged?”
Her husband looks as pale and sick as she’s ever seen him. “I told them I’d pay it. I have the money. It’s in a bag in the car. I’m waiting for a text.”
“Is that the same thing you did when they reached out about Sebastian?”
He freezes.
“You goddamned sonofabitch! How could you not tell me?!” Marin’s voice thunders in the oversize kitchen, the sound echoing off their designer cabinets.
At the sound of her voice, Derek, at six foot four, cringes into a person who appears even smaller than she is.
“I’m sorry,” he cries, sobs racking every part of his body. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”
It was a month to the day that Sebastian was taken. One month exactly; thirty-one days of the waking nightmare they could scarcely believe had become their life.
The investigation into Sebastian’s disappearance—despite his photo and the video from the market being all over the national news—had dried up. There were no leads, no ransom demands, no witnesses coming forward after suddenly remembering something they hadn’t a month ago when he first went missing. When Derek called the FBI and demanded to know what else could be done, the agent assigned to them told him that while Sebastian’s case would always be considered “open and ongoing,” they had to redirect their immediate resources to the hundreds of missing children cases that were occurring every week across the country.
It sent Marin into a spiral. She was already in a terrible place, her mind filled with the horrors of pedophiles and sex trafficking and
whatever else her imagination tortured her with. But after Derek called to tell her what the FBI had said, she sank all the way to the bottom.
Derek was the one who found her. He returned home from an urgent meeting at the office, a meeting he didn’t trust anyone else to handle, and there was his wife, lying in the bathtub, unconscious. He’d only been gone three hours. He called 911 and performed CPR until the paramedics arrived. They managed to revive her and keep her conscious until she could be properly cared for at the hospital.
“You nearly died.” Derek speaks in a monotone, but the tears are flowing freely down his face. “I thought you were dead when I opened the bathroom door and saw you.”
Marin doesn’t say anything. She’s already apologized a hundred times for scaring him, and Sal, and Sadie, and everybody else in her life who cared about her. She can’t apologize anymore.
“When you were discharged from psychiatric hold five days later, I was afraid to leave you alone. About a week after that, I got an email from an address I didn’t recognize. It came through my work account. There was no subject line. When I clicked on the email, there was a picture of Sebastian. He looked fine; scared, but fine. He was holding up a copy of the New York Times with the date on it. The photo had been taken that day. The email warned me not to call the police; said that if I did, I would never see my son again. They told me someone would call in exactly thirty minutes. If I didn’t pick up, or if they thought the call was bugged, they would kill him.”
Marin closes her eyes. It’s the most excruciating thing to hear, and her mind can’t help but conjure up a hundred different ways it could have been handled.
“I should have called the FBI. But I just . . . I couldn’t. I was so angry. The investigation had totally stalled, and it felt like everyone had abandoned us. And you had just . . .” He shakes his head. “I didn’t call them. All I could think about was that it had been five weeks since I’d seen my kid. Five weeks. And if thirty minutes and a phone call could tell me whether or not he was really okay, I wanted to know. I needed to know.”
Yes. She understands that. But she doesn’t want to give Derek the satisfaction of validating his feelings, so she says nothing.
“I went and sat in the car, inside the garage. The phone rang exactly when they said it would. When I answered, it was Bash.”
“What?” Marin’s knees buckle, and it’s her turn to grab the edge of island to keep herself from sinking to the floor. “You talked to him?”
Derek nods, his face a mask of anguish and exquisite pain. “He said, ‘Hi Daddy, it’s Bash. I miss you and Mommy. When are you coming to get me?’”
“Oh god.” Marin can’t breathe. “Oh god . . .”
“And I said, ‘Soon, my honey bear. Soon.’ And I asked him if he was okay, and he said, ‘I’m okay. There’s TV here and lots of pizza and snacks.’ And then he asked me again when I was coming.”
Marin is crying so hard she can’t speak, but she nods.
“Then someone took the phone. A man. I didn’t recognize his voice. He said, ‘If you want your son, we want the million tonight. We’ll text you with an account number.’”
Marin looks at him. “We had just upped the reward money to a million.”
He nods. “Yes, we had. And I told him I could get it, but that it would take at least three days. The money was tied to the reward and being tracked, and I didn’t have the faintest idea how to move it without alerting the FBI. But I said I had two hundred and fifty thousand accessible immediately, in my personal account, and that I could get it in a matter of hours. To my surprise, he agreed.”
“Why didn’t you call the FBI then?”
“Would you have?” Derek isn’t being snarky. He really wants to know what she would have done, and he looks terrified of what she’ll say.
She considers her answer. “No.” As soon as she says the word, she knows it’s the truth. “No, I wouldn’t have. Not at that point, not after five weeks. Not if I thought I could buy back my son.”
Derek exhaled. “I pulled the money together. Got it all into a bag, waited. All day I waited. And then finally, another email. With an address. A house in North Bend. They said Sebastian would be waiting alone inside. I was to let myself in, leave the money, take him, and go. Someone would be watching. If they saw anything amiss, they’d blow up the house with us in it.”
“Jesus Christ, Derek.”
“I went to the house. There was a For Sale sign out front, and inside it was empty, hardly any furniture other than a sofa and a TV, and a small bed in one of the back rooms. But there was a toy on the floor. A cheap plastic thing, the kind you get with Happy Meal. A Pokémon. I don’t know which one, the yellow one. It was lying there, as if to say, someone has been here. A child has been here.
“I sat on the couch. Around midnight the phone rang. He said to leave the money and go. I asked him where my son was, why they didn’t bring him. And then I heard Bash crying in the background. I started shouting, and he shouted back, and then the phone went dead. And a minute later, I got an email saying . . .”
“What? What did it say?”
“It said, ‘Too late. You fucked up. He’s dead.’”
Marin claps a hand over her mouth, choking back a scream.
“I don’t know what I did wrong, Marin, I did everything they asked, I had the money, I was at the right place, I don’t understand why they . . . why they . . .” He can’t finish.
Oh god oh god oh god . . .
“No,” she says. The word comes out a wail. Noooooo. “No, god, please, no.”
“I tried to call back, but the number just kept ringing and ringing. An hour later, it was disconnected. I sent emails to the address, and they all bounced back.”
Derek is gasping for air, shivering violently, and all Marin can do is stare at him in horror. Half of her wants to comfort him and tell him that she might have done the exact same thing; the other half wants to put her hands around his throat and squeeze and keep squeezing until his Adam’s apple bursts and every last molecule of air inside him is used up.
“I don’t know what I did wrong, but I killed him, Marin,” Derek says, his voice strangled, as if her fingers really were around his neck. “I killed our little boy. And I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell you because I knew if you knew, I would be killing you, too.”
He starts sobbing again, and unable to stand it any longer, Marin reaches for him.
They cling to each other, at the custom-built granite island in the designer kitchen of their dream home in their perfect life, and they cry.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” Marin says ten minutes later, when the sobs subside, as they eventually do, because you can’t sob like that forever. It’s physically impossible. At some point, you start to go numb. It’s the body’s way of coping.
Derek looks better than she feels, but he’s had sixteen months minus five weeks to grieve their son; it isn’t new to him like it is for her. At some point later—she doesn’t know when, but later—she will figure out her next step. Her final step. But for now, there are things that need to be said.
“What is it?” Derek’s whole body is sagging. It’s strange to see. Her husband’s physicality has always been such a big part of who he is. His height, his stride, his presence when he walks into a room—he’s always commanding, always in charge.
“It was Sal who took him. He did it for the money.”
She fills him in on everything Castro told her, stopping short of mentioning anything specifically about Julian. She refers to him only as “the fixer.” She’s deeply ashamed of what she did with Julian, and she can’t bear to tell Derek about it, not now, and probably not ever.
“But I think Sal also did it to hurt us. Because he knew we would fracture. How can you not, when something like this happens? I’m pretty sure he thought we would separate. In fact, I think he’s tried to split us up before.”
Derek’s silent, but she can feel his rage coming off him in wave
s. It mimics her own.
“The first time you cheated, he was the one who told me he saw you.” It’s crazy how obvious this is to Marin now, when it never occurred to her at the time. “He said he was sitting at a restaurant by the window when you and the sales consultant from Nordstrom walked by. I didn’t believe him, and he got so angry with me, accusing me of being willfully naive. But then she called, remember? Left a message accidentally on my cell? I had no choice but to confront you. Looking back, I’m sure he orchestrated me finding out somehow. Wanted to get you in trouble.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“But we stayed together. I was pregnant at the time, which Sal didn’t know. Weeks later, when I told him about the baby, he seemed . . . defeated. Like he’d lost. At a game I had no idea we were all playing.”
“I’m going to kill him.” Derek’s voice is quiet, but there’s no mistaking the wrath behind it. “I’m going to rip his fucking heart out.”
Her phone pings. It’s Castro, with a text. Everything okay?
The PI should know better than to ask her if things are okay. Things haven’t been okay for a long time now. Marin doesn’t reply, but she feels a swell of grief rising inside her, overshadowing the numbness. She can feel herself teetering on the brink, right on that sharp, thin line between sanity and the abyss. If she doesn’t act now, she’ll lose herself forever.
She is not okay. She is very not okay.
One last push to keep it together, to finish this, before she lets go.
“I’m going to Prosser,” she says to Derek, straightening up. “I need to see him. Wherever he is, he’s somewhere on that farm. I know it. I feel it.”
They both know she’s not talking about Sal.
“Marin, please.” Derek is horrified. “Don’t put yourself through that. Too much time has passed, and we don’t know what Sal—”
“I need. To see. My son.” She’s not shouting. On the contrary, her voice is low. Controlled. And simmering. It scares him; she can see it in his eyes. “You can come, or you can stay here, I don’t give a shit. Either way, we’re finished.”
Little Secrets (ARC) Page 29