Blood Sugar(48)

I rinsed out the orange juice glass with scalding water and then put it in the dishwasher. I didn’t want any of that man lingering. I paced around the kitchen island, around the living room, around the completely empty room that was once Jason’s office. Homicide detective meant murder. Did I get away with it three times, just to later be accused of murdering someone I truly loved and didn’t kill?

A rush of adrenaline shot through me, and I was sure I could feel my telomeres shortening under the strain. I didn’t know what to do next. Or how to act. I needed advice. I needed help. I took some deep breaths, finally calmed myself down, and stopped sharking through the house. I made a decision, and once it was made, I felt better immediately. I picked up my phone and called one of the best and brightest criminal defense attorneys in the county. He was currently living in Washington, DC, and he owed me a big fucking favor.





CHAPTER 33


    LAWYER



Roman got on the phone immediately. It only took a few minutes for us to move past the awkwardness and fall back into the ease and depth of our old friendship. At this point in life I was older and wiser and had long ago forgiven him his now silly-seeming college trespasses. But I’d never told him he had been forgiven, so it had been a decade since we had spoken.

After my meeting with the dean, the chair, and the professor, Roman had been cleared of all cheating charges. I later found a note hidden in one of my textbooks. It had three words on it. “I owe you.” Roman graduated at the top of our class and went on to Yale Law School. He was courted by tons of corporate firms offering him enormous starting salaries, but he declined them all. He knew the exact path he wanted to take and never deviated. He clerked with a judge who was notoriously tough on crime and known for doling out maximum sentences. Then he worked in the district attorney’s office, then honed his skills at the public defender’s office, and then joined a small but prominent firm defending the rich and guilty. Where he quickly made partner.

“What do I need to know?” Roman asked me over the phone.

“I didn’t kill my husband.”

He said, “I actually don’t need to know that. I need to know why, after an autopsy concluded your husband died of a disease he has had since childhood, a homicide detective is sniffing around, thinking you did kill him.”

I answered truthfully. “I don’t know.”

He hated that answer. He wanted to hear something definitive. By the time we got off the phone, Roman’s assistant had booked him a first-class seat on the next flight to Miami.

Six hours later Roman marched through my door. He hugged me and squeezed me tight, and I could feel his washboard abs pressing against me. He was still square-jawed, ridiculously fit, and had a head of thick wavy hair controlled by just a little product. Now that he was a full-grown man, his underbite gave him added gravitas. I hugged him back, hard. He smelled the same. Like cedar. I didn’t know until that moment how much I had truly missed him all these years. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked at me, eye to eye.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” he said.

I brushed his apology aside. “Bygones. I shouldn’t have made such a big deal about it for so long. We were young.”

“No, Ruby. I mean I’m sorry about your husband.”

“Oh.” This felt like a stab to my heart. For a split second I was lost in the cedar smell and the happy memories of college and youthful folly. But reality was still there, waiting to be acknowledged. My husband was dead. I said, “Thank you.”

Roman set up a makeshift war room in Jason’s empty office. He made it clear to me that if he was going to make all this go away, he needed to know everything. Absolutely everything. I looked at him, at a loss. “I don’t know what everything is! You’re going to have to ask me very specific questions. Give me some guidelines about what exactly you mean by everything.”

Roman started with the basics.

“Have you ever cheated on Jason?”

“No!”

“Emotionally? Online? Texting? Anything?”

“No.”

“That’s good. Did he ever cheat on you?”

“No! I mean, not that I know of.”

“Okay. I’ll look into it.”

Before I could respond to this and defend Jason’s honor, Roman kept going.

“Do you have money problems? Debt? Gambling issues?”

“No.”

“Did he?”

“No.”

“Did Jason’s death leave you better off than you were when he was alive?”

“Of course not. What the fuck?”

I knew Roman hadn’t gotten married yet. His plan was always to play around until he turned forty. Then settle down with the right one. He was so confident it would work like that, I didn’t question his life syllabus. But I needed him to understand that my marriage was real.

“I loved Jason. I really did.”

“Right, I’m not implying you didn’t. I mean, are you financially better off with him dead?”

I had to think. “I guess. Technically.”

I told Roman that when Jason and I bought our house together, our accountant advised we each get life insurance. In case something were to happen to one of us, that insurance would help the other cover the mortgage on a single income. I didn’t like the idea of life insurance. Roman nodded. He remembered my father once saying, “It’s better to be worth more alive than dead.” And I was, and Jason was, but Jason felt it was important to listen to the accountant’s advice, so I went along with his wishes. Because he had type 1 diabetes, his yearly quote was extremely high. But we signed up anyway. If he were to die, his policy would pay me out $300,000. And because my life insurance was so inexpensive comparatively, since I didn’t have a preexisting condition, if I died, he would receive $600,000. These numbers might seem like a lot, but to cover a mortgage on a house in Miami Beach, they weren’t.