Live to Tell (Live to Tell #1)(109)
“Why would you let her have all that candy?” Elsa asked in dismay when he filled her in on the father-daughter evening.
“Because it’s fun to spoil her.”
“I know, Brett…but she’s going to have an awful stomachache. She’ll never get to sleep now.”
Renny proved her wrong, drifting off within five minutes of hitting the pillow. And right now, she doesn’t look sick at all…
She looks terrified. Her black eyes are enormous and her wiry little body quivers beneath the quilt clutched to her chin.
“I’m not sick, Mommy.”
“Did you have a nightmare?” Elsa asks. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“No. It was real.”
“Well, sometimes nightmares feel real.”
And sometimes, they are real. Renny knows that as well as she does. But things are different now. She’s safe here with Elsa and Brett and nothing will ever hurt her again.
Elsa sits beside her daughter and folds her into an embrace. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
“It wasn’t a nightmare. It was real,” Renny insists, trembling. “A monster was here, in my room…I woke up and I saw him standing over my bed.”
“It was just a bad dream, honey. There’s no monster.”
“Yes, there is. And when I saw him, he went out the window.”
Elsa turns to follow her daughter’s gaze, saying, “No, Renny, see? The window isn’t even—”
Open.
But Elsa’s throat constricts around the word as she stares in numb horror.
The window she’d closed and locked earlier is now, indeed, wide open—and so is the screen, creating a gaping portal to the inky night beyond.
Not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse…
What nursery rhyme was that?
Not that it matters.
Really, right now, the only thing that matters is getting away from the Cavalon house without being spotted. Good thing the streets are deserted at this hour; there’s no one around to glimpse the dark figure stealing through the shadows.
Not a creature is stirring…
Damn, it’s frustrating when you can’t remember something that seems to be right there, teasing your brain.
Not a creature was stirring…
Leaning on the terrace railing, gazing at the smattering of lit windows on the Queens skyline across the East River, Marin Hartwell Quinn finds herself wishing the sun would never come up.
When it does, she’ll be launched headlong into another exhausting, lonely day of single motherhood, a role she never imagined for herself.
At this time last year, the storybook Quinn family was all over the press: Marin, Garvey, and their two beautiful daughters destined to live happily-ever-after on the Upper East Side—and then, if the expected nomination came through and the election turned out predictably, in the governor’s mansion…and someday, the White House.
But in a flash—a flash, yes, like those from the ever-present paparazzi cameras—Garvey was transported from Park Avenue to Park Row, the lower Manhattan street that houses the notorious Metropolitan Correctional Center.
Naturally, the photographers who had dogged Congressman Quinn along the campaign trail were there to capture the moment he was hauled away in handcuffs on a public street. And when the detectives had driven off with their prisoner, sirens wailing, the press turned their cameras on Marin, still sitting, stunned, in the back seat of the limousine.
Later, she forced herself to look at the photos, to read the captions. One referred to her as “the humiliated would-be first lady,” another as “a blond, blue-eyed Jackie Kennedy, shell-shocked at witnessing her husband’s sudden demise on a city street.”
That wasn’t the first time the press had drawn a Kennedy-Quinn comparison. But while the slain JFK had remained a hero and his wife lauded as a heart-broken, dignified widow, the fallen Garvey Quinn had been exposed as a coldhearted villain—and his wife drew nothing but scorn from his disillusioned constituents.
No one seemed to grasp—or care—that Marin herself had been blindsided, that the man she loved had betrayed her—and their children—with his unspeakable crime.
She has to force herself to get up every morning—if she manages to stay in bed that long—and face the wreckage of her life.
Public contempt is nothing compared to the rest of it: grieving her firstborn; helping her surviving children cope with the realization that their father is a criminal; looking Garvey in the eye through protective prison visitor’s room glass and telling him that she’ll never forgive him.
With a sigh, Marin turns away from the railing. Still no hint of sunrise on the eastern horizon, but it will appear any moment now, and the day will be underway.
In the master bedroom she once shared with Garvey, Marin smooths the coverlet on her side, arranges the European throw pillows, strips out of her nightgown, and hangs it on a hook in her walk-in closet.
Beside it, Garvey’s closet door remains closed, as it has been for months now. His expensive suits and shirts, shrouded in dry cleaners plastic, are presumably still inside, along with dozens of pairs of Italian leather shoes and French silk ties.
What is she supposed to do with any of it? Burn it? Give it away? Save it? For what? For whom?
She has no idea, and so his clothes hang on in a dark limbo.