Poisonfeather (Gibson Vaughn #2)(37)
Gibson shook his head. “No, it’s just a little job. Might not be anything. I’ll probably be back in a couple of days.”
“Have you told Nicole?”
“I’m not married to Nicole anymore.”
Ellie glanced up at her father. He winced and squeezed her shoulder reassuringly, but his daughter set down her spoon and looked away.
“Gibson . . .” Toby trailed off, but Gibson knew the rest. He’d berated himself with some version of it for the last couple of days—what are you thinking? So far he hadn’t found an answer that mattered to him more than doing right by Judge Birk.
“I know,” he said lamely, and when that wasn’t enough, “I know.”
Last year, during the hunt for Suzanne Lombard, he’d called Nicole in the middle of the night and sent her into hiding. It had been a precaution, but it had strained his already-fragile relationship with his ex-wife. When he came back, she’d waited for an explanation that he couldn’t give—there was no way to tell her some without telling her all of it, and there were parts that he had sworn not to share with anyone. Too much was at stake. Nicole understood how important Suzanne was to him and hadn’t pressed him on it. But she had made it absolutely clear that if he endangered Ellie again, there would be consequences.
Yet here he was.
Across the table, Toby spread his hands in a gesture that said, I cannot help you if you will not help yourself.
“I know,” he said again.
“Then why?”
“Because I owe.”
Nicole met him at the door when he dropped Ellie off at home. She ushered Ellie inside and told their daughter to go upstairs. That should have tipped him off to trouble, but he was too taken aback by the transformation in his wife. Ex-wife. Her fledgling catering business was starting to take off, and tonight had been an audition for a new client. It was the first time he’d seen her dressed for work. Gibson tried and failed not to stare. His ex-wife had always been effortlessly beautiful, never working too hard at her appearance. She was working at it now.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her in heels. She wore an understated, elegant pencil skirt that flirted with her knees, topped by a tailored white blouse. She’d always hated necklaces, but a silver pendant sparkled on her breastbone. Her makeup, although subtle, made her features pop in a way that was new, framing her eyes and accentuating her high cheekbones. Since he’d seen her last, she’d changed her hair, which for as long as he’d known her she’d always worn below her shoulders. Now it was at least twelve inches shorter and fell in a sleek, styled line along her jaw. She looked sensational, but he felt strangely melancholic at the change. He felt a stab of irrational possessiveness—her hair looked great, but what was wrong with how she’d worn it when they were married?
He mustered up a smile for his ex-wife. “Your hair looks great.”
She thanked him, her voice as despairingly barren as it always was when speaking to him. A studied indifference that she’d perfected in the time since his affair had ended their marriage.
“Any word about the job?”
He should have told her the truth. He could have brushed it off and said he was still waiting to hear. Lying to Nicole had always been a waste of breath—they’d known each other since high school and married while he was in the Corps. She was the one person he could never fool. Instead, he launched into a lie. A stupid, unsustainable lie. Spectrum loved him. The job was a go. How excited he was to get started. What a great opportunity it would be. Talked about how busy he was likely to be as he got up to speed, figuring it would give him cover while he was in West Virginia.
“Maggie called,” Nicole interrupted.
That stopped him dead in his tracks, and his mouth went silent as if she’d reached out and snatched language from him. Maggie was Nick Finelli’s wife. She and Nicole were friends from back when he and Nick were in the service together. Gibson could tell from her eyes that Maggie had told her everything. A fragile second passed. Caught in a lie, the smart thing to do was own it. Nicole was angry, but it was still salvageable once everyone cooled off. He could have pled humiliation and embarrassment at being thrown out of the polygraph. All of which was true. Instead, he went the other way, picking the fight that often grew out of the faulty logic of liars after they’d been caught out: Nicole had played along with his deception, encouraged him, so if you really thought about it, it was her fault. She’d made him lie to her, which seemed in this blind moment to be the more outrageous of the two deceptions.
“Oh, what the hell, Nicole?” he exploded at her. “You knew? And so what . . . you’re trapping me now? Is that what this is? That’s such bullshit.”
Nicole didn’t take the bait, her voice striking an even more neutral, dispassionate chord. The tone that always infuriated and then broke him. “So now it’s my fault that you’re a liar?”
“Fuck you.”
“Were you in Atlanta last summer?”
“What?” He tried to stop the question leaving his lips. There was no sloppier admission of guilt to a hard question than feigning momentary deafness. It was the question that he’d been steeling himself against ever since the Suzanne Lombard investigation. He just hadn’t been expecting it now, on top of everything else. Nicole should have been a boxer.