A Good Marriage(31)

He pointed around the room. “The doctors all have this way of standing,” he said. “They, like, lean back a little. It’s because they spend so much time on their feet.”

I looked around the room, ready to argue. But a fair number of people did seem to be standing that way.

“Will you all be stuck like that forever?” I asked.

“Me? Oh, I’m not in med school.” He laughed. “Too cutthroat for me. I’m here visiting a friend from college. He’s in med school, and he told me the thing about the standing. However, there is a decent chance that he was only fucking with me.” He smiled, and on cue, my heart jumped again. “If you’re not a doctor either, what do you do?”

“I’m in law school.”

“That’s funny. I was supposed to be a lawyer.”

“What happened?”

He smiled crookedly. “I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

“Seriously?” I rolled my eyes, though I was already charmed.

Sam shrugged. “Trying to best an opponent all day is not my thing,” he said, then hurried to clarify. “Not that being a lawyer couldn’t be noble, I mean, theoretically.”

“Ah yes, theoretically.” I smiled back. Maybe I should have been offended, but I was too distracted by how wobbly my legs felt.

“I just insulted your chosen profession, didn’t I?”

I laughed. “A little.”

“Am I fucking this up?” Sam asked.

“A little,” I said, though it was hardly the truth.

“Regardless of what I think about lawyers generally, you’ll do great things,” he said. “That I’m sure of.”

“How do you know?” I asked. “We just met.”

“Oh, I can tell,” he said, glancing my way. “It’s a feeling. A good one.”

“You have a lot of these good feelings?”

When he smiled this time, my heart nearly stopped. His eyes were so impossibly blue and bright. “Not like this.”

I soon learned that though not a lawyer or a doctor, Sam was plenty accomplished. He’d recently finished up graduate school at the Columbia School of Journalism and had a job on the metro desk at the New York Times. He was focusing on exposing the secondary impacts of US poverty, especially on children. He even had a feature—“The Orphans of Opioids”—about to run. Sam wanted to change the status quo, just like me. He believed it was possible, too, and as we talked, his optimism swept me away. Within minutes, I suspected I’d met my destiny. Someone who would fix the world with me. Someone who might even fix me. Because I might have looked okay on the outside, but I wasn’t. Ever since I’d lost my parents, I’d been like a burned-out bulb.

It wasn’t until I met Sam that unseasonably warm April night that I believed I might brighten again one day. By the time we were kissing on the edge of Rittenhouse Square, I’d already started to glow.

Up on Sam’s computer screen was a website for Enid’s, Brooklyn, which, it turned out, was a bar in Greenpoint. I looked around the empty room again. Was that where he’d gone? To a bar in Greenpoint in the middle of the day? It had only been a matter of days since he’d bashed his head.

For fuck’s sake, Sam.

My face felt hot as I dialed his number. When the call went straight to voice mail, I had a long moment where I thought I might leave a message telling him not to bother coming home. A moment when I felt like even rehab wouldn’t be enough. But instead of saying that, instead of saying anything, I closed my eyes, swallowed down my sorrow and anger, and hung up the phone.

Fifteen minutes later I stood on the short, tree-lined stretch of Montgomery Place between Eighth Avenue and the park, staring up at Zach’s impressive brownstone. In the golden late-afternoon sun, it was breathtaking. Five floors of flawless reddish-brown sandstone, with an extravagant stoop that seemed twice the width of the ones on either side. Through the huge windows in front, I could see a massive Art Deco chandelier floating under fifteen-foot ceilings.

Of course, given Zach’s success, I did wonder why he and Amanda had chosen Brooklyn over Manhattan. I imagined Zach could have easily afforded a similar home in Tribeca or the West Village. Brooklyn did have a unique charm, but so did those neighborhoods. If Amanda was from a small town, though, maybe she’d been the one who preferred something quieter and more down-to-earth for Case.

I held my breath as I finally made my way up the front steps, relieved that there was no crime tape or any other indication that Zach’s home was still being held by police. Not that I was looking forward to actually going inside. From Zach’s own description, it had been a particularly gruesome scene, and it wouldn’t have been cleaned up. The police and EMTs didn’t mop up the blood and sanitize after your wife’s bludgeoned body was taken away. It was left to you to put your house back in order, even when they didn’t think you were the one responsible for breaking it to pieces.

At the top of the steps, I crouched down next to a large planter filled with chic fernlike greenery. It lifted easily, and there was the key on the ground underneath.

Shit. I had been hoping the key might be gone, proof that somebody other than Zach had indeed used it to gain entry the night Amanda died. Somebody who’d also used Zach’s golf club to beat her to death.

But the notion that somebody had swiped the key, used it to get in, killed Amanda, and then put it back? Some things strained credulity. Like the idea that Zach had simply forgotten to tell me about the part of his hearing where an outstanding warrant was discussed.