Crash & Burn (Tessa Leoni, #3)(25)

“Your clothes,” Thomas says, holding up the bag, marked with the symbol for biohazard.

It takes me a moment; then I get it. From last night, he means. From the accident.

I can’t help myself. “We can take them? I thought, the police . . . You said there would be questions.”

“Your blood alcohol reading measured .06,” my husband tells me. “Legal limit in New Hampshire is .08. At this time, they have no grounds to charge you, let alone seize personal property.”

I nod. I wonder if I should be impressed my husband knows legal statutes so well. Or worried.

“But the items are bloody . . . destroyed.” I’m still confused. Why does he have my shredded clothes? Why does he care?

He doesn’t answer the question, but gestures to the fresh garments he’d stacked at the foot of my hospital bed.

“Think you can get dressed?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’m going to run down to the pharmacy to fill your prescriptions; then I’ll be back. Give me twenty minutes.”

“What time is it?”

“Five thirty.”

“It’s dark outside.”

“Yes.”

“Vero’s not afraid of the dark,” I inform him.

Thomas sighs and leaves the room.


* * *



OUR HOUSE IS a two-story Colonial. I can’t tell the color given that it’s night. But after driving forty minutes along quaint back roads and winding side streets, Thomas pulls into a driveway, kills the engine. Both of us sit there for a moment. Not talking. Just alone in the dark.

Then Thomas pops open his door, comes around and assists me.

My ribs still ache. My chest, if I try to inhale too deep. But I find if I keep my movements simple, my pacing slow, I can manage well enough. There are four steps up to a covered front patio. A lone porch light illuminates the door, which appears to be painted the color of wine. Or is it blood? Didn’t we laugh about that once?

Thomas unlocks the door, gestures for me to enter.

My house has a vaulted foyer. Slate tile below, black wrought-iron chandelier above, switchback staircase straight ahead. I move to the cherrywood side table without even thinking. Two framed pictures. One appears to be us, younger, happier, laughing on a beach. The frame features broken pottery tiles and I immediately think of Mexico. Good trip. We’d breakfasted on tequila and spent the afternoons racing WaveRunners through crashing surf. We’d been dangerous and silly and madly, passionately in love.

I miss Mexico. Still do.

Next up, a black-and-white portrait. Not a couples shot at all. Just me, backlit by something, maybe a table lamp. You can’t see my expression, only my profile, wisps of dark hair curling provocatively. There is something pensive about the photo, and I set it down reflexively.

“I always liked that picture of you,” Thomas says. He throws his keys in a basket on the table, trying to watch me while not appearing to be watching me.

I know without asking that he took that photo and I’d been crying right beforehand. A raw, eyes-streaming, nose-running, throat-hiccupping jag that had concerned him so much he’d gotten out his camera in order to distract me.

Sometimes I cry for no reason.

See, I remember something about myself after all.

I follow Thomas deeper into the home, coming face-to-face with the chocolate leather sofa, the glass coffee table. The kitchen is off the family room. Lighter, maple-wood cabinets, because I didn’t want the room to feel too dark. A backsplash of seafoam-green glass tiles because they reminded me of the ocean. A parlor table for two, wrought-iron base, butterfly mosaic inlay because I always yearned to fly.

This is my room. As well as the sunroom directly off of it, with its crazy alternating lime-green and pink-magenta walls. Thomas had groaned the second he saw the colors. Don’t make me do it, he’d dramatized in mock horror. But it was my room, my space, and I could have it any way I wanted, so I’d gone with lime green and pink magenta.

Just as long as it didn’t have a painted rosebush, climbing up the walls.

“Work shed is out the back,” he says now, gesturing to the door off the sunroom. “Here is where you work. There is where I work.”

“Not side by side?”

“Not too often. I build; you paint. And between the two of us, the work gets done.”

He leads me upstairs. No pictures on the wall and for some reason this surprises me, as if I’d been expecting them. The second floor has three bedrooms, including a master with its own bath. That room has a tray ceiling and a truly massive four-poster cherrywood bed.

My first thought is there is no way I picked out that formal monstrosity. Thomas must have done it, because I already hate it.

He doesn’t say anything, just completes the short, guided tour.

“Why such a big house for just the two of us?” I ask. “Do we entertain often, host many guests?”

“We liked this house, even though it was bigger than we needed. And, given that we do work together, sometimes it’s nice to have extra space.”

I walk into the smaller of the two extra bedrooms. It features a lovely white-painted wrought-iron daybed, covered in a quilt of butter yellow.

“I like this room.”

He doesn’t say anything.

I touch one corner of the quilt, finger it in my hand. It is hand-stitched, handcrafted. But not by me, I think instantly. The skill demonstrated here is well beyond my pay grade. And yet . . .