Deconstructed(32)

Ruby hefted her bag onto her shoulder—such a big bag for a little thing—and slid past me.

Just as the little bells sounded at her departure, my back pocket buzzed.

Patrick Vitt.

I’m on it.

“You better be for what I’m paying you out of my grandmother’s rainy-day fund,” I said to the screen before tucking the phone back into my pocket.

I spent the next hour closing down the store, putting everything in its place, and texting Julia Kate about why I had brought her backup cleats and not her new cleats. My daughter needed to learn that HER cleats were not MY problem to begin with. But that was my fault, wasn’t it? I had always taken care of all the little details, rushing to the school to take her the homework she left on the counter or rushing to the field to bring her a mocha latte before the game. Which had proven a mistake that one game when she barfed up the five-dollar confection on the sidelines.

When I went out to the van to go home, I found it warmed by the sunlight falling through trees beginning to adorn themselves with new green. The beauty of the late afternoon and the thought of an empty house had me steering the opposite way from my gated home. I wove through the oaks, with their knobby roots stretching up from the soil, and old mansions that needed a good scrubbing but were still unable to disguise their refined bones. In one I had danced with Clint Fairchild at a Christmas dance. Another was where I had hunted big plastic eggs filled with chocolates. A bridal shower in that one, a first babysitting job across the street. Azaleas bunched around the old homes with their blooms at the ready, an old neighborhood holding on to what once was, even as gunfire peppered the night around them. A few turns took me to where I had intended to go but hadn’t wanted to admit.

Why I wanted to see my husband’s truck parked outside her house, I couldn’t say. Maybe in some way I liked the hurt. Or more likely, I wanted to believe he was truly praying with that nitwit Jeff Reagan. I shored up whatever compelled me to do what I was doing with the thought that I had to make sure Patrick Vitt, private investigator, was parked outside and being discreet about it, and that Grandmother’s pin money/rainy-day fund/mad money, which she had left in a hatbox, stacked ten inches deep around her mother’s pearls and diamond brooches, was being used in a worthwhile manner. The hatbox sat empty on a shelf in my closet because the money and jewels were in a safe-deposit box in my maiden name. I had my secrets, too.

I turned onto Stephanie’s street, the dimness making the cars parked along it look like cutouts from a movie rather than real vehicles. Dusk and dawn did funny things to reality, made objects look softer or stamped against something in relief. Just different. Which was why I had always liked both times of day.

My heart sighed with relief to see that Scott’s pickup truck wasn’t in the driveway. I moved my gaze down the street, and about two blocks down, his Tundra sat beneath a magnolia tree. Something hard and heavy collapsed in my stomach.

What did I expect?

I had known his whole praying-with-Jeff thing was a load of bull crap.

Several cars sat along the street, and any one of them could have been Patrick’s. I had no clue what he drove, so this was an absolutely worthless endeavor only serving to make me feel even worse than I did about Scott cheating on me. I hadn’t stopped my car. Instead I had been creeping down the street as if I were a burglar casing the houses. When a lady walking her dog eyed me suspiciously, I pulled over and pretended to have dropped something on the floorboard. After counting out five seconds, I lifted my head and gave her a little self-deprecating shrug.

“Nothing to see here, lady. I’m not spying on my husband while he’s slipping the sausage to Stephanie,” I said through my teeth as I smiled at her.

She gave a half wave and tugged her dachshund down the block.

I put the van into drive, and just as I let off the brake pedal, the front door to Stephanie the Tennis Pro’s opened.

Scott walked out.

Feeling panicked, I slammed the van into park and prayed he couldn’t see me around the Roto-Rooter truck parked a house down from where I sat. My van was a nondescript silver, a dime a dozen in this town, but it didn’t matter because he seemed zeroed in on something across the street. He stuck his hands in his pockets and walked briskly to—I moved my head to peer around the plumbing truck, pressing my cheek against the cool glass—a small white car parked across the street. Scott crossed the street and rapped at the window. The window slid down, and I could see the side of a man’s face.

Was that my private investigator?

Something twisted in my gut.

Holy crap! We’d been made.

But then I watched, stupefied, as Scott reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet.

What in the hell?

It was pretty evident even as the darkness descended what was happening.

My dick of a husband was paying off my . . . well, my own private dick.

Son of a biscuit.





CHAPTER NINE


RUBY

Ty had just dropped me off at my car when Cricket pulled into the parking lot around back. I glanced at my watch as I walked to my hand-me-down car, which I had left on the street earlier. My ten-year-old Honda was a far cry from the sleek new BMW that Ty drove. The only way to warm my seats was to swish my behind around a few times briskly. He had a little button for instant hot buns. Lucky duck. I paused at my slightly dented door as I caught sight of Cricket’s face.