Just the Nicest Couple(36)

In an instant, your world can turn upside down when you’re least expecting it.



CHRISTIAN


I go rigid. I hold my breath. I don’t breathe.

Above me, things go silent. The water stops running down to the septic tank in the basement. The pipes become quiet and still. I expect to hear the sound of footsteps or a sink running. I prepare myself for it, waiting, but there’s nothing, only silence, so that then I start to second-guess what I heard. Maybe it wasn’t a toilet flush. Maybe it was something else, like air in the water pipes. Maybe it wasn’t caused by something human.

I’d believe it, if it weren’t for Lily’s text. Thai tonight?

Someone is here.

I slide an open drawer closed without hurrying. It takes everything in me not to slam it shut. I push the chair that I was sitting in back under the desk. I won’t make it to the file cabinet or have a chance to look for a safe.

I find my exits. I could use the front door. It’s closer, but visible, and I wouldn’t be able to lock the door behind myself if I went that way. The office sits less than ten feet from the base of the stairs. I see the wrought iron balusters through the open office doors. There is a window in the office, but to go out that way, I’d have to remove the screen. I couldn’t replace it from outside either, meaning it would be impossible to go that way without leaving evidence that I was here.

I have no choice but to go back out through the garage door, the same way I came.

I drag myself across the room. The floors are wood. I wear shoes. It’s practically futile to try to be silent. My shoes are anything but light on the wooden floors.

I step hesitantly from the office into the foyer. It’s the kind of space that’s two stories tall with a coffered ceiling and a giant chandelier. A quarter-turn staircase leads down into the foyer. There’s a loftlike space with a railing at the top of the stairs, so that the second floor overlooks the first.

From just outside the open office door, I see a wall-mounted mail holder by the front door. It feels like just the thing I was looking for. The problem is that the mail holder is in direct view of the stairs and the loft. I hesitate, calculating the risk. It’s high, but the mail holder is the perfect place for the key. That’s exactly where Lily and I would leave it, and I’ve already come this far. I can’t go home empty-handed because without this key, there is no way to move the car. And if we don’t move Jake’s car, it puts him and Lily together at the same place, on the same day he died. It makes Lily look guilty.

I let my gaze go up the stairs and to the loft. It’s still quiet, for now. If I didn’t know better, I’d think no one was upstairs.

I pull my way across the foyer floor, feeling completely and utterly exposed. I’ve done my fair share of disorderly things in my life. I was an insubordinate teenager. I had more groundings, detentions and suspensions than I can count. My mother used to tell me that my behavior was taking years off her life and was going to be the death of her.

But now I’m an adult, and this is breaking and entering. It comes with serious consequences, like jail.

There are slots for mail and bills on the mail holder, but also hooks for keys. I slip my hand into one of the slots, striking gold. The key fob. I pinch the key fob between my fingertips and pull it out. Something else comes too, slipping from my hand and, this time, my reaction time isn’t fast enough to catch whatever it is. The object falls to the floor, making noise.

A door upstairs rasps open. “Nina? Is that you?”

The voice belongs to a woman.

I spin around. I don’t risk looking up the stairs. I leave whatever fell on the floor. I make my way back toward the garage, as footsteps pad across the hall and a silhouette appears in my range of view.

“Nina!” she calls again.

Footsteps descend the stairs.

I head into the kitchen. I cross the kitchen for the garage door. I set my hand down on the garage door lever and, as deliberately as I can, I pull the door open. I step into the garage and guide the door closed behind me, holding down on the lever, releasing it by degrees so that it doesn’t snap back into place.

What I want to do is slam the door and run.

I have no choice but to open the overhead door. It will make noise, but that’s inevitable because there is no other way out of the garage other than through that door. I have zero options.

I press the button. The door lifts. It’s as loud as a leaf-or a snowblower on a Sunday morning. There is the very real possibility that I’ve fucked this all up. That I’m fucked. That the police are already on their way and I won’t get to my car before they arrive.

As I walk to my car, I risk a glance back and see it.

From one of the front windows, a face is pressed to the glass, looking back at me.

I speed home in such a state of shock that I forget all about the bag of Lily’s bloody clothes sitting in the back seat of my car.

“It was her mother,” Lily tells me later, when we’re both back home. I was home before she got here. She came in to find me pacing, practically running the house from end to end, just waiting for the axe to fall, for the police to show up at the door with a warrant for my arrest. “Her mother is losing her vision, Christian. It’s fine. She doesn’t see very well. How close were you to her?”

“Maybe ten or twenty feet. The thing is, Lily, even if she couldn’t see me, she heard me. She knew someone was there. She spoke to me.”