Little Secrets(68)

She turned and stalked off, knowing full well that none of what she said was true. She wasn’t planning to come back, ever. There were no pictures. He hadn’t broken her heart. This would either work or it wouldn’t, and all that was left to do was wait and see if he’d call her bluff.

Paul met her the next morning at exactly nine thirty outside his bank. He thrust a manila envelope into her hands without so much as a hello, refusing to make eye contact.

“Leave me alone now, McKenzie,” he said, and walked away.

Kenzie headed straight home, her heart pounding with exhilaration. When she got back to the apartment, she dumped the cash onto her bed. She counted it quickly the first time, then slowly a second time, savoring the feel of the crisp bills in her hands. Fifty thousand dollars. She had never seen so much money, and it felt amazing.

She called J.R.

“He paid,” she said without preamble when he picked up.

She could picture his grin on the other end. “That’s my girl,” J.R. said. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

She extracted fifteen thousand for living expenses and her next semester’s tuition, and the rest went to cover her mother’s first year at the Oak Meadows Assisted Living Facility.

Three months later, Kenzie ran into Paul at the Seattle Food Festival, where she was working at the taco truck. His parents lived in Seattle, which must have been why he was in town. His face paled at the sight of her when he stepped up to order, but he paid for six tacos and pretended he didn’t know her. She watched as he walked back to his family, distributing the food.

He never glanced back.

Kenzie lets out a long breath, letting the memory of Paul wash away. She has to focus on Derek now, who’s even richer than Paul, and who also appears to be making things work with his wife, and who didn’t even have the balls to tell her in person that their relationship is over.

If it’s over, so be it. But the negotiations are just starting.

She’s been walking for a while. She’s planning to catch a cab at Broadway, and the closer she gets to the busy street, the smaller the houses get. The creepy sensation of being watched is back. She pulls her phone out and keeps it in her hand, then hears a rustling sound behind her. On high alert, she stops and whips around, but once again, nobody’s there.

But goddamn it, it feels like someone is. Her skin feels like it’s crawling from the unwanted visual intrusion. She starts walking again, faster this time.

A voice floats out of the dark. “Hey.”

“Who’s there?” Kenzie says. She hates the way her voice sounds, high-pitched, frightened. “Hello?”

Something moves toward her, a hulking, elongated shadow that morphs into a person. Every part of her body is stiff, but then the light from a dim streetlamp catches his face and she realizes it’s someone she knows.

“Julian,” she says, surprised, when his facial features come into focus. Her relief is so powerful, her knees almost buckle. “Jesus Christ, you scared the shit out of me. What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you,” he says.

She can’t remember the last time she saw Julian—it’s been a year, if not longer. He steps toward her, his arms outstretched as if he’s going in for a hug. It’s weird, and instinctively she steps back. What’s he doing? They’ve never hugged before—the dude doesn’t even like to shake hands. Guy’s some kind of germaphobe, and she remembers he always carries a packet of those antibacterial wipes in his pocket.

Tonight, though, he’s wearing gloves. Except it’s not that cold.

“Is J.R. with you?” Kenzie asks.

Julian doesn’t answer. Instead, he smiles.

The last thing she remembers is his gloved fist connecting with her jaw, a hard pop before her knees buckle for real and everything goes black.





PART THREE


Down in a hole and I don’t know if I can be saved

—ALICE IN CHAINS





Chapter 21


Derek’s left hand is on the steering wheel, and his right hand rests on Marin’s knee. It’s such a small thing, such a tiny gesture, but his palm on her leg says everything about where they are today.

He was right—they needed this weekend away. Whistler was Derek’s idea, and he planned the entire thing without her knowing. The night after Marin wired two hundred fifty thousand dollars to a man named Julian to have Derek’s mistress murdered, her husband came home, handed her an anniversary card, and asked if they could start over.

She didn’t know what had changed. The day before, he’d broken up with McKenzie and then almost immediately had wanted her back. But something had shifted in the short time since then. He seemed different. As he reached for her hand, he was once again the Derek she remembered, the Derek she married.

“It’s been twenty years, Marin,” he said, his face anguished. “If you had to do it all over again, would you?”

Would she? Of course she would. They’d had two decades together, most of them good, minus that one mistake Derek made early on in her pregnancy. Up until the last sixteen terrible months—which were entirely her fault—they’d been solid. A trip away to celebrate might seem sudden, but at some point, you have to pick a direction. And wasn’t this what she wanted? Wasn’t this the point?