Mother of All Secrets(61)

“I’m so sorry, Selena,” I whispered, my anger for what had happened to her making my blood bubble like the jacuzzi jets.

Selena nodded at me. “Me too,” she said.

“What an absolute prick,” Kira said, squeezing Selena’s shoulder. We were all silent for a moment.

“As horrible as he is . . . ,” Kira continued, bringing us back to the topic at hand, “and don’t get me wrong, he’s obviously beyond horrible—I mean, like a sociopath, right?—I’m still not sure I can agree to murdering him.” Panic returned to her face. “Again, I still don’t really get why she can’t just divorce him and move across the country or overseas or something, like a normal person?”

“It would never be that simple now that there’s a child involved,” Selena admitted, though she’d advocated for the same solution earlier.

I nodded. “I really felt what she was saying about how she couldn’t allow him to be Naomi’s father. I would do anything I could to protect Clara from someone who would be that kind of toxic presence in her life. We know how he is with women. Who knows what kind of damage he might do to a child.”

The hot tub’s heat couldn’t fully account for the flush surging into my face, the spots that floated in my vision. I took a gulp of wine and went on.

“If Isabel says that divorce won’t cut it, even if she were able to get one, I want to believe her. I do believe her.” I heard myself say these words but was shocked at how much I sounded like I was arguing in favor of killing him. Could that actually be what I wanted?

“Still,” Selena said, shifting her position in the jacuzzi, “does that give us the right to just remove him from the world? Play God? I don’t know that it does. Besides, how do Isabel and Vanessa know for sure that we won’t get caught? They don’t. Anything could go wrong. And I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in jail.”

“But if we do decide not to—if we say no,” Kira said, “do you guys think that Isabel and Vanessa will just let it go? Or are we in some kind of danger here? I’m not sure that we’re really in a position to just walk away.” She rubbed her head with both hands and then stretched her arm out to grab her glass of wine, taking a long sip.

I had been wondering the same thing. “I guess we’re taking a risk no matter what we decide. But—and I almost can’t believe I’m saying this—the only way to make sure he never does this to another woman is to do what they’re asking. And I want that. I don’t want any more of us out there.” It felt like an out-of-body experience, listening to myself tout the pros of killing someone. And yet, I was pretty sure that’s what I was doing.

“Let’s try this,” Selena said. “I think the question we all have to answer is, Will we be able to live with ourselves if we do it? And will we be able to live with ourselves if we don’t? What feels better? What feels safer? What feels more right?”

Kira and I nodded carefully, thinking. Selena, ever the lawyer, was the voice of reason. I was glad she was here. I was glad both of them were.

Kira spoke up, finally. “I want to say yes to Isabel,” she said, but her voice was unconvincing. “I really do. He’s a terrible, destructive person, and Isabel wouldn’t ask this of us if she wasn’t sure that this was her only way out. We should have said something when she went missing, and we owe it to her to be here for her now, after we didn’t step up when we had the chance before. But—but it’s murder, you guys. Murder.” She looked at us each for a long moment, making sure we understood.

“I’m scared, too,” I said. “Terrified. But the thing is that I really do want him gone.” Yet again, my own words surprised me. But they felt right leaving my lips. As much as I’d assured myself several times over the past week that I didn’t know Isabel all that well, that her disappearance couldn’t have had anything to do with me, the truth was that I’d learned everything I needed to know about her that day that I’d seen her on a park bench, talking to Naomi. I did know her. I believed her that this was the only way she could be free. I trusted her.

And if I was being honest with myself, I didn’t just want to do it out of friendship for Isabel. I wanted to do it for myself, for every woman he’d made feel powerless and every woman he had yet to meet whose life he’d shake off course and whose self-worth he’d demolish. I wondered, for a moment, if the drunk girl at the Milling Room bar had made it out unscathed.

I disappeared into my head for a minute and conjured my mom. I wondered what she would think of all this—of what I’d done, of what I was thinking of doing. I thought of how she’d always told me to trust my intuition.

And, crazily enough, my intuition seemed to be telling me I should help my friend murder her husband.

“God dammit,” said Selena, finishing her wine and looking out toward the ocean.

I shivered as we exited the hot tub and walked back into the house. In the midst of everything going on, we’d forgotten to bring towels. But there was no way to know if I was shaking from the cold or because of what I was pretty sure we were going to agree to do.





Chapter Twenty-Seven



Friday, October 9

While the rest of our Montauk trip was hardly the restorative girls’ getaway I’d envisioned, it was a relief to have everything out in the open, to know that Isabel was alive, and, for me personally, to know that I didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance—at least not directly, not in the way that I had feared. And we knew that, in a matter of days, we’d be able to start putting all this behind us, because we all agreed that, if we were going to do this, we weren’t going to waste any time.