The Break(76)

“What should we order?” Gabe asks, holding up the menu so close to his eyes he must be farsighted. I can feel Harrison watching me, waiting for me to answer, but then Rowan leans in close across the table like it’s just us. “I’m writing this guy now, and he’s really possessive, quick to anger, that kind of thing.” She gesticulates, her cocktail ring catching the light. “He’s going to be the murderer, I’m pretty sure. I mean, he’s the obvious choice, so I may change my mind at the end. But there’s something about him that terrifies me, keeps me up at night and everything.” She lowers her voice until I can barely make out her words. “He’s like any guy we know, do you know what I mean? It’s a hairsbreadth difference, isn’t it? What someone will do under the right circumstances?”

I swallow. She’s kind of scaring me. I feel my body arc toward her—I almost want to reach across the table and grab her hand and tell her I get it, but of course I don’t do that. “There was this guy in college I used to date, nothing serious,” I tell her. The music is loud enough that I’m not sure if the guys can hear me, because I’m practically whispering. “I think I got out of it just in time. He was like that, what you just said: so fast from totally fine to furious.” I snap my fingers to emphasize my point: one second fine, one second rageful. “Once we got in the smallest fight and he punched his leg while shouting at me. We were in his car. And when he pulled over I just got out and never called him back or responded to his texts anymore, and I only saw him a few more times on campus and we just ignored each other.”

“Good for you,” she says, and her voice is loud now, getting the guys’ attention. “You trusted your instincts, right? Wouldn’t you say?”

“I guess,” I say as a waitress brings us waters.

We go quiet and the waitress takes our drink order. Seltzers for Harrison and Rowan, cabernet for Gabe and me. “Maybe that waitress should be your killer,” Gabe says with a smirk when she leaves the table, and Rowan swats him.

“What made you want to write?” I ask Rowan.

“Oh,” Rowan says with a wave of her hand. The guys watch her. It’s so obvious they both find her beautiful. I catch it on Harrison’s face as he stares. “I always tell people I write mysteries to get to the bottom of what happened to my father,” she says. “He was killed when I was five.” My eyes widen. Even though I’ve read this same thing in her interviews, it’s different hearing her say it to me in real life. “And I’m pretty fascinated by what people are capable of, and how you’re supposed to avoid the ones who have it in them to do dangerous things. Because how can we really know who those ones are?” She shifts her weight, her pale blue eyes blinking. “But the truth is, I suppose I write to get to the truth of what I’m capable of.” She stares at me. “Do you know what I mean?”

I don’t really know what she means. My fingers have gone cold squeezing my ice water, wanting her to go on. Gabe leans back in his seat like he’s heard it all before. He’s watching the side of her face, his big shoulders relaxed.

Harrison’s staring, too, and his body has gone tighter, coiled like he’d leap across the table and sit next to her if he could.

“I just mean, what would I do?” Rowan asks. “To protect my family. My mother, say. Or Gabe. Or now.” She puts a hand on her stomach. “My babies. I think I’d do anything. And I think most of us would. It’s just we don’t usually get put in the set of circumstances that test the things we hold so dear. I mean, you might think you’d never kill for anything. But how can you really know?”

A flush of goose bumps sweeps over the exposed skin on my neck and arms. I don’t say anything. The waitress comes with our drinks and sets them down. I thank her and take a big sip of my wine. “You’re painting murderers like valiant defenders of their family,” Gabe says to Rowan, no malice in his voice, more like they always have conversations like this.

“She’s not defending them,” Harrison says, squeezing lime into his seltzer. “She’s saying that none of us have any idea what we’d do if pushed to the limit. Which is true.”

“I can say with certainty that I wouldn’t kill for certain things,” Gabe says.

“Your babies aren’t here yet, Gabe, how can you really know?” Rowan asks. She sips her drink, considers her husband.

“Okay, fine, take our family out of the conversation,” Gabe says. “There are people who kill out of passion and romantic jealousy.”



“And that’s what’s terrifying,” I say, swirling my glass of deep, dark wine, a little too quickly so it almost goes right over the edge. I stop myself in time. “It’s so scary because those emotions are everywhere.”

“Exactly,” says Rowan, locking eyes with me.

I take a swig and the cabernet slides down my throat like medicine. “Obviously women can be violent, too,” I say. “But the stats are clear on which gender usually perpetrates intimate partner violence.” I don’t feel so young anymore; I feel like someone with something to say. “You guys won’t ever know what it’s like to be a woman entering a relationship without knowing your partner’s capacity for violence.”

“Bingo!” Rowan says. “And sometimes it doesn’t even come out for years. That’s what happened to my mom.”