The Ex by Freida McFadden(80)

“Your phone was ringing, Cassie,” Anna says.

And then Anna closes the door behind her. When she turns to Cassie, her eyes are dark and foreboding.



Anna



During the second half of my pregnancy, I couldn’t sleep.

People warned me that as I got closer to my delivery date, sleep would elude me more and more. But even before my stomach was bulging and pressing on my bladder all night long, I had horrible insomnia. And because of the pregnancy, pills were out of the question. The best I could do was practice good sleep hygiene and drink glasses of warm milk.

One night, Dean woke up and caught me pacing our bedroom at one in the morning. He cracked an eye open, rubbing at his already messy dark hair. “Anna,” he mumbled. “What are you doing? Come to bed.”

“I can’t sleep.”

He yawned as he struggled into a sitting position. Before the baby came, he still made it to the gym a few nights a week, and his well-muscled bare chest was extremely appealing. He grinned at me. “You want me to wear you out?”

“Yes, please,” I said, because Dean had delivered on the promise he made during his first date. He was a damn good doctor. He was a damn good kisser. And he was damn good in bed. I mean, damn.

After it was over, he passed out with his arms wrapped around me, but instead of wearing me out, the good sex had energized me. I slipped out of his arms and reached for my phone on the nightstand.

The WhereAmI app was still on my phone. Dean allowed me to install it on his so that I would be able to locate him wherever he was, which felt increasingly important as my due date neared. One other person I was also able to track was Lydia.

This was, more or less, innocent. Lydia had no regard for anyone else’s time but her own, so she thought nothing of telling me we were meeting at a given time, then showing up twenty minutes or even half-an-hour late. She never called to say she’d be late, or if she did, it was always after I was already sitting in the restaurant like an idiot, waiting for her. So one day, after she had been an enraging forty-two minutes late for our lunch together, I plucked her phone out of her purse while she was visiting the ladies’ room. The screen was locked but her password was Violet’s birthday. It took me thirty seconds to install WhereAmI on her phone, so that I’d always know exactly when she was on her way to meet me.

I loaded the app on a whim. Dean’s location was blinking in the same place as mine—his phone was five feet away from me. But Lydia wasn’t home. She was somewhere else. Somewhere surprising.

She was at Joel’s new girlfriend’s bookstore.

Dean was sound asleep, snoring softly. I got out of bed, shrugged on my coat, and called for an Uber to meet me downstairs. Ten minutes later, I was outside Bookland. Well, down the block. I instructed Pierre, my Uber driver, to keep in the distance. I slipped him a twenty to shut off his lights and let me stay in the car to watch.

It was after two in the morning by then and the street was very quiet. Lydia’s BMW was parked by the bookstore, and she was standing on the street in her black coat. Her blond hair glowed in the streetlights. I could only just barely make out the splash of paint on the door, and there was a homeless woman who suddenly started shouting at Lydia. Lydia said something back that I couldn’t make out, then dug around in her purse until she came up with something that she handed to the woman. Money, I later realized.

When I heard from the grapevine that Cassie’s store had been vandalized, I kept my mouth shut. But I started tracking Lydia in the app. I tracked her to Cassie’s apartment. Back to the store again multiple times.

I considered blowing the whistle on her. I never forgave Lydia for what she did to me, and this seemed like a great opportunity to humiliate her. I could have told Joel what she was doing, but she would have denied it. And after that first time, I never caught her in the act again.

So I decided to make my own evidence. I bought three burner phones. Untraceable.

And I started to make my calls.



Cassie



“Anna,” Cassie gasps. She looks down at the pieces of the shattered phone on the ground, then back at Anna. “What… why…?”

“I don’t expect you to understand,” Anna says.

Cassie backs up, nearly stumbling on a teddy bear. “But I thought Lydia…”

“Lydia started the job. I finished it for her.”

Cassie blinks rapidly. She doesn’t know what to say. She’d thought Lydia had to be lying when she refused to admit to some of the harassment Cassie had experienced. It turns out, she wasn’t lying.

“Look in the drawer again,” Anna says. “There’s something else I want you to see.”

Cassie’s hands are shaking as she goes back to the drawer, digging frantically through the cloth diapers, but she knows what she’s going to find even before she sees the brown book inside with the gold lettering on the cover. A Christmas Carol.

A first edition. Worth twenty-five thousand dollars.

Except not really.

“After I had left my little love note in your closet,” Anna says, “I poked around a little. I didn’t expect to find that. I guess even a goody two shoes like you has secrets.”

Cassie can’t find the words to speak. Anna was the one in her apartment. Anna had made the calls to her. Was Anna also the one who sprinkled peanuts in her food?