The Neighbor's Secret(76)

For the first time since Annie had arrived, Lena looked directly at her. Her brown eyes seared. It was Annie’s turn to look away.

“Did you know my late husband Tim?” Lena said.

Annie’s palms felt hot and itchy. She flattened them against the skirt of her silk caftan, which she didn’t deserve, should have never accepted. She was a parasite.

“I worked for him,” she said. “He hired me right after college.”

“How was he,” Lena said evenly, “as a boss?”

Annie kept her eyes on the giant cottonwood tree. There was fluff trapped in its boughs, trembling in the wind, itching to snow down on the neighborhood.

“Not the best,” she said.





CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT



By design, Annie did not remember much about her affair with Tim Meeker.

They met in the interview. Annie had a little crush from the start.

First, there was that voice, so gravelly and sexy, and he wanted to make her comfortable. He didn’t seem concerned about her proficiency in PowerPoint. He cared about her taste in music and books, where she wanted to travel.

“I’ve been at your house before,” she admitted, and told him about the swim-team party. “Please tell your wife how lovely it was.”

“She and I are basically separated,” he said. “Same house, different lives.”

Tim’s habit was to go to the hotel bar next to their office after work. Annie didn’t remember when or why she started tagging along, sharing a scotch, but soon there were also steak dinners, nights at the hotel, outdoor concerts, weekends in the mountains.

Lately, despite her best efforts, she’d been recalling more: the hazy thrill of secrecy from keeping things quiet at work, waking up in a hotel room, sun too bright and a splitting headache, walking the snowy streets of a mountain town arm in arm and laughing.

He bought her a car, which seemed like proof of his generosity, or in hindsight, of the transactional nature to their relationship. They drank a lot.

She could not remember anything about their time together without feeling a stifling heat of regret and shame and she didn’t want Laurel anywhere near that feeling.

Tim Meeker had ultimately been as disposable as he’d wanted to make her.

“I’m sorry,” Annie said to Lena now. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’m sorry for you, Annie,” Lena said. “I wish I’d been there to protect you from him.”

“He wrote me a check to go away.” Annie’s eyes welled. It still, after all this time, shocked a little, how stupidly hopeful she’d been when she slipped inside this house.

“He wasn’t a good person.”

“I need you to listen, Lena,” Annie said. “Please. What happened later that night was my fault. All of it.”


FIFTEEN YEARS EARLIER

Tim wanted Annie to know that she would not walk away empty-handed. He made her sit next to him, in that stupid desk chair, while he left a voicemail for HR: His assistant Annie would be leaving for greener pastures. He was authorizing a generous departure bonus to be issued to her immediately.

“If you want a work reference,” Tim said to her, “just write one up and get it to Maureen. I’ll sign anything.”

He leaned forward, pressed a cold hand to Annie’s bare knee. He forgot himself for a moment, and his index finger traced her patella. When a mocking peal of laughter slipped through the open window from outside, he stopped himself, turned the gesture into a brusque pat.

Annie’s hand was on the doorknob when he said her name.

“You should leave through the garage,” he said. “Take the back staircase down, then a left through the mudroom.”

She stopped in the hall, balanced herself against the wall. The band returned from their break, and she staggered downstairs to the grind of guitar chords, the lead singer’s shouted count: One two three four—

It was after she stepped into the garage, cold and fluorescently lit, and saw Tim Meeker’s little hunter-green two-seater that her numbness splintered, gave way to the warmth of rage.

Annie tasted metal as she looked around the room at all the toys—the kayak, the skis, the bag of golf clubs with that stupid knit tassel hanging from it.

She was just seventeen, you know what I mean

She hoisted a club, cool and heavy, out of the bag. It took several swings to break the front headlights.

Annie was half aware of the beat shifting underneath her. She paused to catch her breath.

’Cause you’re fine and you’re mine and you look so divine

And then she walked around to the back of the car and smashed the brake lights, too.





CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE



Lena wanted to press her hand to Annie’s mouth.

Stop talking.

But Annie did not. She hugged a throw pillow to her chest and pulled its tassels as the words bled out of her.

She was the reason, Annie said, that Bryce didn’t see Tim on the road. Lena must hate her. Lena watched Annie and realized that yes, she did. She hated Annie with a passion too consuming and fiery to be contained. The hatred was going to erupt and spill over both of them like molten lava, preserve them, charred, in this spot forever.

And Annie would never know the real reason.