The Night Before(62)

“If it makes you feel any better, I do that more now. Now that I’ve been dating for a while on that godforsaken website. Everyone lies. You have to read between the lines, look for clues hidden in photos. Sometimes you don’t know until you meet face-to-face.”

“Or you Google them—and hope they’ve used their real names.”

“Haha,” he says. “But you did it too, Laura Heart.”

Yes, I did.

“So where does that leave us?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

He slips an arm behind my back and pulls me into him. Our bodies press together as we lean against the counter. His body is warm and strangely familiar now.

I wrap my arms around his neck and rest my cheek against his chest. I hear his heart beating and it soothes me.

But then everything changes.

“I think…” he says, moving one hand down my thigh until it finds the hem of Rosie’s dress. Then it moves beneath the fabric, up and up and inside.

He whispers in my ear.

“I think we should fuck again.”

His voice is deep and lurid and it sends my body into lockdown. Every muscle stiffens against the pull of his hands on my dress and my hair. His mouth is wet, kissing my neck, devouring me suddenly like he devoured that pizza.

What is happening? The question has nowhere to go for an answer. It searches for the place where instinct should be, where reason should sound out, and finds an empty hole.

This is my defect. This is my Achilles’ heel. All I can do is look at the evidence.

Where is the kindness? Where is the honesty? I’ve just stripped my soul bare. I’ve told him how vulnerable I am to this very thing—to uncertainty about men, to regret. And to the violence that resulted years ago.

He says it again. “I want to fuck you right now,” and I feel my hand squeeze tight. A ball of stiff, folded fingers. Nails digging into my palm. A fist.

I open my eyes when he moves his head away and I see my purse on the counter. I have one thought now—one thought about what I have to do.

RUN!

Maybe this is nothing. I know that. Some people like this—the physical passion, the verbal vulgarity. But it stands beside the soft touch of his hands less than an hour before. It stands beside the intimate conversation that has barely ended. I don’t have the tools to understand.

“I have to go,” I say. Though the words are not easy to get out. That sad child, that stupid child, does not want to disappoint him.

I hate her. She never listens.

He doesn’t stop, so I say it again, fueled by anger now.

“I have to go.”

I push him off me and grab my purse. I reach inside and look for my keys. Jonathan stands still. He seems embarrassed, but I don’t care. I don’t care if he was trying to be seductive or sexy or whatever. I have to leave.

“Laura,” he says. “I’m sorry—did I misread something? I thought we were really connecting.”

Fuck! Where are my keys?

My hand brushes a piece of paper, and I remember the same feeling from earlier. From before I lost control. Got in his bed. Found his ring.

I grab it this time and pull it out. It’s heavy and when it is freed from the purse, my keys fall out from between the folds. Jonathan reaches down to pick them up and I hate him for doing it. For being nice again. So much hatred runs wild.

Who are you, Jonathan Fielding?

I unfold the paper. It’s just like the others. One sentence typed in black ink. Only this one scares me even more. This one is not a threat. It’s a conclusion.

“What is that?” Jonathan says. “What does it say? You just turned as white as a ghost.”

I look up from the note. I don’t need to read it again—they’re words I will never forget. So I just say them as I stare at this stranger.

You should have left while you had the chance.





THIRTY-SIX


Rosie. Present Day. Saturday, 1 p.m. Branston, CT.

Rosie followed Conway and Pearson to the police station. Gabe offered to go with her, but she needed him to go home, where he could research Edward Rittle and the two companies he was involved with.

The first was the LLC that leased the apartment—362 Maple Street. The name of the company was the address of the building. Gabe said he had no doubt it was formed simply to hold the lease so it wouldn’t be in Rittle’s name.

The second was a financial firm—Klayburn Capital. Laura had made calls to a number registered to the hedge fund. It was the number Laura had used to contact the man she believed to be Jonathan Fields.

Rosie sat now in a small conference room staring at a printout of the numbers from Laura’s phone.

Pearson sat with her, flipping through notes from the morning.

The young officer looked up suddenly with a question. “I thought you said Edward Rittle worked in construction—win dow replacements, right? What does that have to do with a hedge fund?” But Rosie only heard the voice, not the words that were spoken. Her mind was on something else.

She’d been staring at her husband’s phone number. Counting the calls and the texts. Trying to remember what happened on the days when there were many, and the days when there were none. Trying to find a pattern that might explain this connection between her husband and her sister that began over the summer.