Things We Do in the Dark(99)

Paris exhales so hard, she collapses in her chair. The tears follow a moment later, which turn into sobs that rack her whole body. She’s only vaguely aware of each lawyer’s hand touching her shoulder as they leave quietly.

Life has a way of balancing everything out. And the only reason this moment feels so good is that what happened to Jimmy was so bad. She knows the feeling won’t last. When Paris is finished crying, all she’ll be left with is the guilt that her husband was so unhappy and in such a dark place that he felt the only way out was to end his own life. And she’ll spend the rest of her life trying to understand how he got there, how she could have missed it, how she might have saved him.

When the sobs subside, she heads upstairs to her room to wash her face and change into something comfortable. She needs to call Henry, and then she needs to finish making plans for Jimmy’s funeral. Per his wishes, he’ll be cremated, and his urn will rest next to his mother’s in the family mausoleum.

A little way down the hall, she sees that the door to Jimmy’s bedroom is open. She can still smell the bleach coming out of it, reminding her that it’s been cleaned and that it’s safe to go inside. She takes a step toward it, then stops. The last time she was in Jimmy’s bedroom was the night he died.

She’s not ready.

Jimmy, I love you. And I’m sorry. I’m so, so, so sorry.



* * *



All that’s left to do now is grieve. And the way Paris grieves is: she cooks.

For the past couple of hours, she’s been listening to Jimmy’s cassettes on his old boombox in the kitchen. It’s nice. Every song on his “Hits of ’70s” compilation cassette has a memory of her husband attached to it. Right now, The Hollies are playing, and she can picture Jimmy sitting at the table with his reading glasses on, drinking his coffee as a light rain comes down on the window. Sometimes, all I need is the air that I breathe …

She lifts the lid off her Le Creuset and gives the lightly simmering pork adobo a stir. Every cook has their own recipe for the traditional Filipino stew. Some like it saucy. Some like it dry. But the basic ingredients in any Filipino adobo are soy sauce, vinegar, bay leaves, and patience. She’s also making lumpia (spring rolls) and a huge batch of pancit (noodles), and when she’s finished, she’ll have enough leftovers for a week. The only good thing that ever came out of her time in Maple Sound was that Lola Celia taught her to cook.

The doorbell rings. Paris checks the clock on the stove and frowns. She can’t imagine who could be at the front door at nine o’clock at night, other than a photographer hoping for a picture or a journalist hoping for a comment. But the crowd that was camped outside for the past week is finally gone now, and the neighborhood is back to normal, with its usual amount of city gazers taking photos at Kerry Park.

The doorbell rings again, and this time, it’s followed by a knock. Whoever it is, they know she’s home, because all the lights are on inside the house. She looks around for her phone to see if she’s missed a text. Maybe Henry was planning to stop by. But she left her phone upstairs on the charger.

A thought occurs to her. What if it’s Ruby? She’s out on parole now, and although she’s forbidden to leave Canada, her mother has always been crafty. And she can be very motivated when someone else has something she wants. Like husbands. And money.

The knocking stops. Paris keeps her ears perked, waiting for the doorbell to ring again. It doesn’t. Padding down the hallway to the front door, she finally looks out the peephole to see if she can at least catch a glimpse of who it might have been. But there’s no one there.

Feeling a little rattled, Paris heads back into the kitchen. She’d started cooking around six o’clock when her stomach began to rumble, and then got carried away—she’s knee-deep in it now. The song has changed to “Midnight Train to Georgia,” and she sings along softly with Gladys Knight. I’d rather live in his world than live without him in mine …

Something crashes outside, and she jumps. What the hell is going on? Is someone in the backyard? Are they trying to break in now?

In a panic, she reaches for the closest sharp object she can find: the cleaver she used to chop all the vegetables for the pancit. There’s a glare on the kitchen windows and patio doors from the overhead lights, preventing her from seeing anything in the backyard, so she flicks them all off before approaching the glass to see if there’s anyone outside.

A man appears at the patio door, and she screams, nearly dropping the cleaver. Whoever he is, he must have hopped the fence. He’s dressed in dark clothing, wearing a black ball cap with some kind of red insignia on it. She fumbles for the switch to the backyard lights, but it’s dark, and all she ends up doing is flicking the kitchen lights back on again. The face vanishes behind a reflection of white.

The man pounds on the patio door.

“Go away,” she says, as authoritatively as she can muster. “You are trespassing, and I’m going to call the police.”

But how can she call? Her fucking phone is all the way upstairs.

He pounds on the glass again, and her fingers finally find the lights for the backyard. She switches them on, and sees a tall Black man staring in at her.

“Come on, Joey,” Drew says, his voice muffled behind the glass. “Let me in.”





CHAPTER FORTY