Wish You Were Gone(42)
“Can I help?” Kelsey stood up, suddenly full of energy.
“Kelsey, I—”
“I’ll totally cold-call them,” Kelsey said, walking around the island to open the laptop.
“And say what?” Hunter asked. “Hey. This is Kelsey Walsh. Were you having an affair with my dead dad?”
“Hunter—”
“Dad was not having an affair!” Hunter shouted. He dropped his bowl into the sink with a clatter that startled both Emma and Kelsey, then grabbed the pile of bills, crumpling them in both hands.
“Hunter!” Emma cried, making a grab for the pages. All that work.
“This is so fucked up!” he shouted, angling away from her. He turned and shoved the whole wad into the garbage, covering it up with the goopy, dirty detritus of carrot and potato peels, eggshells and coffee grounds. “You guys want to make him out like he was evil, but he wasn’t evil.”
Emma’s heart was in her throat. “Oh, Hun—”
“I don’t want to hear it, Mom.” Hunter snatched his duffel bag up off the floor. “I’m going upstairs.”
Emma locked eyes with Kelsey until they heard Hunter’s bedroom door slam. Then she turned and leaned into the counter, just breathing. Hunter never lost his temper. Ever. It was like watching a dormant volcano randomly explode. How could she have thought that the truth, in this case, was in any way appropriate? He’d just lost his father. They all knew the man had been flawed. She didn’t need to taint her son’s memories of James even deeper. Emma felt like the worst mother imaginable.
“He probably texted her,” Kelsey said in a small voice. “Everybody texts. Or snapchats.”
“I can’t imagine your father on Snapchat,” Emma said, before she could stop herself. “And I don’t have his phone.”
“What about his computer? If he synched his messaging app to his computer, it would have a record of his conversations,” Kelsey said. “Unless he deleted them.”
The room temporarily tilted. How had she not considered that? But then, the laptop was missing, too. It was almost as if someone was trying to hide something. But James couldn’t have known he was going to die that night, and he was the only person with a motive to keep this information a secret. Other than—possibly—the mistress herself.
“Let’s just leave it.” Emma reached for the ladle Hunter had left lolling in the stew and dished up dinner for herself and her daughter. She handed Kelsey a bowl, then ran her hand over her long hair. “You know what we should work on instead? Deciding which monologue you should use for your audition for Daltry. Let’s concentrate on the future for tonight.”
LIZZIE
The only drawback of Ben’s café was that it shared a parking lot with The Tap Room, one of only two bars in the town of Oakmont. The other, Varka Lounge, was more on the outskirts and attracted a younger, trendier crowd—twentysomethings who still lived with their parents while commuting into the city or working from home on their start-up whatevers. The Tap Room was the place where people Lizzie’s age went after work or after the kids were in bed or when they couldn’t take their spouses anymore. Thanks to local ordinances, it closed at eleven during the week and midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, but sometimes, when Lizzie was walking into Ben’s at seven o’clock on a weekday morning, she could still smell stale beer and vomit in the air. Who drinks themselves sick on a Monday night? she thought, moving to an outdoor table slightly farther from the lot, then wondered if James Walsh had ever done just that.
The idea made her heart hurt. What must it have been like to live with that man? Part of her wondered whether Emma and the kids weren’t better off with him gone, now that she knew the truth. May he rest, her brain automatically added to the shameful thought.
Lizzie lifted her café au lait—on the house, no matter how much she argued with Ben—to her lips and slowly trailed her gaze toward the train station, telling herself she was not sitting there with the express purpose of spying on Gray and Darnell. It was simply a beautiful morning. The kind of morning that begged to be enjoyed outdoors, preferably not downwind from a puddle of puke.
“You alright out here?” Ben asked, popping outside even as the line at the counter began to snake toward the door.
“I’m fine!” she replied with a smile. “Get back to work!”
“Not before giving you this.” He produced a beautifully plated chocolate croissant from behind his back, a little rose made out of white chocolate resting next to it.
“Ben, that looks amazing. But I could never eat something like that for breakfast. I’ll gain ten pounds!”
“You have to eat the whole thing to get to what’s underneath.”
Ben grinned and ducked back inside. Lizzie, blushing, lifted the croissant and saw that there was a paper doily on the plate, and she could tell something had been written on the underside of the circle at the center. Her heart flipped over and she put the croissant down again, ripping a tiny bit off the top. She couldn’t stop smiling. Secret messages on croissant doilies? She felt like the romantic heroine in a French film. But she wasn’t going to look like a desperate housewife and read it right now. She didn’t want to do it while Ben was most definitely watching her.