Mother May I(89)

“She’s probably left the state anyway,” Trey said late that night, when he woke at two to find me mulling all this over, my hand resting on Robert’s busy little heart. “The guys I’ve hired are a precaution. If she has any sense, she’s long gone.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” I’d whispered back, with absolutely no conviction.

For all Coral had said she was leaving her child out of it, I knew how dirty Lexie’s hands were. She had helped her mother stalk a toddler. Maybe she hadn’t known Coral’s plan in the beginning, but after Geoff’s murder she’d still helped Coral watch me. She’d let her mother take my child, too. Now Coral was dead with her plan only two-thirds complete. Would Lexie feel she had to finish it? She didn’t come from a family who let things go.

The next day the mail came at eleven, right on time. I put Robert into his bouncy chair and left him with Mills again. I walked down the drive, feeling Lexie’s eyes on me with every step I took.

I opened the mailbox, and there it was. I knew it at once. It was a white cardboard thing, the size of a sheet of paper, tucked between the smaller bills and larger catalogs. The only words on it were my name and address, the handwriting small and spidery, the letters crabbed together. No return address.

I grabbed the whole stack and hurried back inside. In my head, in the two minutes I’d been gone, Lexie had vaulted over the back fence, kicked down my back door, and taken Robert. It was a relief to see him peacefully napping in his chair, his pink mouth working a dream bottle.

Mills looked up from his book. “Everything okay?”

“Uh-huh,” I said, trying to calm my breathing. “Can you sit with him? I’d love to grab a shower. He should sleep at least until noon, and I’ll have the baby monitor in case he wakes.”

“Sure,” Mills said. He was good with Robert, I’d discovered. Giant Mills with his eight-pack and his hooded eyes liked babies. His sister had two kids, he said. I found it touching, even sweet, and these days I took sweetness anywhere I found it.

I brought the mail back to my bedroom. I locked the door and leaned against it.

I would not read the letter. I’d decided. There was nothing Coral Lee Pine could tell me that was true. It would do me no good at all. I would take it to the master bath and burn it in the sink. I had a lighter in there for my scented candles. Trey had told me he saw our family as a bull’s-eye after Anna-Claire was born. The baby in the middle. Us around the baby in concentric circles. I realized now a bull’s-eye was a target. I could not weaken us with Lexie still unfound—and maybe aimed at us. I had to keep Robert and his sisters safe, at center, and I wanted Trey wrapped tight around them. To not read was to choose to wrap around them all, my husband included.

I dropped the pile of mail on the bed, then fished her envelope out from between the bills and glossy catalogs.

I was halfway to the bathroom before I registered the small red stamps running in a chain along the edge. A long envelope from Visa had hidden the words before.

photographs, do not bend. photographs, do not bend. photographs, do not bend.





24




This was how affairs began. Marshall should not be standing on Bree’s porch, readying to meet her one-on-one to talk about her problems with her husband. That was the first step in the How to Screw Up Someone’s Marriage handbook.

On the other hand, there wasn’t a universe where she called him weeping that way and he didn’t go to her. It didn’t feel physically possible.

She’d been so upset on the phone that he’d had a hard time understanding anything beyond the bare facts. Coral had sent a letter. An explanation, apparently, for all the damage she and her daughter had done. He hadn’t been able to make out much beyond that, she’d been sobbing so hard.

Bree had asked, “How can I stay married?” He’d heard that question loud and very damn clear. So here he was to talk with Bree about leaving her husband, and he was . . . what? Supposed to be objective?

Trey’s story about Lexie Pine had smelled off to him from minute one, but standing on the porch, he swore to himself that no matter what Coral’s letter said, he would be fair. He would be more than fair. He would go in there a hundred percent Team Trey. Not only because the other team was headed by a dead murderess who lied, and tricked, and poisoned. But because Bree loved her husband. They had three kids who’d only known a happy, intact family so far. Unless Coral had sent actual footage of Trey assassinating Lincoln, he wasn’t going to do anything to bust that up. This he promised God, the universe, and himself before he pressed the doorbell.

Bree opened the door so fast she must have been waiting in the foyer. She wore faded jeans and an old Tori Amos T-shirt she’d had since college. Her hair was pulled back in a loose, low ponytail. Barefoot, with no makeup, she looked so young, like the girl he’d grown up with. Her nose and even her lips were puffy and pink from crying, her eyes red-rimmed, but she was so lovely and so sad that he had to put his hands in his pockets to keep from reaching for her, pulling her into his arms.

Something had broken in him, some resolve, that day up on the mountain, when he’d put her baby back into her arms and she had clung to him. Her tears had wet his face, and she’d rained kisses on his head, his hands. Some essential barrier had crumbled, so that now he had to work to keep space between them. This was not the right time. There never would be a right time. She was not the right woman. Just the one he wanted.