Pretty Little Wife(13)
After a few seconds, they fell back on comfortable, unflinching eye contact.
“He should be at school. I don’t understand why he’s not.” And that was the truth. The SUV should be where she’d parked it. He should be in it. Dead but there.
She’d turned the mystery over in her head. Spun it around, flipped it over. Nothing she did, no matter how much she reasoned it out, led to a comprehensible answer. Was he alive? Injured? Playing with her?
“I called everywhere I could think he might go if he needed to clear his head,” Jared said.
That stopped her from fidgeting. She rubbed her hands together under the safety of the bar overhang. “What did Aaron tell you about the fight?”
“That you both said some things. I know he regretted however it rolled out. I’m sure he told you that.” Jared started to say something else but stopped when his cell buzzed. He pulled it out of his jacket pocket and read the text on the screen. “Brent wants to take the afternoon off and drive around.”
“Doing what?” She’d assumed Brent would be the kind to fade into the background if things got tough. That’s how he’d mismanaged his marriage until it finally sputtered to a halt. He’d put more into his friendship with Aaron in five hours than he had with caring about his ex-wife’s obvious unhappiness and spiraling depression during the last two years of their marriage. Lila knew because she’d had a front-row seat to that disaster.
“Looking for Aaron.” Jared shrugged. “Brent thinks he might have driven to the lake. There are places he likes to go there, like that one hiking trail.”
Her mind blanked for a second. “You think that instead of going to work Aaron took off on a drive and went hiking?”
“I don’t know, Lila.” Jared pushed the mug away from him and shifted until he faced her. “Look, you can talk to me.”
She could hear the thread of concern in his voice. See it in his eyes. “About what?”
“Anything. I know Aaron can be tough. People think he’s outgoing, but we both know he’s not emotionally very open.” Jared hesitated for a few more seconds before sitting up straight again and leaning away from her. “Are you going to be okay with the detective on your own?”
“Investigator.”
Jared snorted. “Is there a difference?”
“I guess we’ll see.” She’d gone out of her way not to know anything about the intricacies of New York law enforcement, both because she didn’t plan to take another bar exam and because she didn’t intend to ever return to a courtroom.
“Okay.” He stood up and adjusted the waistband of his dress pants on his waist, trim from hours of running each morning. “I’ll do a quick drive with Brent then circle back here to help out and make some calls. I’ll have my cell. Text if you hear anything.”
The second kiss landed in her hair. It was quick and brotherly and comforting in a way she never expected. She wasn’t exactly one to relax and let someone else share the load, but from the moment she’d met Jared they’d clicked. They understood each other and never needed to verbally vomit their life details to each other.
They were reluctant survivors. Angry and unwilling to open up and invite more pain. Aaron bonded them, but most days—and especially recently—she preferred spending time with Jared over Aaron.
She glanced at the tablet and the podcast site. “Jared?”
He turned around in the doorway to the hall and stopped. “Yeah?”
The hopeful expression, all wide-eyed and waiting, pulled at her, but she let it go. She wasn’t even sure what she intended to say when she’d called out to him. It wasn’t as if she had anything encouraging to offer. No hope. No empty words about finding Aaron safe.
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
Aaron wasn’t coming back. But if he did, she’d finish what she started.
Chapter Seven
GINNY CALLED TO SAY SHE’D LEFT THE OFFICE AND WOULD BE there soon. That was thirty minutes ago. She showed up with a younger man. No uniform on him either. Just dark pants and a bright white shirt. When he asked to use the bathroom, she directed him to the one down the hall and told him to do whatever he needed to do. She had nothing to hide. There was no reason to pretend she did.
“This is a big house. No kids?” Ginny ran her finger along the fireplace mantel, hesitating only when it landed on the frame of the one photo sitting there.
Lila standing between Aaron and Jared. The picture was a little more than a year old and captured a rare moment in time when all three of them looked genuinely happy. It was taken only a few minutes before they headed out on a boat on Cayuga Lake. The bright blue sky and late-summer sun had them looking tan and rested.
“No.” Kids or no kids was the one marital decision she and Aaron had made together.
Ginny set the photo back on the mantel and turned to face Lila. “Walk me through this morning again.”
This was a game. Lila didn’t feel like playing. She sat down in the middle of the couch and opened the laptop she’d carried into the room after Jared left. “I got up, and he was already gone. That’s normal, by the way.”
“Normal?”
She didn’t look up. Just kept typing. “Do you object to the word?”