Pretty Little Wife(58)
Her body suddenly weighed too much. It was difficult to keep her eyes open and keep her head from bobbing. With careful steps, she walked over to the kitchen and out of the middle of the debris field. The glass crackled as she tried to maneuver around the worst of the mess and make it to that bar stool across the room.
A few minutes later, she sat at her kitchen counter recovering from the aftermath. To cut through the thoughts cramming her head, she flicked the switch and let someone else talk.
This is Nia Simms and Gone Missing, the true crime podcast that discusses cases—big and small—in your neighborhood and around the country.
After days glued to this stupid podcast, she heard that opening in her dreams. She’d roll over and Nia’s deep voice would call to her. The line between real and nightmare shifted and blurred.
Today is our weekly call-in show. Let’s talk about the investigations and the three missing women. And since we’re talking about mysteries and missing neighbors, let me know if you have any thoughts about Aaron Payne. Are the disappearances in our area tied? Should the task force be reviewing all of these cases together? What do we need to know to bring these people home?
Even on this podcast where Nia worked so hard to keep the names in the news, three women missing, and Aaron’s name was the one in the spotlight. He sucked up all the energy in the room, and he wasn’t even there.
Nia did the initial hard work. She pushed the theory of the connection among the three. She forced the issue, kept them in the news and the public’s mind, after they’d become voiceless, hardly mentioned. But now she and the people who called in broke into a frothing frenzy talking about the men who might have perpetrated the violence. Their interest turned into something feral and disconnected from the women as people. Ignoring the loss to those families.
Karen Blue. Julie Levin. Yara James.
Lila vowed to remember their names.
The theories droned on. She listened as the calls morphed into one big guessing game. Anyone talking about Aaron talked about her. They made assumptions. Made her out to be some pathetic loner who was happy some man had paid attention to her and who had killed her husband to keep the other man’s interest. All bullshit and maddening.
She slid her arm across the counter, unable to do much else. She’d expended so much energy, her body now felt heavy and lifeless. An extra push and she touched the end of the remote. She brought it closer, ready to turn it off just as the next caller broke in.
“I know Aaron, and he’s not the man everyone thinks he is.”
A quick shot without any detail. Probably easy for most people to ignore. Not Lila.
The comment breathed life back into her exhausted body.
She recognized that voice.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
EXACTLY TWO HOURS AND A QUICK CLEANUP JOB LATER, LILA tracked Ryan down at his office. He’d ignored her repeated attempts to reach out, even the one through the college’s main number.
By the time she got to his office door, she’d worked herself into a full-throttle rage. Anger poured through her. His notes and all those side comments he’d written ran through her mind like a movie.
She opened the door and walked in without knocking. The move caught Ryan off guard. He dropped the book in his hand as he spun away from the window to face her.
Nothing in his expression said welcome. She picked up a bit of how dare you? mixed with oh shit and decided he was half-right.
After a few seconds, he nodded his head in what she took was a gesture to shut the door. Keep all the secrets in and don’t let the public see the mess. She’d grown up that way, and being with him threw her back into that mindset. The secrets and the scheming. But she closed it anyway.
He was the first to speak, and the harsh whisper of his tone matched his stiffness. “What the hell are you thinking by coming here?”
“You didn’t answer my call.” She didn’t bother to lower her voice or rein it in. He’d lost the right to have her care about his reputation when he dug into her past with abandon.
He bent down and retrieved the book, returning it with care to its assigned space on the shelves. “The police searched my damn house yesterday, Lila.”
“CID.”
“Does the precise name of the office really matter?”
His voice rose along with her indignation. Every cell inside her screamed to open his window and shout about his betrayal to the quad. Let him regain his favorite professor tag after that. “You don’t get to be pissed off.”
“Excuse me?”
He’d flipped the whole situation around and blamed her, put her in the role of begging forgiveness. As if she didn’t have enough garbage to worry about right now.
Screw that shit. This offensive strike was meant to throw her off balance. Little did he know that’s where she lived now. On the fringes, ready to fall into the abyss.
“The drama, the fake outrage—whatever this is—tone it down. Your students aren’t here to watch and applaud.”
A muscle in his cheek twitched. “Your marriage bullshit has turned my life upside down.”
Maybe true. She needed to own a part of that, but she’d do it in silence unless and until he explained the reams of papers he had collected about her without warning. “Oh, really?”
“I have a job and a life, Lila.” He pointed toward the closed window behind his desk. “Right now I have a meeting with the department chair and—”