The Good Liar(39)
What the hell was that man doing? What was he hoping to find? Me with another man? Me with . . . Oh God. I’m so, so stupid.
I pick my phone up off the bedside table, where it will sleep forever now, and open a web browser. TMZ seems like the best bet. And yes, there it is.
TRIPLE TEN WIDOW MOVES ON?
Teo and me kissing is tonight’s breaking news.
The dawn, when it finally comes, does not improve what happened in the night.
Though I need to tell Cassie and Henry about the kiss before they read about it online, I don’t want to wake them again. I let them sleep in while I count the ways in which I’ll kill the man who terrified us when they find him. I silently send curses to the man or woman—I wasn’t able to tell which—who took the picture of Teo and me. I revive the litany of words I have for Tom, the betrayer, because if he hadn’t done what he did, I’d be a real widow, too torn up with grief to even think about a man, even one as great as Teo. And then I think about her, that anonymous woman who tore my life open. Who is she? Where is she? If she’s alive, does she lie awake at night full of regrets? Or did she slough off Tom’s death, consider it a close call, and scurry back to the comfort of her family, her life?
I get up and go to Tom’s study. I start to pull items from his desk and sort them into piles—keep, toss, donate. I try to tell myself I’m doing what I should’ve done long ago, sort through his things and start to make room for myself in here. But really, I’m looking for evidence, some sign or clue to point the way to her. I’ve been avoiding this forever, not asking the right questions when I had the chance, not searching my own house for further proof of his betrayal because I had enough to deal with.
But now, in the early morning after a night when my stitched-together life feels like it’s falling back apart, it seems like the right time to look under corners and reach to the back of drawers to see if I can find the monster after all and slay it.
Instead, all I find are remnants of our life together. Old bills, the to-do lists he’d make, packs of photographs that never made it into albums or frames. Tom was old-fashioned about his photographs; he didn’t want them to be only digital, so he’d dutifully take his camera chip into the pharmacy and return with an envelope full of carefully curated memories. The ones I find today are an amalgam from the year before he died—our last ski trip, the house we rented in Cape Cod with the Rings, Kaitlyn and I with our arms slung around each other after our first successful foray on the stand-up paddleboards we rented.
Kaitlyn’s wearing the wide-brimmed hat she always wore to protect her delicate skin from the sun. I was more reckless and have the wrinkles to prove it. Kaitlyn looks happy that day, strong and smiling, halfway between the broken woman I’d befriended and the one she was in the months before she died. I didn’t notice it so much then, as it was happening, like the changes in my own face that caught me up short when I finally looked at myself for the first time in a while. But examining this picture now, I recall clearly what she looked like the last time I saw her, when I met her for coffee before she went to work and we talked—I talked—about Tom.
She had dark circles under her eyes, and though she said all the right things, the things I needed, her eyes were downcast, and she kept stirring her coffee without drinking it. When she’d said she had to go, I’d stood up and hugged her. I’d asked her, finally, if she was okay. What was wrong?
“It’s nothing. I haven’t been sleeping well.”
“Any reason in particular?”
She’d shaken her head. She had more than a few gray hairs mixed in with the honey brown she’d adopted as a hair color a few years before. I wondered if she’d noticed them the way I’d noticed my own, evident to me despite their being close enough to my natural blonde to be invisible to most people.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not . . . It’s not happening again.”
“I wasn’t thinking that. But it would be okay if it did. You can tell me. I want you to.”
“I know . . . I just don’t know how to talk about it.”
“About what?”
She shook her head again. “Not today, okay? You have enough on your plate.”
“Then when?”
“How about next week? When things have settled down.”
We’d hugged again, and then she was gone, running to her car with her purse over her head to block the worst of a sudden pelt of rain.
Franny. It must’ve been Franny she was thinking about. She must’ve known the day was coming when she had to fess up to Joshua, to her kids, to us, and how that was probably going to rip her life to shreds, when she’d just gotten finished building it back up.
How I wish I’d known. How I wish I could’ve told her there was nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to fear in telling me, that it was keeping the secret that was painful.
Was it ever.
Chapter 18
The Gordian Knot
Kate
In Montreal, Kate looked with curiosity at the photo of Cecily Grayson kissing a strange man. The photo was on TMZ, a site she was embarrassed to say she spent too much time on in the last year. There was something about the voyeurism of it all; she found it strangely soothing. That people who had everything anyone could want were caught in unflattering positions. Drunk after dinner. Or “canoodling”—such a ridiculous word—with someone they shouldn’t be. It was an escape. Something she knew more than enough about.