The Watcher Girl(21)

Campbell waves a hand. “Oh, no. It’s not that. Sutton is really big on privacy. I hope you don’t think I’m being rude?”

“God, no,” I assure her.

Sutton . . . big on privacy? Since when? Back in college, he’d take all his calls on speakerphone or over the Bluetooth in the car. He never demanded privacy of me, never required it of himself.

“So what’s he like? Your husband?” Clearly he’s a changed man. I need to know what I’m dealing with.

A vision of him playing air harmonica to “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” comes to mind. He was always trying to put a smile on my face, always reminding me to lighten up. The man had no qualms about making a fool of himself to pull me out of my darkest moods, if only for a moment.

My mind refuses to conjure up a vision of a man demanding private, secret phone calls.

“Sutton?” She gazes up at the ceiling, contemplating. “Hmm. He’s an amazing father. Old-fashioned. Driven. Though he can be a bit particular at times . . .”

“Particular?” Tell me more . . .

“He knows what he wants,” she says, her voice matter-of-fact. She shrugs like it’s a quirk of his she’s come to accept and respect. “He’s been that way since the beginning. He likes to run the show, I guess. And that’s fine. It’s nice not having to worry about things, you know? He’s always taking care of us.”

She’s submissive and subservient—again, the antithesis of me.

But my mind refuses to picture Sutton as a control freak.

Eight years ago, had someone asked me to describe him, I’d have used words like agreeable, sentimental, tender, selfless, and soft-hearted. Movies made him cry, even the happy ones. He loved stargazing. And he was always asking what I wanted to do. Where I wanted to go for lunch. Where I wanted to live someday. He never tried to sway me one way or the other—he simply wanted to be with me . . . wherever that was.

Campbell picks at a hangnail.

Is she nervous? Is there something else she’s not saying?

“You’re one of the lucky ones,” I say to feel her out.

“What do you mean?”

“You landed yourself a real family man. Aren’t too many of those left these days.” I think of my brother, Sebastian, who knows he’s got it all—sharp looks, cunning wit, the promise of success as soon as he finishes law school. The guy’s got a waiting list of beautiful women all desperate to lock him down. He lives for the moment. Words like “marriage” and “family” don’t exist in his extensive vocabulary. Men like him are more the rule than the exception these days, especially for our generation.

She sniffs. “Yeah.”

Yeah? That’s all she’s going to give me?

“So what do you guys do for fun around here?” I ask again. “Have you checked out the Marietto Running Trail or the Summerfield Aquarium downtown?” I cross my fingers under the table, hoping those places still exist.

“Not yet,” she says. “Now that Gigi’s getting older . . . I’m sure we’ll do more of that. We don’t even have a sitter yet.”

No sitter? So they haven’t had a date night in over a year? Surely Sutton has a colleague with a cash-hungry teenage daughter? Why wouldn’t he put out the feelers? Take his poor wife on a date to get her out of the house? Let her put on a dress and heels and lipstick and feel like a woman again?

It’s almost barbaric to keep her sheltered away like that. No wonder she was so desperate to clean me up after our run-in the other morning. This is a woman starved for attention. Socially and emotionally emaciated. Dying on the inside from loneliness—even if she doesn’t know it yet.

One day she’ll snap . . . the way my mother did twenty years ago . . . and Sutton will have no one to blame but himself.

“I think there’s a children’s museum on the east side of town,” I add. I recall spotting it on the traffic-heavy trek from the airport to my father’s house. “Or there used to be. Have you seen that park that looks like a medieval castle? Has a moat and everything.”

My phone buzzes inside my bag. Without looking at it, I already know it’s Jonah. I’m under a tight deadline with the Redwood project, which means I shouldn’t be here, tending to personal business.

I check the caller ID and confirm my suspicions.

“I’m so sorry—it’s my boss.” I hate to take the call outside after our conversation a few minutes back, but it’s best he doesn’t hear the tinkle of coffee mugs and soft jazz playing in the background. “Will you excuse me for a sec? I’ll be right back.”

A week ago, I was tasked with a revenge porn project—my least favorite kind of gig, if only because as soon as one copy comes down, ten more pop up in its place. Virtual Whac-A-Mole. This particular case, however, involves the underage former stepdaughter of an Indiana senator, and his opponents would love nothing more than to manufacture a scandal so they can see him go down in flames. Or so his camp says. I was hired to do a job, not to ask questions.

“Watcher Girl.” Jonah always calls me by my online handle when I answer.

“Jonah.” I always call him by his name. Though once I made the mistake of referring to him as Guardian Boy—his handle—and he thought I was flirting.

“How’s it going? You in, uh, New York?” he asks.