The Wife Who Knew Too Much(58)
“You have to decide who to trust.”
“I’m asking your opinion.”
“You want my opinion? Fine. You say you want to leave. So, leave. And soon, before the baby comes. Nothing good happens at Windswept, and it’s no place for a baby. But that’s just my two cents, and I’m only the housekeeper. Now, if you’ll excuse me, ma’am, I have things to do in the kitchen.”
26
I knew I had to tell Connor that I’d been at Windswept the night Nina died before Kovacs remembered, and gave me up. I spent the day agonizing over how best to break the news. What tone to strike, how much to reveal, to make him the least upset. Should I cook dinner first? Get him into bed and tell him afterward, when we were relaxed in each other’s arms? Or just sit him down the minute he walked in the door and treat this like the crisis it was?
In the end, my stewing was for nothing. Connor called me from the airport. He was on his way to Dubai on business and wouldn’t be home for days.
“Can I come? I hate being alone here.”
“We can’t be seen together publicly right now. That ChitChat piece is all over the internet.”
“The one about me and the necklace?”
“Not just that. They did a piece on that Baxter woman’s lawsuit, repeating her lies like they’re gospel truth. Lauren says we have to fight fire with fire and dirty up the Baxter woman in the press ASAP. Make her the villain. Once the Twitter mob picks a side, there’s no turning back. They’ll come for us with pitchforks.”
“What’s Lauren got to do with this?”
“She’s advising me.”
“Connor, you can’t trust her. I told you what she said about you.”
“She apologized. Look, Lauren shoots her mouth off when she’s had a few. She doesn’t mean anything by it. We’ll come up with a strategy by the time we land.”
“Wait, Lauren’s going to Dubai with you?” I said.
“She’s staffed on the deal. But since we’re taking the company plane, we’ll have some privacy to work out a strategy for the PR problem.”
“Oh, no. That makes me really nervous.”
“What?”
“You, alone with Lauren on a long flight. You used to be with her. And now she thinks you killed Nina. What kind of twisted thing do you have going on with her?”
“You’re overreacting. Lauren and I were over long ago. And she’d had too much to drink that night when she said those things. Besides, we won’t be alone. Hank’s here, and the entire team. Don’t get jealous, okay? I hate that. It reminds me of Nina.”
I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. “You’re comparing me to her because I don’t trust Lauren? I don’t even believe you anymore that Nina was paranoid. She wasn’t paranoid. You were cheating on her. You can’t deny it. I was there.”
“Look, I don’t want to fight right before I get on a plane. I’m sorry for comparing you to Nina. You’re nothing like her. That marriage was wrong from the beginning. I’m a different person with you. And I have no interest in anybody else, so there’s no need for you to worry about anything. I love you more than I’ve ever loved anybody.”
Connor Ford is not capable of love, Lauren had said at the dinner. Did she know something I didn’t?
“They’re telling us to board. Tabby, you have to have faith.”
“Okay.”
I’ll try, I thought. But it was getting harder.
“Now, listen. Steve Kovacs is coming tomorrow afternoon to start implementing the security plan. Until then, don’t go out. Don’t accept calls from numbers you don’t recognize. Don’t do anything that could attract more press scrutiny. Understood?”
“I—”
“Just say yes. Otherwise, I’ll be worrying about you the whole time I’m gone.”
“Yes.”
“Gotta go. I’ll call you when I land. I love you.”
I didn’t say it back. Not because I didn’t love him. If anything, I loved him too much—painfully and overwhelmingly and with the dawning fear that our love would not bring me happiness.
I searched my name online to see what Connor had been upset about. The photo of me in the emerald necklace had been picked up on scores of news and gossip sites. I read the article about Kara Baxter’s lawsuit. She’d obviously fed information to the reporter, who reprinted her claims verbatim. “I want justice for my beloved sister,” said the woman who hadn’t spoken to Nina in decades. “The police need to reopen this investigation because I know in my heart she would never take her own life.”
Normally I avoided looking at Nina’s portrait, but now I went to stand before it, trying to find the real woman in the ghostly form splayed across the canvas. I wanted answers. I wished I could make her talk to me. Tell me what happened.
“Did you kill yourself? Did you try to kill me?” I said.
My words echoed in the cold bedroom. I’d accepted that Nina was a head case, like Connor always said. I had good reason to believe him. Some goon in a Suburban tried to run me down and kill me. Nina was behind that. She had to be. I couldn’t prove it, but I’d seen the Suburban here, on Windswept grounds, the night she died. I even took a photo of its license plate, then wasted two hundred bucks so some PI back home could tell me the car was registered to a shell company. Protocol Shipping Solutions, an entity with no known ties to Nina Levitt. But it had to be her, right? Right? And yet. When Gloria told me what a monster Edward Levitt was, for the first time I felt sorry for Nina, and wondered if I had the full picture. Who was she, really? If only I knew that, I could understand what had happened to her.