Reputation(47)

My phone rings. The caller ID reads, Unknown. A reporter? Various news outlets are dying to get an interview with me because of Greg.

I let it go to voice mail. After a moment, I press the little triangle to play it, and some static noises crackle through the speaker. After about ten seconds, someone sighs. The hair on the back of my neck rises. Do I know that sigh? Is that Patrick?

Forget him, I tell myself. He’s married to your coworker. Stop thinking about him.

My phone rings again. This time, I see my dad’s landline number. One of my daughters, probably.

I pick up the receiver. “Sienna? Everything okay?”

“Actually, it’s Willa.”

My sister’s gravelly voice makes me sit taller in my chair. “Oh. Hey.”

“How’s work going?”

“I just got here,” I remind her. “I haven’t really done anything yet.” I idly navigate to Facebook, though that’s a mistake. My feed is full of both Greg In Memory messages and a few hundred reposts of Greg’s e-mails to Lolita. “How are the girls?”

“Well, they haven’t come downstairs, even when I knocked.” Then she clears her throat. “Maybe they should go back to school.”

“They’re still so shell-shocked.”

“I wonder if it would be better for them if they went back. They’ll be around friends. Classes will take their minds off things.”

Out the window, a siren wails. I twist away from the noise. “Just because you convinced me to go back to work doesn’t mean it’s the right choice for them.”

“I was serious when I said they’ve been off since this happened.”

I ball up my fist. “What do you mean, off?”

“Don’t you think they’ve been acting sort of weird? Distant? Kind of . . . cold?”

“Their stepfather was murdered in their home—a home we can’t even go back to yet. I think that’s a valid excuse for not acting like themselves.”

“I wonder if they should talk to someone.”

“A counselor?” I start to open the paper bag that contains a muffin I’ve brought for breakfast, then decide against it. I’m not hungry.

“Or even me. As a start. Maybe they’re afraid to talk to you.”

I scoff. “Why would they be afraid?”

“A lot has happened. Maybe they’d feel more comfortable talking to someone who isn’t so close to the situation.”

I’ve tried to reach my girls over the past few days. The morning after I found Greg murdered, I sat on the couch with them, cradling their bodies. I tried to say things to make them feel better, safe. But I’d been in shock, too. All of my swirling emotions of horror and loss and anger stewed close to the surface. Perhaps I was more concerned about my own self-preservation right then, but can you blame me? I basically bathed in a pool of my husband’s blood. I was also the one who’d had those violent, angry thoughts about him just hours before he was stabbed.

I figured I’d just let them grieve on their own and then, in a few days, we’d talk. I also need to get that awkwardness out of my head first, so that I don’t tarnish their opinions of Greg now that he’s gone.

Unbidden, the image of Sienna and Greg sitting at his old kitchen table in Shadyside flashes back to me. How happy they were. How tickled I’d felt when I watched Sienna laughing for what seemed like the first time since Martin died. I flash on another memory, too: Aurora, at fourteen, rushing home from school so she could log into a website at precisely 3:00 P.M., when Beyoncé tickets went on sale. But the bus had been late; by the time she logged in, the tickets were gone. Greg and I watched as she bit back tears. Fast-forward to the next night: Greg slyly sitting down to dinner and, with a twist of his mouth, pushing an envelope across the table to Aurora. She opened it, and her eyes popped wide. “How did you find them?” she screeched, and got up and threw her arms around Greg . . . just as one would a father.

Willa clears her throat. “There are a few other things I want to ask you. Stuff I meant to ask yesterday . . . but things were so crazy . . .”

I swivel away from my computer to the window. Down on the street, the student bus, which takes kids to dorms all over campus, huffs past, kicking up a plume of black exhaust.

There’s a long pause. “Who was that guy you were talking to after the funeral?”

I curl my toes. I had a feeling Willa might ask. “Just a friend.”

“You looked . . . uncomfortable.”

I peer nervously into the hall, fearful that Lynn Godfrey is lurking around a corner somewhere, listening in. “I’m not particularly good at accepting people’s sympathy, that’s all. I haven’t exactly processed that Greg’s dead.”

“Okay,” Willa says. And then, after a pause: “Also, this other thing. Maybe I have my information wrong, but was Greg Martin’s surgeon?”

I roll a few inches back, my chair hitting the radiator behind my desk. The heat is on, and my spine is instantly too warm. “Yes. Yes, he was.”

“Is there a reason you never told me this?”

“I . . . don’t know. I didn’t think it was relevant.”

“You said Greg was part of the team that diagnosed him. Not that he’d been the guy who actually operated on Martin’s heart.”