Count My Lies

Chapter 29

29

I shut the door and go up the stairs, taking them two at a time. From our bedroom window, I watch Sloane and Harper begin their walk from our house to Anne-Marie’s. It’s a five-minute walk there, ten minutes round-trip, longer, of course, if she goes in to chat.

Either way, I don’t have much time.

I take my suitcase across the hall into Sloane’s room. Sloane’s barely unpacked either, clothes spilling out from her oversized suitcase in the corner. I stuff them all back inside and wheel it into the master.

Then I go into the closet and find Jay’s empty duffel bag, start grabbing his things from the dresser drawers, tossing them inside, trying to fit in as much as I can in the short time I have. I keep an eye on the window, checking for Sloane.

In the bathroom, I grab his toothbrush, his electric razor. When I come out, I glance again out the window. My heart skips a beat. Sloane is starting down Anne-Marie’s walkway, back to the road leading to our house.

Here it goes.

“Jay!” I yell. “Jay!” When I don’t hear him, I yell a third time. “Jay!”

Finally, “What?” he answers, his voice faint from the laundry room office. I don’t respond.

Then, I hear a door opening down the hall, and a moment later he appears in the doorframe. “What—?” he asks, then stops short. He looks around the room, sees his half-packed bag, the open drawers, the piles of his clothes. “What are you doing?” he asks, looking up at me in confusion.

“I changed my mind,” I say. I shove a pair of his board shorts into the bag, not bothering to keep them folded, then a stack of his shirts. “I want you gone.”

“Are you kidding?” he asks. His face darkens. “You begged me to come here.”

“Well, now I don’t want you here anymore.” I stop for a moment, folding my arms across my chest. “Take your things and go.”

“Why? What the fuck did I do?”

“I saw you with Caitlin,” I say.

Jay shakes his head, raises his hands defensively. “Violet,” he says, lowering his voice, “she was coming on to me, and I—”

I almost laugh. He’s used this line before.

The first time I heard it was after his company Christmas party, back when we lived in San Francisco. I was a month or two into my pregnancy with Harper, not showing, but naueous all the time, puking most mornings. But Jay had just gotten the job, and I wanted to support him, so I put on a dress and a smile and accompanied him to the restaurant.

Halfway through the evening, I realized a woman was staring at him, a young sales associate he worked with, caramel-colored curls, pretty. Jay pretended not to notice, but I watched as his eyes kept darting toward her, as he bit his lip to keep himself from smiling at her.

When he excused himself, my eyes followed as he went to the bar, where she was standing with a glass of wine. Then they were both gone. Not for long, five minutes at the most, but it was something. Maybe a blow job, maybe just his hand up her skirt, the other on her breast. Something quick. I knew it in my gut. He was twitchy when he came back, his arm slipping back around my waist, fidgeting by my side.

When I confronted him at home, he told me I was being paranoid. That it was the pregnancy hormones. “I saw how she was looking at you,” I insisted. “Look,” he said, holding his hands up. “You’re right, she was flirting with me, but I—”

But I —always but I —never at fault, never to blame. I believed him then. Because I loved him, because I wanted it to be true. Because I was hormonal. Because I was stupid. I’m not anymore.

Now, I hold up a hand to quiet him. “I don’t give a shit. In fact, I’m happy for you two. It’s exactly what I hoped for.”

Jay glares at me, eyes flashing. “You’re fucking crazy,” he says. “You know that?”

I stare back at him. He’s so handsome. I loved that face once. Now I hate it.

“Maybe I am,” I say. He’s probably right. But aren’t all mothers when it comes to their children? There’s nothing we won’t do. “Now get the fuck out.” I zip up his bag and shove it at him.

For a minute he doesn’t move, then takes it from me roughly. “You’re such a bitch.” He gives me a long once-over, his lip curled with disdain. “Who could blame me?” he says.

There it is: his other favorite excuse. If I looked different, better , put out more, he wouldn’t have done what he did. It’s pathetic.

“Get out .”

His jaw twitches. “Where’s Harper?”

“A sleepover next door. She won’t forgive you if you make her leave early. Just go back to the city. I’ll bring her home on Sunday.”

“I’ll see you in court,” he says. He slams the door on the way out. It rattles in its frame.

No, you won’t , I think.

His footsteps are heavy on the stairs. I hear the front door open and the bang of the screen, then the car starting, the squeal of tires as he peels out.

Then there is quiet again. He’s gone. There’s only the sound of my breathing and the ticking of the clock on the wall, the steady rhythm like a metronome. I walk back into the bathroom, punch in the code to the safe for the last time.

I take out two things, the gun and the divorce papers, the ones my lawyer drafted before we left.

My trust, since it was set up before we were married, is not considered marital property; if we divorce, Jay is not entitled to it. I’d likely owe him alimony from the income I earn from it, but the trust itself would remain in my name. The only way the money would be his is if something happens to me; he’s the primary beneficiary on our life insurance policy—as long as we are married at the time of my death. If we divorce, however, it all goes to Harper. It’s very much in Jay’s best interest that we remain together. It will be clear to anyone: these divorce papers would make him very, very mad.

I imagine the surprise that will register when he learns about them; perhaps it will mirror my own when I learned that our marriage, like my mother and father’s, had been a sham from the start.

I was heartbroken when we moved to New York, grieving the loss of my parents. I had been the one to sever ties, yes, but it hurt, a deep, throbbing ache in my bones. I felt like an orphan.

I told myself that it didn’t matter because I had Jay. He’d fallen in love with me before he’d known about the money. He cared about me for me. And when I finally told him the amount, after he proposed, three years after we’d started dating, he kissed me and said it didn’t change anything. That he wanted to be self-made, earn his own money. He might need an initial investment, but after that, he’d be on his way.

He’d sounded so earnest. I believed him. Even as he flitted from job to job, always quitting after a few months, hopping from one new venture to the next. I was happy to support him, happy to seed his start-ups, to write checks with strings of zeros; I thought he was brilliant.

And then I found out he’d known about the money all along. He’d been on the phone with his sister one night, shortly after we’d moved into the brownstone, a few whiskeys in. Their dad had had a health scare; they weren’t sure if he was going to make it through the night. I was upstairs with Harper, he in the living room, but his voice carried and I heard his side of the conversation clearly. His sister must have said something about their father’s will because Jay snorted. “Don’t be too sure,” he said, “Violet’s mom only got a vacation shack when her grandmother died. And that was after they petitioned a judge.”

I’d stiffened. What? How did he know they’d petitioned a judge? I hadn’t known that, so how did he?

Sheepishly, later, he admitted that he’d heard my parents discussing the division of my grandmother’s assets at the funeral, in hushed, angry tones. “All of it?” my dad had said. “To Violet?” Then, “The house isn’t worth a tenth of that.” And, “Yes, we’ll contest it, see if it holds up in court.” It had, of course.

I sat down on our bed, my legs buckling. Jay had known about the money since the beginning. He swore it made no difference, knelt down and looked me in the eyes. But it made a difference to me. How could it not? How could I not question everything?

New York was supposed to be our fresh start. Jay’s big break. I wanted it so desperately to be. For us, for him. And we were already here, my family already lost. So I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. The chance for him to prove himself, finally. “This is it,” he said, “you’ll see.” With him still kneeling in front of me, I nodded. “Okay, I believe you,” I said, for the ten thousandth time, about the ten thousandth thing.

This won’t be a surprise to anyone: it wasn’t the business opportunity he promised it was. It quickly became clear that “online gaming start-up” was a euphemism for a slapdash gambling site; he’d joined a group of midlevel investors who thought they’d cash in on the recent online frenzy, though none of them had any expertise in the field whatsoever. The hours Jay was holed up in his office were hours spent in virtual poker rooms—for market research, as he put it. The truth: like always, he was giving into whatever impulse struck his fancy. Today, gambling; yesterday, a line of coke in the bathroom, sex with a stranger at a party. Jay only thought about himself, did what felt good, looked good. After three months in New York, he came to me for another check; nothing had changed.

He, like my parents, would never be able to separate his love for me from his love for my money. It was a crushing realization, to say the least. I hope, when this is all over, he is similarly crushed, his heart smashed to smithereens under the weight.

I place the divorce papers on the dresser and take the gun back into the bathroom. Then I wait.

A minute or two passes, then the front door opens and closes again. I hold my breath.

“Violet?” I hear Sloane call out.

I cock the gun, let out the air in my lungs.

Sloane’s footsteps are on the stairs, then in the hall. I clear my throat. “In here,” I call out. My voice echoes off the bathroom’s tiled walls. It’s reedy, thin. The jugular vein in my neck throbs.

I hear her open the bedroom door, then the knob to the bathroom door turns. My back is to her. I’m facing the vanity counter, my head hung.

“Violet?” Sloane says again, almost a whisper this time. “Are you okay?”

I open my eyes and look up. I see Sloane’s face in the mirror behind me. The face that now looks so much like my own. Our eyes meet. For a moment, neither of us moves, both staring at the other’s reflection. I breathe out steadily. Then I turn to face her.

“No, I’m not,” I say. “Okay, I mean.” My heart is a drum in my chest. “I haven’t been okay for a long time.”

Sloane’s brow crinkles with concern, her face softening. “I’m sorry,” she says tenderly. “Is there anything I can—”

Then she stops, her eyes landing on my right hand, dangling by my side. She sees the gun. Her jaw goes slack, color draining from her face.

When she looks from the gun to me, her eyes are wide, pupils so big and black they look like inkwells. I stare back at her. It’s like looking into a carnival fun-house mirror. A warped, almost-true version of myself.

I see her swallow. “Is this about Jay?” she asks, her voice wobbly, tiny.

I nod.

Sloane’s eyes flutter closed. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It just happened. I never meant to hurt you!”

I can’t help but laugh, a short bark. “You think this is because I’m jealous?” I shake my head. “No, I’m not jealous. That’s not why.”

She sighs. Then, gently, “He told me everything, Violet. He told me he was leaving you and that you weren’t taking it well—”

“He’s lying,” I interrupt sharply. “You think you know him, but you don’t. He’s a liar. Just like you, Sloane .”

When I say her name—her real name—her face changes. She swallows hard, opens her mouth to speak, but nothing comes out.

I give her a small, rueful smile. “We’ve all been lying to each other, haven’t we?”

Finally, her voice strained, she asks, “How long have you known?”

“Since the beginning.”

She presses her lips together tightly. Her eyes fill with tears. She looks like a wounded puppy. I feel nauseous. I swallow the sour spit at the back of my throat. Think of Harper , I tell myself. This is for her.

“But—” Her voice shakes. “Why are you going to kill me? If you’re not jealous?”

“I’m not killing you,” I say. “Look in the mirror, Violet . I’m killing me .”

Sloane stares at me, not understanding, her face contorted in confusion. Then her eyes widen with the dawning realization. Slowly, she raises her hand to her mouth, covering it in horror.

“Well, technically, Jay is going to kill you,” I continue. “At least, that’s what I’ll tell the police.”

I feel a sharp pang in my gut. The truth is, I wish I didn’t have to kill her. I wish I could have aimed the pistol at Jay’s chest, blown a hole right where his heart should have been. I thought about it. And thought about it and thought about it. I wanted to kill him, wanted to with every fiber of my being, but it would be too risky. If I was caught—I’d be the prime suspect, probably the only suspect—I’d lose everything. Everything Jay was already threatening to take.

Then I met Allison. And she told me about Sloane. It gave me an idea. What if, instead of me killing Jay, Jay killed me? What if people thought I was dead and he’d done it? Then when I took Harper, no one could question it; she’d be in the loving, legal care of our trusted nanny. And Jay would be in jail, where he belonged.

But for it to work, I needed a body. I needed Sloane. If I could get her to dress like me, look like me, act like me, then, well, when police arrived on the scene and I told them it was me, there’d be no reason for them to believe it wasn’t. Violet Lockhart would be dead, and Jay Lockhart would be the one who had done it. At least that’s who I’d point my finger at.

It would be my picture on Sloane’s driver’s license. And then there are all the pictures I’ve taken of Harper and Sloane together, pictures I’ll show the police. If they take the photos to Anne-Marie, she’ll point to Sloane and say, Yes, that’s Violet Lockhart . It sounds simple, and it is. Because it’s always the husband, even when it’s not. What would there be to refute? There would be a body and a motive. They’d find out about the life insurance policy and how it is null and void in the event of a divorce, then find the divorce papers I set out on the dresser. Case open and shut.

Jay would go to jail, and I’d leave with Harper. Thanks to the updated will, Sloane Caraway is the named guardian. From Sloane’s phone, I’d text her mother, let her know what had happened to Violet Lockhart, that Sloane would be taking Harper back to the West Coast. Maybe I’d FaceTime her a few times—her mom’s vision and hearing are starting to go—just long enough for her to think Sloane is all right. She’s unlikely to pose any real threat, even if she suspects something. Sloane said she’s housebound; there’s not much she can do from an armchair. Then we’d go away, maybe back to California, maybe to the Pacific Northwest, a little town in Oregon.

“Please,” Sloane whimpers, voice muffled from behind her hand, breaking. She’s scared, so scared. “Please don’t do this.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. And really, I am. I don’t want to, but I have to. The pain in my stomach is throbbing. “There isn’t any other way.”

My finger hooks around the trigger. I raise the gun.

Sloane begins to back up, legs quaking beneath her, arms outstretched as if to shield herself. There’s terror in her eyes.

I feel like I’m floating above myself. Blood rushes in my ears. I see her mouth moving, but I can’t hear anything but static.

She turns to run. Now. Now, Violet, now. For Harper.

I close my eyes and squeeze. The gunshot is deafening, sharp, like the crack of a whip, but louder, my ears ringing, aching.

When I open my eyes, Sloane’s body is on the floor.

The gun clatters to the tile. I fall to my knees.