Chapter Fourteen #2
“That hardly mattered to them.” He opens his eyes and looks at me now, some of that long-ago memory still living there. A part of him will always be a young man in love—or so he wants me to think. I can’t reconcile my confusion. I want to believe him, which is rare in my line of work.
I lean in. “What made her so irresistible?” I ask.
He opens his mouth to speak. Then, from the kitchen, something begins to beep in a shrill, repetitive pattern.
He sighs. “Excuse me,” he says, standing.
“I’ve just backed this startup company, and they’ve sent me a prototype for their coffee machine.
But it’s been firing off random alerts. I’ll unplug it. ”
“That’s all right,” I say. “Mind if I use the restroom?”
“Of course. You remember where it is.”
As I walk down the hallway, I wonder how many others have been in his apartment enough times to know where the bathroom is.
I pulled up all of his live streams online and never saw any indication of another person, no noises coming from another room.
It doesn’t appear that he ever talks to his family or has any friends.
His social media presence is clinical, business only.
Although thousands of people post questions and replies, he never tags anyone socially.
He only follows companies and public figures.
How has he managed to so neatly erase his personal life?
In the bathroom, I lock the door behind me, and I text Elodie to let her know that I’m working on the lead we discussed. What should I ask him?
After a moment, she replies: Record everything on voice memos on your phone.
Can’t, I respond. It’s a two-party-consent state.
Oh Margaux, seriously, is all she texts back.
But we aren’t talking petty theft or small crime.
We are trying to get him on a murder, and if I obtain the evidence illegally—like by recording him without his consent—there won’t be enough to blackmail him with, because the confession would be thrown out if we brought it to the police anyway.
Connecticut is a two-party-consent state, meaning all recordings in a private place require the knowledge and approval of everyone present.
If I get him on murder, the recording won’t be enough, but the evidence he provides may do it.
Still. I open the voice memo app and consider it.
I tap the record button, but all I’m going to pick up in here is silence.
Silence is innocent. But it’s not just any silence—it’s the silence in a billionaire’s apartment.
It’s the silence that exists between his minimalist furniture.
The silence into which he confides his secrets when he’s alone, and the thoughts he will never say while I’m around him.
What has this apartment seen? Was Annie murdered here? Did he sit at his desk and plot it out like he was playing a mental game of chess?
What does he think about me while I’m sitting across from him?
How do I get those secrets out? How do I find out what he’s done?
There’s a soft knock at the door. “Margaux?” he says.
“Yes—I’m almost done.” I run the sink as though I’ve just washed my hands.
“Actually, this is going to sound a bit strange, but could you stay in there? For just a minute?” he asks.
“What?”
“I’d like to tell you something, but—and this will sound absolutely crazy—I don’t think I can look at you while I say it.”
What is he playing at? “Oh—of course,” I say.
I hear the soft thunk of his body leaning against his side of the door. I move closer, my hand hovering over the smooth, polished finish, not quite touching it, as though it’s a looking glass and I could step through it and be with him in his memories.
“Annie and I were on and off for many years. You could say we grew up together in a way. By the time we were in our mid-twenties it seemed like it was time for us to do what people do—get married, maybe talk about having a family. By then, she had her degree in medical science, but she hadn’t committed to pursuing it further.
She told her parents that it had never been her dream and that she wanted to be an anthropologist.
“Of course, I supported her. I’d sold some programs to developers and we were making decent money, so we traveled for a while.
It was so…liberating. Neither of us having to do anything.
We hiked in Machu Picchu, went swimming in Greece, went diving off Kahekili’s Leap in Hawaii. It was magical, wild, passionate.
“Before we were to officially tie the knot, we went to Havasu Falls in Arizona. Her family lived nearby, and she was going to break it to them. They were going to be unhappy, of course. In their minds, I was the one who had corrupted their perfect daughter and derailed her from being a doctor. Even though I was making enough money to support the both of us, it wasn’t nearly as much as she’d be making if she had seen medical school through. ”
I close my eyes and I can picture it. Traveling the world with the person you love, just the two of you on a floating island above everyone else, unreachable by logic or persuasion or responsibility. No mortgage, no careers, no crushing guilt.
I breathe in, and I can feel the mist of a waterfall on my face.
“There’s this little pocket along one of the cliffs where you can stand under the water,” he says.
“The night before, as Annie slept in the hotel room, I’d gotten the call that my app was sold.
I knew it was going to be big. The preliminary offer was nearly seven figures, and with investments it would quadruple that in the first year.
“I hadn’t told her yet. I wanted it to be special.
I wanted to tell her that I would take care of her, that I wanted to make all of her dreams—all of our dreams—come true.
But standing there with the water moving over and around us, I looked at her and thought she was so beautiful that I couldn’t speak. ”
I try to picture Annie, but the only public photo of her is taken from a distance, her face and hair blurred by the motion as she turns her head.
But Bertram’s tone when he speaks of her is filled with desire, and as he recalls her, I can see how beautiful she is.
Her rosy cheeks and light eyes, her wet hair sticking to the curves of her shoulders as she looks at him.
“We’d been together a hundred times before, but never like that,” he says. “I’d never been so in love.”
Bertram tells me more than I would dare to ask. That they gave everything to each other, that they cupped their hands over each other’s mouths and laughed into each other’s palms as some tourists swam in the pool below where they were making love.
The details are so vivid that I can’t tell what he’s told me and what I’m imagining. Annie straddling his waist, her eyes burning bright with love for him. His corded arms around her. Her finger in his mouth. The way he leaned forward and bit her lip.
He’s been dying to tell someone about this love affair.
Not just me, but anyone who would listen.
I can hear it in his voice. I can see the loneliness leave his face when he gets lost in the memory.
He wants to speak the words out loud just to prove that it happened. Now someone else knows about it, too.
“I didn’t tell her yet, even though I’d planned to,” he says. “I just wanted the moment to be what it was. I didn’t want to talk about our future yet.”
I lean against the door, my legs suddenly unsteady.
God, what is it like to be with a man who isn’t so obsessed with the future?
One who doesn’t plan everything and try to push me into the labyrinth of calendars.
Christmases with his parents. Summers at the beach.
Saving up for a very structured tour of Venice, with Collette in tow.
What is it like to be wild? To not care if strangers see your bare ass bouncing up and down through the curtain of a waterfall?
When Bertram opens the door, I nearly stagger into him. He catches me, his hands tight around my forearms. I can feel his pulse thudding through his fingertips.
“Sorry,” he says, breathless. “The lock doesn’t work. I should have asked.”
Wake up, Margaux. I’ve had some version of this dream before, where I’m running but my legs won’t work. I’m screaming, but marbles fall out of my mouth and I can’t make a sound.
He’s a liar. A killer. A con man. A strange lone wolf with a Vogue model face.
I had thought his eyes were the same as Erin’s, that light, champagne-bubble green.
But now I think there’s more darkness in his, like the deep heart of a wilderness somewhere.
I’m in an episode of I Shouldn’t Be Alive.
I’m a hiker who went too far off the trail, missed the markers, and has spent days wandering through evergreen needles and vines, all tangled and lost in him.
I stare, even though I’m telling myself to look away. To break the spell. To wake up. But he’s staring, too.
He touches my face, and his fingertips are soft. He rustles through my ponytail like a breeze.
“What happened?” I ask him. I’m desperate to know. “How did you tell Annie that you were going to be rich?”
This awakens him from some sort of trance. I see the sobriety fill his features, and then they turn sad for a flash before he locks them away.
“That’s enough for now,” he says softly, and he lets me go. “All of this was off the record, of course.”