38. Charlotte Approved Person
Charlotte Approved Person
All day I’d had this weird, unavoidable feeling that things were just off . Of course they were. My husband was in jail. The discovery had come in. To top it off, I was still feeling a little weird about everything that had gone down at the mommune last night. And how Oliver said he’d be out of touch for a few days. And the heaviness of thinking about the potential New York move and what that could mean. And, of course, I hated when my daughter was mad at me. I was very much of the school of thought that I was her mother and not her best friend, but still. I liked it when she was happy. Anyway, anxiety increases anxiety, right?
I went to get my phone between clients to text her. I wouldn’t apologize necessarily. Not yet. I’d go with something sort of neutral. Maybe, Want to grab burgers tonight after practice? Something that would make her happy (because it wasn’t vegan!) but not suggest that I was sucking up. I rustled around in my bag for a minute before it hit me: I had left my phone at home. I looked at the time in the corner of my computer screen. I had twenty minutes until my next client. I could probably make it. If I was really efficient, maybe I could even grab a coffee too.
As I drove, I thought about the day in the bank when Alice had taken me back to the house, when she’d asked us to live with her. What if I had said no? Would we have been better off? But no. Look at all the good that had come from that one chance meeting. I had made three friends who’d changed my life, and Iris and I had had a place to lick our wounds while we got back on our feet. One bad dinner wasn’t going to make me second-guess everything.
I ran up the back steps to the mommune and flung the door open, calling, “Alice! Grace! Julie!” No answer. I grabbed the leather pouch on the hall table where we stowed our phones. My phone wasn’t there—but Iris’s was. Along with another one that I thought was potentially Alice’s, but I wasn’t positive. That was weird. Maybe she had accidentally taken mine. “Shit!” I said out loud. “I knew I shouldn’t have given in to that dumb rule.”
I ran up the stairs into Alice’s room. “Alice!” No one answered. I looked around and peeked out on the porch. No Alice. Where was she?
As I glanced around her room, scanning the surfaces to make sure my phone hadn’t somehow gotten up here, something caught my eye: a church bulletin stuck in the mirror above the dresser. A line had been highlighted: Vengeance is mine .
Vengeance. Good Lord. That was creepy. Was Alice that mad at her sister?
I shook my head, snapping myself out of it. Alice was always leaving her church bulletins around. She never missed a service, it seemed, and she often highlighted passages that spoke to her. This wasn’t new.
I was shocked at how completely helpless I felt without my phone. I had lived my first fifteen years without one just fine. And I really hated that Iris didn’t have hers. I liked knowing that I could reach her.
I ran into my room to grab my laptop. I could at least text from that.
I composed a text to Iris (who I knew didn’t have her phone), Merit, and Emma: Hey, kiddos. My phone is MIA and Iris’s is at the house. I’ll take my laptop to work so you can text if you need me, but call me at work when you get home!
I copied and pasted the same text to myself just in case Iris had my phone.
I glanced at my texts quickly in the iMessage icon on my laptop, noticing one from Bradley. It wasn’t highlighted as unread, but I knew I hadn’t seen it. I opened the link to the Capstone Fund and glanced through their directors. I didn’t know any of them. I mean, I recognized Dan Isaacs from Bill talking about him, but that was it. As I was reading his bio, an email notification from Oliver popped up in the right-hand corner of the screen.
I clicked down to my email. The body said: Client list and amounts. Oliver’s email signature was underneath.
As soon as I opened the file, my heart started racing. I hated seeing these names in black and white, knowing that these people’s lives had been ruined—or at least changed. I knew how that felt. Then I gasped. I looked away from the screen, and then back down. This couldn’t be right. She would have told me, wouldn’t she? We couldn’t have gone this long in our relationship with a secret this big. I felt light-headed, swimmy, my mind careening up hills and around curves. Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe I was seeing things. I looked down at my screen again, and there it was, in bold black type.
Bailey, Alice, Juniper Shores, NC
“What?” I said quietly, out loud. “This can’t be true.”
I wasn’t even sure why, but between my missing phone and the “vengeance is mine” verse in her room and this news that surely ought to have come up over the past couple of weeks, my chest started to feel tight. Was the vengeance against us ?
For now, I had to set all that aside. I had a client meeting in eight minutes, and it would take me six to get back to the office. I picked up my laptop and walked down the stairs and out the door, feeling, for the moment, grateful to get out of this house. As I got in the car, I questioned why Alice wouldn’t have told me about this. And that made me wonder if Iris and me coming to live here wasn’t a coincidence at all.