Chapter 9
CHAPTER 9
Vero and I bathed the children and put them to bed. Then I changed into a pair of jeans that didn’t smell like cat litter before driving to Nick’s apartment. He had given me his address right after we’d returned from Atlantic City, but between the hours he’d been keeping at work and the nights he’d spent at my house, this was my first time actually seeing the place.
I parked my van beside his car. A lamp glowed in a window of his ground-level unit. It was nearly ten o’clock on a Sunday night. Too early for him to be sleeping, but too late to call and ask permission to come over.
I got out of the van and walked to his apartment before I could talk myself out of it. The door opened as I raised my hand to knock.
Nick stood in the doorway, wearing a loose-fitting tank top over a pair of faded sweatpants. I wondered if he’d been preparing for bed.
“Hey,” he said, studying my face.
“Hey,” I said, feeling foolish for coming. I wasn’t entirely sure why I was there. Only that I hadn’t wanted to leave things the way we had the day before. “Can I come in?”
He stood aside, making room for me to pass, our shoulders brushing as I entered the narrow hallway into his apartment. The galley kitchen to my right was dark, the dishwasher humming quietly. The pass-through above the sink overlooked a cozy lamplit living room, the one I’d seen glowing from the parking lot outside.
The apartment was smaller than I had expected it to be. A glance down the hall revealed a door to a single bedroom. In my daydreams of his home, Nick had taken up more space, or maybe it was only that he had been taking up so much room in my mind in the short time since I’d met him that I had expected his home to be larger. He’d texted me his address late one night, after he’d been out drinking at Hooligans with my sister and his entourage of cop friends, with an open invitation to come over anytime. When I saw the missed text the next morning, I recognized it for the drunken, hopeful booty call it had been, but I had given in to curiosity anyway and googled his address. I’d been surprised by the pictures of the aged, run-down apartment complex, unable to reconcile why a successful detective in his mid-thirties hadn’t chosen to buy a home in a nicer neighborhood. It hit me in that moment how little we actually knew about each other. How many questions I had about him. How much more I wanted to know. And how much he might still want to know about me.
A file folder sat open on the leather sofa, the reports inside spilling out alongside a yellow legal pad and an uncapped pen. He beat me to the living room, shutting his open laptop and scooping up the papers and handwritten notes. “Sorry, I wasn’t expecting you,” he said as he set them on the coffee table, as if it was his fault and not mine that I had come unannounced. “Can I get you something to drink?”
A half-empty bottle of an imported lager sat on a coaster on the table. “A beer would be great.” I slipped off my coat and hung it over the back of a chair.
Nick disappeared to the kitchen. He hadn’t made an effort to hide the file from me, so I tipped my head to read the notes on his pad, surprised to see the names Dupree and Haggerty scrawled among them. The fridge opened and closed, then a whisper of air escaped the bottle as he twisted off the cap. He came back into the room, his expression still wary as he handed me the drink and gestured for me to sit down.
I cleared my throat and stared into my beer. “I wanted to apologize for yesterday,” I said as he sat down beside me. “Thanks for not giving me a ticket.”
“A ticket,” he repeated.
“I was reckless. I should have slowed down. And I’m sorry I sped through that yellow light, but in my defense, you probably shouldn’t have followed me through it.”
He stared at me, dumbfounded. “That’s what you’re apologizing for? You think I was upset about your driving?”
“You had every right to be,” I admitted. “I could have hurt someone. Any other cop probably would have arrested me.”
He set his beer on the coffee table a little too hard. “You’re right, they would. And I most definitely should have. But I wasn’t thinking about anyone else. I was thinking about you !” He pinched the bridge of his nose and lowered his voice. “I was worried because you were upset. Because you were angry and hurt and you weren’t thinking clearly.”
“And you didn’t want me to do something stupid,” I sassed.
“I didn’t want you to be alone! I wanted to be there for you, Finn, but you didn’t give me the chance!”
“What do you want me to say?” I cried. “I’m sorry I ran out on you back at Penny’s! I’m sorry if that made you feel left out! I just needed…” I rubbed my eyes. “I don’t know what I needed, Nick! You’re right. I was angry and upset and I wasn’t thinking clearly, and I didn’t want you to see me like that.”
“Like what?” He leaned into my field of vision. “What don’t you want me to see, Finn? The fact that you’re hurting or that you’re hiding something from me?” His jaw tensed when I didn’t answer.
“Look, I get it,” he said earnestly. “After seeing what Steven did to you, I get why you don’t want to open yourself up to that again. But I was lying to myself before when I said I could be okay with the way things are between us.” A familiar knife blade twisted inside me as I braced for what he’d say next. “I was kidding myself when I said there were things about you I was okay not knowing. That maybe I didn’t want to know them. Because that look on your face killed me yesterday. Not when Penny told you she’d been having an affair with your husband, but the moment she answered the door—the expectation in your eyes, like you knew the betrayal was coming. Like you knew in your heart he was going to let you down. It’s the same way you look at me sometimes, when I want to be there for you or when I want to help you. You want to confide in me, but you won’t. You want to believe I would never do anything to hurt you, but you can’t. Because Steven broke that trust, over and over, and I can’t stand seeing you look at me that same way. Like you’re scared to talk to me.” His voice shook with barely restrained emotion.
“And it’s the trust part that’s killing me, Finn. You can’t ask me to only fall in love with the pieces of you you’re willing to show me. I want you. Not part of you. All of you. I don’t want you to run away when you’re afraid. I want you to come to me. When I ask you a question, I want you to feel like you can be honest with me. When you look at me, I want to know beyond the shadow of any doubt that you believe— truly believe —I would never do anything to betray that trust.”
“I do trust you!” I wanted to.
“Then tell me something. Anything. Tell me one thing that scares you,” he pleaded.
I watched him, a deer caught in headlights. I opened my mouth but didn’t know what to say. Why couldn’t I give him this one small thing without risking everything? “You first,” I said. “You know as much about me as I know about you.”
“What do you want to know?” He didn’t flinch, didn’t blink, didn’t look away. Whatever question left my mouth next, I’d better be damn sure I was ready to hear the answer.
I gestured to the file on the table. “Where did you get that?”
He hesitated a second before answering. “From the LCPD file room.”
“How?”
“Joey made me a copy, and he’d get in a lot of trouble if anyone found out, but he did it because I asked him to.”
“Why?” I knew I was pushing my luck, but Nick never said I only got one question.
“I wanted to make sure your name’s not anywhere in it.”
“Is it?”
He pushed the file toward me, not expressly granting permission but not withholding anything from me. I picked it up and opened it. He sipped his beer as he watched me thumb through the Dupree case notes. Penny had been cleared from the preliminary list of suspects after her husband’s disappearance five years ago. According to the original investigator’s notes, a neighbor had seen her leave for their beach house in Florida the night before Gilford had gone missing. She’d been alone in her SUV when she’d driven out of her garage, and her husband’s coupe had been inside it when the garage door had closed behind her. The next morning, the same neighbor had seen Gilford leave for work, only that afternoon he hadn’t come back.
Penny had placed a call to the Loudoun County police from the Duprees’ beach house the following evening, claiming Gilford hadn’t been returning any of her calls. She’d requested a wellness check at their Ashburn house. Finding no one at home and no signs of forced entry, no action had been taken by the police, until Gilford’s car and phone were found abandoned later that weekend at a local park.
I turned the page, angry at myself for breaking into Penny’s house for nothing. Her alibi had been verified by her neighbors in both Virginia and Florida, and she’d been cleared as a suspect very early on.
The next reports were more current, including the discovery of the body and the medical examiner’s findings concerning the cause of death—blunt force trauma to the back of the head. Mike Tran’s notes were also copied in the file. Margaret and Owen Haggerty had been listed as possible suspects early on, but over the course of the investigation, both were discounted. No known association with the deceased had been noted beside each of their names. Brendan’s name had also been crossed out.
The remainder of the file was mostly about Steven, beginning with the report Mike Tran had filed when Riley and Max had broadcast the anonymous tip, followed by the invoice for the mulch delivery with Steven’s address on it and a copy of Penny’s voided check.
There were interdepartmental reports about the bodies found on Steven’s farm last fall, taken from the joint task force investigation of the Russian mob. Redacted sections had been marked confidential and blocked out in thick black bars.
I turned to the last page of the file and felt a hot rush of blood to my face. Mrs. Haggerty had provided a statement detailing the exact dates and times when she’d observed Steven’s extramarital activities while we’d been married. I was mentioned once on that page, identified only as Steven’s spouse. A handwritten question mark had been scribbled beside my name, presumably by Mike Tran.
Nick reached out and delicately took the file from me. He closed it quietly and set it back on the table, as if he’d known what page I’d been reading by the look on my face.
“Are you finished grilling me?” he asked indulgently.
“Not even close.” My throat burned, and I sipped my beer as I considered what to ask him next.
He cracked a smile, but I could tell his patience was wearing thin.
I looked around the room, at the tiny water stain on the ceiling, at the worn spots in the thin gray carpet and the cracked pane in the window, grasping at every surface for a question. Anything to put off the moment when the tables would be turned and he would expect me to answer one of his.
“Why do you live here?” I asked. “You’re a detective with thirteen years on the force. Why not buy a house in a decent neighborhood?” It felt like low-hanging fruit, or maybe like I was baiting him, but it was the question that had been nagging at me since he’d opened the door. Even my sister, with all her commitment issues, rented a nicer place in a better neighborhood than this.
Nick took a deep swig of his beer, polishing off the last of it before answering. “I moved into this apartment eighteen months ago,” he said quietly. “I never bothered to buy a place of my own before that because I had been living with a woman for the past five years, and I assumed Tonya and I would eventually get married. She came home from work one day and told me she was sleeping with a cop named Wade Coffey. Wade and I had worked in the same precinct together for years, and I wasn’t sure which of them I was angrier with.
“I moved out that night. I crashed on your sister’s couch for a week and signed a lease for the first vacant apartment I could find. This was it,” he said, setting down his empty bottle.
My stomach clenched with a jealousy I had no right to. All I had known about Nick’s last girlfriend was what little his former partner had told me, and what Wade Coffey himself had inferred when he’d been my handgun instructor at the citizen’s police academy. But to hear Nick say this woman’s name gave the vague notion of her a solid form. It took up an uncomfortable space in my mind. I looked down into my beer, wishing I hadn’t asked.
“Your turn,” he said.
He wanted me to talk about myself. To confide in him things that scared me. But in that moment, I was consumed by only one.
My throat constricted around the words, but I couldn’t hold them back. “I hate knowing her name,” I blurted. “I hate knowing you shared a home with her, I hate knowing what she was to you, I hate wondering who she is and where she is now, if you work out at the same gym, and if you pass each other in the grocery store. I’m scared there might be some part of you that’s still in love with her.”
There was a razor-sharp gleam in Nicks’ eyes. “Why does that scare you?”
“Because I’m afraid one day you’re going to realize that I’m not the person you want to be with!” The confession rushed out of me, taking all my breath with it. I forced myself to hold his gaze. It was only one small truth, and maybe not the one he’d been looking for, but in that moment, it felt like the only one that mattered.
He reached for me, taking my face in his hand, his thumb stroking away a tear as he pressed his forehead to mine.
“Your turn,” I whispered. “What scares you?”
I felt his brow crease as he leaned in to kiss me. His lips were warm, his tongue cool and hoppy from the beer.
He reached for my bottle and set it on the table beside his. The leather creaked as he pulled me onto his lap, our kisses becoming deep and greedy. I did want all of him, even the honest and scary parts, but this was the part of him I needed right now.
He wrapped my legs around his waist as he stood, every part of us tangled together as he carried me down the hall to his room and let me down slowly, a soft, controlled fall onto his bed in the dark. His mouth took probing passes at mine, his arms keeping just enough distance between us for me to work off his shirt and pull it over his head. I dug my nails into his shoulders, wanting more of him, my hips rising, seeking him out.
“Tell me something that scares you,” he murmured when we were finished.
His bedroom was a dark cocoon. I wasn’t even sure what time it was. Only that I was hungry and spent.
I curled into his side, my smile wide against his damp skin. In that moment, there was only one thought that truly terrified me. “It might be too late to order a pizza.”
His laughter was warm in my hair. He kissed the top of my head. “I’m a little afraid of that, too.”