Chapter 31
Mallory
Sunday Evening
Three Days After the Outing
Fuckity fuck fuck.
That night in the bar, the woman Ethan had been about to cheat on Aubrey with . . . Christ. Ilena. This can’t be happening, but so much is happening that shouldn’t be happening.
The Shandy Shane Show filming in her condo.
Officer Middlebury and her menacing sunglasses.
Calendar reminders for “pheromone speed dating.”
Grayson’s porcupine hair.
Nut crackers, nut crackers, nut crackers!
Her father. Her fucking father.
And Ethan. Ethan Sonders, repeating on them like too many jalapenos.
Not to mention that goddamn emerald ring on Ilena’s finger.
James retakes his seat just as the smell of smoke wafts over the table. Felix stands.
“No,” Mallory says, her gut swirling with panic and fear and disbelief. “This is actually my territory. I’m an expert when
things go wrong.”
Mallory quickly gets up, feeling the lewd intensity of Ethan’s eyes on her, hearing his You can’t pluck feathers from a bald chicken.
Again, hearing it again.
She slides the kitchen’s pocket door closed behind her. “What the hell, Ilena?” Mallory says, keeping her voice low.
Ilena stares at a tray of smoldering ramekins. “These were white chocolate.” She floats an oven-mitted hand above the dishes
whose tops are as black as asphalt. “Not that you can tell.”
“Dessert? We’re talking about dessert?”
“What would you like to talk about? Felix was in charge of the steak, and it was perfect. But this?”
“Seriously? You’re playing house?” Mallory tosses her hands in the air. “This isn’t real, none of this is real life!”
“So you’ve found the portal?”
“The what?”
“Portal, time machine, wormhole, universe Uber that’s going to zoom us back to a world I’m starting to think maybe is the
one that’s not real.”
“Don’t you mean the one you wish wasn’t real?”
“Do not do this, Mallory.”
“What? State the obvious? A squeaky clean AIM, a fawning hubby, and a baby? One that isn’t Jonah’s, but that doesn’t seem
to matter to you. So tell me, has it worked? Are you finally happy? Is it everything you hoped it’d be? Even if I go to prison?”
Ilena’s jaw clenches. “I thought this was all starting to get to you and I was feeling sorry for you and doubting myself,
but, you know what, Mallory, fuck you.” Ilena yanks off the oven mitts. She rests her hand with the diamond-encrusted emerald
on top.
That ring. Mallory had been so sure that night in the bar: Ethan about to sleep with another woman.
But that was only because she’d been looking at it through the lens of Ethan, not the woman.
Now her lens shifts to this woman Mallory has known for more than half her life.
A woman who has an immutable sense of right and wrong.
But she was with Ethan. And never told Mallory.
She seizes Ilena’s hand, regretting not bringing her reading glasses. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
“Mallory, you’re hurting me.”
Crunch of glass, smell of wine, pooling of blood.
Mallory lets go. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . .”
Right leg bent at an unnatural angle, body still, eyes open, opaque and not moving.
Mallory’s breaths shorten, and she leans over the marble island, head between her elbows. Ilena met with Ethan. Ethan was
at Grayson’s penthouse. Is there a connection? Could Ilena be, shit, involved? And Mallory thought waking up here was the most lost she could ever feel.
Ilena presses her hand between Mallory’s shoulder blades, and the warmth brings Mallory back to the first time she did this,
when Mallory was hunched over a grungy dorm toilet. Vodka-sherbet slushies and the special cupcakes Ilena had gotten for her
birthday were less colorful on the way out. That was the first time Mallory had met Jonah. Jonah, who has been as much a part
of her life as Ilena and Aubrey. She’ll lose him too in the divorce.
She misses him. How can Ilena not?
Ilena draws Mallory’s long hair back from her face and looks at her with those blue eyes that Mallory still wants to prove
herself worthy of, same as when they first met.
“Do you want to tell me what this is about?” Ilena says, sounding very much like a mom.
Mallory squeezes her eyes shut, but all she sees is pieces of herself scattered like a never-finished jigsaw puzzle. She’s spent her entire life not being this person. Someone who falls apart. “Ethan . . . our Ethan . . . I need you to tell me the truth. I know you met with him the night he died.”
Shock slackens Ilena’s face, and she doesn’t deny it. “How do you know?”
“Because I was there. At the bar. I saw you. Or at least, I saw your ring.”
“What ring?”
Mallory gently retakes Ilena’s hand. “This ring, which I’d never seen you wear before.”
“But that’s impossible.”
“You were there, weren’t you? All I could see from my stool was a white coat and a woman’s hand, fingernails painted beige,
wearing this ring. Just like you are now. But you don’t own a white coat.”
Ridges form between Ilena’s eyebrows. “That can’t be.”
“It wasn’t you?” Mallory says.
A heavy sigh releases. “It was. I’d just gotten the coat, but I left it in the bar and never went back for it. But I wasn’t
wearing the ring. I didn’t own it. It’s my engagement ring. From Felix.”
“What the actual fuck? You’re sure?”
“I’m not Queen Elizabeth,” Ilena says. “I’ve got a pretty good sense of what jewels are mine and not.”
“Actually, she probably did too.”
“Princess Margaret?”
“Better.”
“Still . . .” Ilena says.
“What the actual fuck?”
“What the actual fuck.”
Mallory saw that ring. She knows she did.
What the actual fuck, indeed. She shrugs out of the Burberry coat and reaches for the bottle of bourbon on the tray of after-dinner drinks that will have to serve as dessert, which she honestly prefers.
She takes a swig and tips the bottle to Ilena, who considers for half a second before shaking her head.
Ring or no ring, Mallory needs to understand this. “Why were you meeting with him alone?”
Ilena spins the ring around her finger, her face growing more pale with each rotation. “Things weren’t great. With Jonah,
with AIM, with you and me. Aubrey was sure to find out about the computer error, and well, I needed to know if Ethan loved
her, if he truly loved her, if he’d be—”
“There for her? That’s why you were in the bar. To talk about Aubrey?”
“Yes, or sort of, but he . . .” Ilena keeps twisting the ring. “This is harder than I thought.”
A million ants writhe up Mallory’s spine. The woman Ethan had spoken to in the bar with such hatred was Ilena. “Christ, did
he hit on you?”
Ilena sets a protective hand on her round belly.
“He did, then. Fucker.” Mallory reaches for a glass and pours what feels like a double since these useless eyes of hers won’t
focus up close. “And we were fighting about going public, so you felt like you couldn’t even tell me. My god, Ilena, how did
we get here?”
Ilena gives a half shrug, her eyes clouding with guilt.
But Mallory’s the one who did this, kept the secret about the night in the bar among so many others she’s losing count. She
wants, no, she needs to tell Ilena the truth. Starting with the lie that kicked off all the rest. Yet as she confesses to
sleeping with Grayson, the look on Ilena’s face makes it clear she already knew.
Ilena’s eyes are gentle. “I’m sorry, Mal. I should have said it earlier. You cared about him. It’s obvious. It’s okay to grieve,
to truly grieve. Just like Aubrey.”
Mallory shakes her head. “Except it’s not ‘just like Aubrey.’ I’m not accepting responsibility for Grayson’s death. Unlike Aubrey, who’s clearly been blaming herself for Ethan’s. And we’ve been too distracted to see it.”
They live in mutual guilt and silence for a beat before Mallory continues by relaying what she overhead at Grayson’s penthouse
and the person she’s now convinced said it. “Pluck a bald chicken.” Fucking Ethan.
As she tells Ilena, it all clicks in Mallory’s brain. Grayson has—had?—an elephant’s memory, like Mallory cataloging everything, never knowing when something might prove useful. Like Ethan’s position
in his tech firm. Grayson surely remembered just as Mallory did and must have enlisted Ethan’s help to hide the error in exchange
for a job or money or prestige or all of it. Yet Ethan had gotten greedy. That night at the penthouse, he must have been trying
to shake Grayson down for more. If that didn’t work, Ethan had already secured his backup plan with their best friend.
Ilena nods as they jointly put it together. “If Ethan married Aubrey, he’d have been rich. He’d have insisted on no prenup,”
Ilena says without a shred of doubt.
“How do we tell her?”
“That her dead fiancé was only with her to steal from her? Maybe we don’t.” Mallory is surprised at Ilena’s uncharacteristic
response. Ilena then adds, “At least while we’re here. What good would it do?”
“She might hate him. And hate washes away guilt.”
“Does it though? It hasn’t for you with Grayson.” Ilena picks up the coat Mallory had dropped, and Mallory can’t help looking
at that ring as Ilena continues, “Grayson and the error, it’s why you chose him in the game?”
“Plus him threatening Aubrey at the outing. He said if I implicated him in the error, he’d point the finger at her.”
“Then he deserved it.” Ilena’s phone buzzes on the small desk in the corner of the kitchen.
Mallory pours more bourbon.
“Not the actual dying of course,” Ilena says flatly, as blunt as ever, and it’s more reassuring than anything. “But the choosing.”
Ilena’s phone buzzes again, and this time, she rounds the island to retrieve it.
Mallory sips for courage, not sure if she’s fully ready to voice her fears out loud, even to Ilena. “What if it’s more than
that? What if those crackers we cleaned up in his kitchen were from my emergency snack bag, which shouldn’t be possible, but
I don’t know what other explanation there could be. You know he’d never have had them in his house.”
Ilena’s hand wraps around her phone. “But it could have still been an accident. Maybe he took them while you were in the bathroom
or something.”
“Maybe.” Mallory sips. “Or maybe I put them out while he was.”
“Mallory—”
“I wanted to throttle him. I truly did. Maybe I don’t remember because I can’t let myself remember because—”
“Mallory.”
“Because, I mean, maybe I was actually starting to fall—”
“Mallory!”
“What?”
Ilena holds up her phone just as the pocket door slides open. Aubrey, cheeks sagging and pale, walks toward them, gripping
her own phone. With a flash of apricot, Harley scurries in behind her, landing himself beside Mallory’s feet and licking her
toes.
Ilena and Aubrey share an anxious look, and Mallory’s jealous of being out of the loop.
Mallory tilts her head. “What’s going—” But Ilena and Aubrey simply hold up their phones.
Mallory squints to see, her eyes shifting from one screen to the other, confirming the same logo for the Cambridge police.
Her heart pounds with fear, but she manages to say, “This might be a good time to mention that I met my dad.”