23. Delphine
— ? —
Delphine
I woke to darkness and the smell of salt and rotting wood.
My head was pounding, a sharp pain behind my eyes that made it hard to think. My mouth was dry, my throat raw, and when I tried to swallow, I tasted metal. Blood. My blood, probably, from where someone had hit me.
I tried to move and found that my hands were bound behind my back, the rope rough against my wrists. My ankles were tied too, my legs bent at an awkward angle that made my muscles cramp. I was lying on a cold concrete floor, my body curled in on itself, completely disoriented.
Where was I?
A boathouse. I was in an old boathouse, abandoned from the look of it, somewhere on the Newport waterfront.
Memory came back in fragments. The sound of breaking glass.
Heath’s voice telling me to lock the door.
The 911 call, the dispatcher’s calm instructions.
Then footsteps on the stairs. The bedroom door bursting open.
A man in a mask, grabbing me, a cloth pressed over my face that smelled sweet and chemical.
Then nothing.
The baby.
The thought cut through everything else, sharp and terrifying.
I curled forward over my stomach, trying to feel a flutter, anything, some sign that my child was still okay.
My belly was still there, still faintly rounded under the ruin of my husband’s shirt.
I couldn’t feel movement, but it was too early for that.
I wouldn’t feel the baby move for weeks yet, and I had never in my life resented a fact more.
“Please,” I whispered to no one, to the darkness, to whatever god might be listening. “Please be okay. Please let my baby be okay.”
I had to get out of here. I had to find help. I had to get back to Heath.
Heath. Was he okay? The last thing I remembered was his voice, shouting my name from somewhere below, and then the hands grabbing me, the chemical smell, and then nothing. Had the intruders hurt him? Was he lying on the floor of our home, bleeding, dying, while I was trapped in this place?
The thought made me want to scream. It made me want to tear through these ropes with my bare teeth and run back to him.
Instead, I took a breath and started working my wrists against the rope.
The process was slow and painful. My wrists were bleeding within minutes, slick with sweat and blood that actually helped me slide the ropes a little looser. I counted the seconds in my head, trying to stay calm, trying not to think about what might happen if I couldn’t get free.
Outside, I heard the sound of a car engine. Headlights swept across the gaps in the wall, then went dark. A door slammed.
Footsteps approached the boathouse.
I froze, my heart hammering, the air stopped in my chest. I let my body go limp, closed my eyes, tried to look unconscious. Maybe if they thought I was still out, they would leave me alone. Maybe they would give me more time to escape.
The door creaked open, letting in a rectangle of gray morning light.
“Oh good.” A voice I knew. A voice that dropped straight through me. “You’re awake. I was beginning to think they hit you too hard.”
I opened my eyes.
Kendall Saladino stood in the doorway, picking her way across the debris littered floor in heels that had no business being in a place like this.
She was dressed immaculately, as always, in a cream-colored coat and designer jeans, her honey blonde hair perfectly styled despite the early hour.
Her makeup was flawless, her nails freshly manicured.
Only her eyes gave her away. They were bright and wild, glittering with what looked a lot like madness.
“Did you sleep well?” she asked, stopping a few feet away from where I lay on the ground. “I know it’s not exactly the Fairchild master suite, but I thought you might appreciate a change of scenery.”
“You’re insane.”
“Careful.” Her smile sharpened, turning cruel. “That’s not a very nice thing to say to the woman who controls whether you live or die.”
I forced myself to stay calm, to keep my voice steady even though every part of me wanted to scream. “What do you want, Kendall?”
“What do I want?” She laughed, a high, brittle sound that echoed off the walls of the boathouse.
“That’s a complicated question. I want a lot of things, Delphine.
I want a life I was promised. I want a man I was supposed to have.
I want everything that was stolen from me when you walked into that engineering lab and decided to take what was mine. ”
“Heath was never yours.”
“He was mine first!” The words came out as a shriek, sudden and violent, making me flinch.
“We were together for four years! Four years! I was supposed to be Mrs. Fairchild. I was supposed to live in that house, wear that ring, have his children, run his charity. I was supposed to be the one he loved!”
She was breathing hard now, her whole body shaking, the polished surface cracked wide open. She leaned down until her face was inches from mine, her voice dropping low and vicious.
“He should have been mine. All this time, he should have been mine. Not yours. Never yours. MINE.”
“He didn’t love you. That’s why he ended things.”
“He was confused! He was young and stupid and he got distracted by a shiny new toy.” Kendall started pacing, her heels clicking against the concrete.
“But he would have come back to me eventually. He always would have come back, if you hadn’t dug your claws in so deep.
If you hadn’t trapped him with your sob story and your fake modesty and your pathetic little act. ”
“There was no act. I loved him. I still love him. And nothing you do is ever going to change that.”
“Shut up.”
“It’s the truth. Heath chose me. He married me. He stayed with me for nine years. If he wanted to leave, he would have left.”
“I said shut up!” She lunged forward and slapped me across the face, the impact snapping my head to the side.
I tasted fresh blood. My cheek throbbed with pain. But I also felt the rope give another fraction of an inch.
Keep her talking, I told myself. Keep her distracted. Keep working at the ropes.
“You think kidnapping me is going to make him love you?” I asked, keeping my voice deliberately calm, deliberately mocking. “You think if I’m out of the picture, he’s just going to fall into your arms? That’s not how love works, Kendall.”
“He made his choice nine years ago and it was a mistake. He knows it. He’s always known it.”
“He didn’t make a mistake.”
“Yes he did!” She spun to face me, her eyes blazing with fury.
“You were never supposed to happen! You were just some nobody from Boston, some middle-class girl who had no idea how to navigate our world. Montana told me about you, you know. She told me everything. How you didn’t know which fork to use at dinner.
How you wore the wrong dress to the charity gala.
How you made Heath a laughingstock by not knowing the difference between a salad plate and a bread plate. ”
“And yet he chose me anyway.”
“Because you tricked him! Because you made yourself look innocent and pure and different from all the other women who wanted him. But I knew the truth. I always knew. You’re nothing but a gold digger who got lucky.”
“If I was a gold digger, I would have demanded everything when I filed. I didn’t. I asked for nothing because I didn’t want his money. I only ever wanted him.”
A flicker crossed Kendall’s eyes. Doubt, maybe. Or fear. The fear that everything she had told herself for years might be a lie.
“He’ll hate you,” I said quietly. “If you hurt me, he’ll hate you for the rest of his life.”
“He’ll get over it. People always do.”
“He won’t. Not this. Not ever.”
She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a phone. Her phone, sleek and expensive, the case decorated with tiny crystals. She looked at it the way you look at a door you’ve been waiting at.
“He’s going to call,” she said. “Any minute now. He’s going to work out that it was me, because he’s clever, that’s the thing everyone forgets about Heath, he’s so clever, and then he’s going to pick up a telephone and call me.”
She turned the screen toward me like she was showing me a photograph of her children.
“Twenty years,” she said. “Twenty years and he’s never once called me. Do you know he has my number? He’s had my number since we were fourteen. He’s never used it. Not on my birthday, not when my father died, not once.” Her thumb moved over the glass. “Tonight he’s going to use it.”
“And what happens to me?”
She looked at me with cold, empty eyes. “That depends on how cooperative you are.”
The rope slipped free.
I kept my hands behind my back, my heart pounding, waiting for my moment.
And then the phone rang.
It was an absurd sound in that place. A bright little chime bouncing off rotten wood and black water, and Kendall made a noise I’ve never heard a human being make, caught halfway between a sob and a laugh. She looked at the screen and her whole face opened up like a girl at a window.
She answered it on the first ring. She put it on speaker. Of course she put it on speaker, because what was the point of any of it if I couldn’t hear.
“Heath,” she said, and she sounded so happy. “I knew you’d call.”
And then my husband’s voice came out of a telephone in an abandoned boathouse, and it was the calmest I’ve ever heard him, and it terrified me more than anything Kendall had said all night.
“Hello, Kendall.”
“You’re not shouting.” She sounded delighted. “Everyone said you’d shout.”
“Would it help?”
“No.” A pause. “No, it wouldn’t.”
“Then I won’t.” A breath down the line. “Is she alive?”
Kendall’s eyes came to me. I held very still and kept working the rope.
“That’s a very cold way to ask about your wife.”
“It’s the only question I have, and you know it is, and you’re enjoying it. So enjoy it. Is she alive?”
“Yes.”
I heard him breathe out. Two thousand miles of it, in a sound.
“Thank you,” he said.