Chapter 16
PAIGE
Why is Grant here on a Wednesday? Paige watches out the window as he uses a leaf blower on the lawn.
He looks like a Ghostbuster with the contraption strapped to his back, and there will be more leaves in an hour, so what’s the point?
There are a few things she’d better get out of view before he comes in, which he will, for coffee or just to insist she take out the recycling more often or tidy up the mugs lying all around the house.
She doesn’t feel one bit bad about smashing Finn Holmon’s car window.
She’s no stranger to sneaking into the neighbors’ garages.
She’s quite good at it, actually. She saw Finn with the hatch of his SUV open after he pulled into the garage.
He stood a moment with his head bent down, looking at his phone, texting, probably with one of his bimbos because he looked around in a covert, guilty way for a moment.
She saw his laptop bag propped up next to his golf clubs in the back of his car.
Distracted by his phone, he shut the hatch without taking the laptop bag and closed the garage door.
She was sure he’d left it in there unwittingly, but it turns out he must have gone back out to get it between the late afternoon and her break-in, because it wasn’t there.
That was a disappointment, but when she saw his day planner sitting on the passenger seat, she knew she needed it.
Who locks their doors inside their locked garage?
She certainly doesn’t, and she didn’t expect his to be locked.
That’s his fault: she did what she had to do.
She spotted a nearby fire extinguisher, grabbed it, and hit the heavy bottom of it against his window.
She swiped the planner as quickly as she could, then hoisted herself back up on their recycling bin, slipped out the slim window she’d come in, and dropped back down onto the HVAC unit outside.
They should really be more careful. Anyone could have broken in like that.
The planner is now sitting on her coffee table because she isn’t finished paging through it. He will be out of the office for a lunch meeting tomorrow. Good to know.
She takes the planner and brings it into the bedroom where a cardboard box sits with Finn’s name written on it in Sharpie.
He will pay attention to her. It might just take some time.
She drops the planner on top of the photos of him with the hooker and him with Charlotte in the hallway at the ball.
She’s also printed out his passwords and contacts and has kept the rose he gave her at the bar.
She pulls it out and smells it, even though it’s long dead and the petals are dried and brittle.
She wraps the flower in a small towel to make sure it doesn’t get broken inside the box, then she shoves all of it into her wardrobe and goes back into the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee.
“Why the hell don’t you have gloves on?” she asks Grant when he comes into the kitchen, rubbing his hands together. The weather dropped last night, and it’s starting to feel like winter. He shrugs and pours a cup of coffee.
“Well, for God’s sake, you’ll lose a finger to frostbite,” she says and goes to the hall closet, where she pulls out a plastic storage container of winter accessories and drags it into the kitchen. She sits next to him at the table and starts to pull out mismatched gloves and mittens.
“I bought you Isotoners once. Where are those?” she asks.
“That was fifteen years ago,” he says.
“Yeah, so they should be here.” She pulls out a tangle of scarves and unknots them. “Ohh, I’ve been looking for this one,” she says, coiling a chunky knit scarf around her neck, and keeps searching. She sees him smiling at her.
“What?” she says.
“Nothing. You’re cute.” He sips his coffee and keeps the amused look on his face.
“I’m a middle-aged woman. I assure you I’m not cute,” she says and then presents him with a pair of brown leather Isotoners she pulls from the bottom of the bin.
“Would you look at that,” he says, taking the gloves and trying them on for size. He flexes his fingers and keeps them on as he drinks his coffee. “Thanks.”
“Need a hat?” she says, plucking a tragic brown ski cap from the pile.
“Absolutely.”
She puts it on his head, and she laughs at how ridiculous he looks, but he leaves it on and does a little dance.
“You’re laughing,” he says, sitting back down. She responds by stopping. “It’s nice to see. You seem...happier lately.”
“I don’t know about that,” she says.
“I do.” He smiles. Then he gets up and brings his mug to the sink. He rinses the dirty dishes that are piled up and starts to load the dishwasher.
“You don’t have to do that,” she says, pushing scarves and woolen hats back into the storage bin.
“Someone does,” he jokes, but she doesn’t appreciate the passive judgment. He picks up on her irritation.
“It’s a lot for one person,” he continues, looking out the window rather than at her. “The yard is a lot by itself. The gutters need cleaning.”
“I can hire a service for that,” she says flatly.
“The air filters need changing, the crack in the bathroom tile needs replacing—”
“What’s your point?” she says. He’s quiet for a while as he finishes loading the dishes and pushing the racks in, closing the dishwasher and starting it.
He wipes his hands with a dish towel and turns, leaning against the counter.
Paige is trying to sit on the plastic cover of the storage bin to force it shut.
“The point is maybe I should stay a few nights a week.”
“You want to come back?” she asks. “I thought we talked about this.”
“I’m just saying a few nights a week. To help out,” he says, a note of hurt in his voice. She thinks about it a minute.
“It’s your house, too. So I guess you should do what you want,” she says, giving up on the bin and sitting at the table. He purses his lips and nods slowly.
“What?” she says.
“When you want me to, you let me know,” he says.
He could say this coldly, but he doesn’t.
He could let the sting of rejection cause him to storm out, or give up on her, or lash out, or a variety of other very human reactions to her constant difficult behavior, but he never does.
He goes to her, kisses the top of her head, and lets himself out.
She feels sick. She wishes she could change how she feels.
She trades her coffee for a glass of wine and sits in the front window seat with Christopher, who makes six circles before he lies down on the pillow at her feet.
All she can think about is Finn, and it’s not fair to Grant, it’s not fair to anyone—this obsession that nobody would understand.
She hates Cora being a victim of this, but she feels like she can’t stop what’s started.
The next day, she walks around the house nervously tidying up, thinking about how to best pull off what she plans to do. She can’t get caught, so she’ll need some backup stories to weasel out of the situation if she does. She really can’t think of one single explanation, so she can’t get caught.
She decides that the wig from her Marilyn Monroe Halloween costume would be a decent disguise: the opposite of her long dark hair, and she’ll wear her reading glasses and some dark lipstick.
Nobody would recognize her if they looked on a security camera or even ran into her.
She finds these items and stuffs them into a messenger bag and goes.
His lunch meeting is from one to two o’clock, and she hates waiting around all day.
It was fine when she slept the day away for all those months.
Now, though, she has a renewed purpose, and she wants to just get moving.
She stops at City Blooms for a mixed bouquet of mostly lilies and baby’s breath, and then she drives to his office building and looks for his car in the parking lot.
The lunch is at Grimaldi’s, so he’ll have to drive there.
It’s a few miles away. She parks in the back of the lot and waits.
When she sees him come out of the revolving front door, he’s with Charlotte.
They don’t touch one another. She’s on her phone, and he’s slipping his suit coat on.
So that’s his lunch meeting. She should change plans and follow him, ruin the lunch, walk right in as if it’s a coincidence and sit at the table next to them to see how he fumbles his way out of it.
But her work here is more important. She watches them get into Charlotte’s car.
Thank God she was watching the door and not just his car.
She hadn’t considered he wouldn’t drive.
When he gets in the passenger side of Charlotte’s Tahoe (which is far too large for her itty-bitty frame), Paige notices him glance around.
Hmm. She watches a moment longer and sees Charlotte kiss him.
This goes on for some time until they part, her giggling, it looks like.
Both of them looking around the lot for one more check that nobody is out there.
Paige ducks farther down in her car. Then Charlotte buckles her seat belt, and they pull away.
So you think I’m just gonna let that happen, huh? Paige thinks. Then she picks up the large bouquet she purchased with a glittery helium balloon (last-minute buy) wrapped around the pretty foil paper and bouncing behind her as she walks up to the building.
On the fourth floor, she finds the name of his company in fancy stencil across two glass doors.
She sees the receptionist through the glass and knows that the young woman with a bouncy bob and oversize false eyelashes will tell her to leave the flowers with her and she’ll make sure he gets them, but she can’t do that.
In the outside hall, there are two leather chairs with a low table in front and a spread of popular magazines lying across them.
She has to wait until Eyelash Girl leaves the desk.
It’s the only way. She does her cell-phone move and holds it up to her ear, pretending to be engaged in a conversation so she doesn’t look suspicious just standing there nervously.
Instead she looks like someone who got interrupted and will continue her business in a moment.
She passes the door and sits in one of the chairs, just out of sight, and waits.
It takes forty-five godforsaken minutes before the receptionist leaves her desk.
Paige doubts Finn will return from his so-called lunch meeting in an hour, but she hurries anyway.
She walks right past the desk and scans the row of office doors for his name.
There are a few people in a meeting at a table in the center of the office—a modern, open-concept arrangement.
One of them smiles and lights up upon seeing her—assuming all the romance and surprise that must be attached to the gift, no doubt.
If someone let Paige back here, it must be okay, so nobody seems to bat an eye.
She spots his door and slips inside. His laptop sits open and plugged in, but the screen has timed out and is dark.
No matter—that’s what his list of passwords are for.
She pulls the power cord from the wall, slips that along with the laptop into her messenger bag and zips it closed, then she leaves the flowers where the computer used to be and walks out.
“Hey!” a voice calls. She walks faster. “Hey, ma’am.” It’s the receptionist, walking toward her, holding five reams of printer paper and headed back to the front desk. “You can’t be back here.”
“Oh, sorry. I’m just—I was delivering flowers. They told me to go on back,” I say authoritatively.
“Who? I would be the only one to do that, and I didn’t,” she says, probably making a scene to cover her ass so everyone knows this was not her oversight.
“Someone did. Otherwise I would have left them up front, wouldn’t I? This is wasting my time for my next delivery, so...” and then she walks out the front doors, not waiting for any further response.
She glances around as she walks swiftly to get to her car to make sure she doesn’t pass Finn on his way in.
She takes great pleasure imagining him reading the card.
She wasn’t going to leave one, originally.
She was just going to use the flowers to get in.
Then, the more she thought of how delicious it would be to confuse him and maybe expedite a breakup, the more certain she was that it was the right thing to do.
Finn, I bet you thought these were from Charlotte, but they’re not. I’m on to you, it reads. She thought that was just enough for him to question her about them and become the right amount of paranoid and miserable.
Before she gets in her car, she thinks of another opportunity she hadn’t anticipated because she assumed he’d be driving to his lunch meeting.
She clicks her car key out of its plastic fob, holds it in her fist, and ever so subtly runs it down the length of his precious Range Rover as she walks past, gets in her own car, and drives home.