12. Reid
— ? —
Reid
We barely made it through the door when my phone rang.
Blythe went straight to the kitchen, her shoulders tight, her hands shaking.
I heard her open a cabinet, heard the clink of glass against glass as she reached for a glass: wine, probably, or maybe something stronger.
The baby shower had gutted her. I’d watched it happen in real time, watched her face go pale when she saw those nursery things, watched her spine turn to steel when she confronted her sister.
And then Birdie’s water had broken, and suddenly Blythe was the villain, and a garden full of smartphones had captured the whole thing.
I should follow her. Should make sure she was all right. Should do something other than stand in the foyer with my phone buzzing in my pocket.
But the caller ID said Dario Tarino, and I answered instead.
“Mr. Navarro.” Dario’s voice was low and careful, forty years of knowing when to speak and when to stay silent in every word of it. “You got a minute?”
“What is it?”
“The Anchorage II went out tonight. Came back about an hour ago.” A pause, weighted with something I couldn’t identify. “You might want to look at the harbor cameras.”
I went still. My hand tightened on the phone. “What’s on them?”
“Something you’ll want to see.” Another pause. “I can’t say more than that, Mr. Navarro. But I thought you should know.”
“Thank you, Dario.”
“Keep my name out of it.” His voice was sharp, urgent. “My son works for Chadwick. I can’t be seen as-”
“I understand.” I was already moving toward my office, my mind racing through possibilities. What could be on those cameras that Dario thought I needed to see? What had Stan done now? “There’s a job at Halyard for both of you, the day either of you wants it.”
“I appreciate that.” A click, and he was gone.
I pulled up the harbor security feed on my laptop. The interface was familiar. I’d been accessing it for months, tracking Chadwick vessels, monitoring their movements. Part of the machine I’d been building. Part of the revenge.
It took me a few minutes to find the right timestamp, 6:47 p.m., the Anchorage II returning to its slip. The image was grainy, black-and-white, but clear enough to see what was happening.
Stan Chadwick coming down the dock.
His shirt was undone, hanging open to reveal a chest I wanted to put my fist through. His hair had the disheveled look men get when they’ve been doing something they shouldn’t. And behind him, climbing off the yacht one by one, were three women in bikinis.
They were laughing. All of them, Stan included.
He had his arm around one of the women, his hand resting on her hip with casual possession.
Another was adjusting her bikini top, fixing straps that had clearly been moved.
The third was carrying her shoes, barefoot on the dock, her head thrown back in laughter at something Stan had said.
While his new baby was being born.
While his wife was in labor.
While an entire garden was screaming over a puddle of amniotic fluid, Stan Chadwick was on the water with three women who weren’t Birdie.
I watched the video twice. Then a third time, studying every detail. The timestamp was clear. The faces were identifiable. This wasn’t circumstantial. This was proof.
I downloaded the file. Saved it to three different locations, the cloud, an external drive, my phone. Evidence this valuable needed redundancy.
Then I sat in my office chair and stared at the frozen image of Stan’s smiling face.
I should tell her.
The thought came and I pushed it away, then pulled it back, then pushed it away again. A familiar pattern now, the constant war between what I wanted and what was right.
I should tell her, because she deserved to know.
Because secrets were what got us here in the first place, what poisoned her marriage and nearly killed her.
Because I’d already lied to her about enough things: my reasons for coming to Newport, my history with Chadwick Shipping, the revenge I’d been building for fifteen years.
But telling her meant hurting her. And I didn’t want to hurt her.
God, I didn’t want to hurt her.
I sat there for a long time, thinking about that. About the way she’d looked at the baby shower, surrounded by women who’d watched her almost drown in whispers. About the strength it had taken to confront her sister, to walk into that garden knowing everyone would be against her.
About the way she’d laughed this morning, feeding toast to Bayes, like she’d forgotten what happiness felt like and was just remembering.
She was under my skin. That was the thing I couldn’t explain, the thing I hadn’t planned for, the thing that was complicating everything.
Two weeks of living in the same house, eating at the same table, watching her feed toast to my dog and laugh at bad television and fall asleep on the couch with her head on a pillow that smelled like her shampoo afterward.
She was already all the way in.
I wanted to be good enough for her. That was a brand-new problem.
I had never wanted to be good enough for anything: not for Newport, not for the club committees that kept rejecting me, not for any of the people who’d looked down on me my entire life.
I only wanted to be better than them. Smarter, richer, more successful. I wanted to win, not to deserve.
But with her, I wanted to deserve it. I wanted to be the kind of man who could look her in the eye and know I’d earned the right to be there.
Stan Chadwick had never deserved her for a single day of their marriage. He’d had her, her warmth, her brilliance, her loyalty, and he’d thrown her away like garbage. He’d fucked her sister while she saved his company. He’d pushed her off a boat and watched her drown.
And now, while his new baby was being born, he was on his yacht with three women in bikinis.
I would do anything to make sure I wasn’t just another version of that man.
I stood up. Walked as far as the living room doorway.
And then I stopped, and stood in my own hallway like a trespasser, one hand on the doorframe, unable to take the last three steps.
Through the doorway I could hear the television, and under it, her laugh.
I stood there and let myself count it, four times, five, and thought about the fact that I was holding a laptop with a video on it that was going to take that sound away from her.
Tonight. Possibly for a long time. She had been hurt by every person who was supposed to love her, one after another, in order, and now I was going to walk into that room and take my turn.
There was no version of this where I didn’t tell her. I knew that. She had spent seven years married to a man who decided what she got to know.
I made myself let go of the doorframe.
She was on the couch with Bayes, wrapped in a blanket, watching something on television.
A sitcom, from the sound of it, laugh track, bright voices, the artificial cheerfulness of people whose problems could be solved in twenty-two minutes.
The kind of mindless entertainment I’d never understood the appeal of, but she seemed to find it soothing.
She was laughing.
The sound hit me somewhere in the chest. She’d had such a terrible day, the baby shower, the confrontation with Birdie, being blamed for something that wasn’t her fault. And here she was, laughing at a sitcom with my dog on her lap, and I was about to ruin it.
Then she looked up and saw my face, and the laughter stopped.
“What is it?” She sat up, pushing Bayes aside. The dog grumbled but relocated to the floor. “Reid? What happened?”
I sat down beside her. Opened my laptop. Turned the screen toward her.
“Dario called,” I said. “The harbor cameras picked something up.”
I pressed play.
She watched in silence. I watched her watch, saw her face go pale, saw her hands clench in her lap, saw the moment she understood what she was looking at. The color drained from her cheeks. Her breathing went shallow.
“That’s tonight,” she said. Her voice was barely a whisper, thin and fragile. “That’s - the baby was being born. Birdie was in labor, and he-”
“Yes.”
“With three-”
“Yes.”
She stood up so fast she knocked the laptop off my knee. I caught it before it hit the floor, but she was already gone: running toward the bathroom, her hand over her mouth, making sounds that weren’t quite words.
I found her on her knees in front of the toilet, throwing up.
“He probably did the same to me.” She was crying now, tears streaming down her face, her voice ragged between heaves. “Reid - what if he never took care of himself? We never used condoms. Not once in seven years. I trusted him. I trusted him, and he was-”
She vomited again. I knelt beside her, held her hair back, rubbed circles on her back while she emptied herself. Her whole body was shaking. I could feel the tremors running through her, wave after wave of them.
“Holy shit,” she said when she could speak again. Her voice was raw, scraped. “Holy shit. What if I have something? What if he gave me something and I never knew?”
“We’ll find out.” I kept my voice steady, even though I wanted to put my fist through the wall. “First thing tomorrow morning. I’ll take you to a clinic - one where nobody knows our faces. We’ll get you tested for everything.”
“What if-”
“Then we deal with it.” I pulled her into my arms, held her tight against my chest. She was still shaking, still crying, her tears soaking through my shirt. “Whatever it is. We deal with it together.”
She clung to me. Her fingers dug into my back, holding on like I was the only solid thing in a world that kept shifting under her feet.
I pressed my lips to her hair. Breathed in the scent of her, shampoo and salt and, underneath it, just her.
“I’ve got you,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She cried. I held her. Bayes pushed his way into the bathroom and pressed his enormous head against her leg, whining softly, and we stayed there on the cold tile floor until her tears ran out.
And in my own head, very quietly, I thought: I would burn the world down to the waterline if she asked me to.