Chapter 20
RYDER
The questions came through Mia in the first week of August, four typed pages with space under each heading for answers Eden intended to check against paper she already had. Mia gave me a copy in the evening and kept the original in her case.
Page one was Jess. Page two the burner, the money, the house. Page three every public thing I did where somebody could watch it. Page four was our last night and the future I’d planned on the other side of taking her life apart.
At the top, in black ink, in her handwriting:
I choose the order. I may ask the same thing twice. I may end it without finishing. You don’t ask what I believe, whether I forgive an answer, or what I’m going to do. If you compress a fact, I make you say it again until you stop protecting yourself.
“Do you agree to a recorded meeting on those terms?” Mia asked.
“On her terms, in her order, for as long as she wants to sit there.”
“Then bring your lawyer, and understand he doesn’t answer for you and doesn’t interrupt her.”
I kept the pages overnight and wrote nothing on them. Drafting would have produced better sentences and left her guessing which ones I’d practiced. I slept three hours and reported to the side room at two with empty pockets.
She had moved the table so we sat at adjacent ends, out of my reach, angled so she could see my face without looking past Mia or the recorder.
Her list lay squared in front of her with a pencil across it and the knife closed beside her right hand.
The window faced west and the room had been holding heat since noon.
My lawyer came in with me and put his case on the floor.
“For the record,” he said, “I’ve advised my client not to do this. There’s no privilege over any part of it. This recording is discoverable, and every answer he gives can be used in a criminal proceeding, a civil claim, or a divorce. My advice is that he decline.”
“Noted,” I said. “I’m going ahead.”
“Say why,” Eden said.
“Because the only thing I have left that’s any use to you is the truth, and if I hold pieces of it back to protect myself, I’m doing the same thing I did in July with a lawyer in the room instead of a burner phone.”
He looked at me, then at Mia, and asked her to note his objection and his client’s rejection of it. Then he went out and sat in the hall with Leah, and the door stayed open, and Mia pressed the button. The red light came on and stayed on for two hours and nine minutes.
“Start with what you told her about me,” Eden said. “Not the marriage. Me.”
I had expected the pregnancy first. She wanted to know how much of herself I’d handed to a stranger before that stranger came up her steps.
“Your name. That we’d been married five years. That you’re a baker. That you have asthma. I said you wouldn’t hurt her, you’d ask about the baby, and you’d leave if you believed it was mine.”
“What did you tell her about my asthma?”
“That you carry rescue medication and might need it when she said the word pregnant. I told her not to block the door and not to stand between you and the kitchen.”
Her pencil stopped. She put it down flat. “You warned her where my medicine was,” she said, “before you warned me there’d be a reason to need it.”
“Yes.” I gave her the answer without looking at Mia or the recorder for somewhere else to put it.
“What else?” Eden moved her pencil to the next blank and waited, making it clear that the first answer had bought me nothing.
“That you’d protect her from Tessa. That she shouldn’t insult you, argue about the house, or claim I loved her in a way I hadn’t written for her. That you’d call Mia and separate your aunt’s money before you left.”
“You told her about my aunt’s money.”
“Not the amount. That you had money of your own and would know to protect it.”
“What did you tell her I’d pack?”
“Medication. Identification. Legal papers. Clothes. Your aunt’s knife. Whatever baking equipment you could prove was yours.”
She looked at the knife by her hand and left it where it was. “Did you tell her I was weak?”
“Difficult. A burden.”
“No. I told her the answer I’d prepared if you asked why I wanted a different life. I said I’d use asthma, because you already feared I was tired of it.”
“Repeat that without saying use asthma. Give me the words.”
She had caught the evasion on the first page. Use asthma sounded cleaner than the sentence I had actually prepared. “I told her I was going to say I was tired of planning around whether you could breathe, and that I wanted a woman who could make a family without turning every route into a problem.”
“Was the second half of that in what you said to me on the porch?”
“No. I stopped after tired.” Saying it aloud didn’t make the part I had withheld any less hers.
“But she had all of it.”
“She had all of it.” I watched Eden draw a line under the heading and understood that agreement wasn’t the same thing as giving her anything back.
Eden drew a line under the heading and moved to the burner. “Which messages did she write?”
“None of the thread you found. I wrote both sides, set the delivery times, and left the phone under my route folder unlocked. She read the dates and the public claims so she wouldn’t contradict them.”
“You researched a pregnancy.”
“Eight weeks, symptoms, spotting, appointments, and a prenatal trip.”
“Why spotting.”
“It gave me a reason to ask her something intimate and frightened in front of people. It also explained why I’d put her first during an attack.”
Her hands came off the table into her lap. “You chose bleeding so you could ask about it in front of me.”
“The water reminders. Her car.”
“I copied the kind of care I gave you. Ordinary messages made it look older and more real than sexual ones would have.”
“The motel.”
“A location Dez’s people already knew and Eden could verify existed. We never went into it together.”
Mia’s pen stopped moving. Eden let the silence sit there long enough for me to hear the recorder’s fan. “You just called me Eden,” she said. “I’m two feet from you.”
I had answered in the register I used with the source and with Jess. My wife as a name in a file with predictable behavior attached to it.
“Say my name,” Eden said.
“Eden. I picked a real motel, twenty minutes off the county road, because I knew you’d drive out and look at the sign, and I wanted you standing in that lot working it out. Jess and I were never inside it together.”
She wrote the correction herself before Mia could. “The phrase.”
“Stay where I put you. I’ll come get you.”
“Why that one.”
“You fought it every single time and believed it anyway. I needed a sentence you’d know came from me and would never believe I’d hand to another woman unless I meant it.”
The room was hot enough by then that Mia had rolled her sleeves. Eden turned to the account page and flattened it with the side of her hand. “Why move ninety-four thousand dollars when Jess was paid out of something else?”
“The affair needed a financial future. I knew you’d open the bank app within an hour of me saying I’d support her and the baby. If the money was sitting there, you’d have read me as frightened rather than committed.”
“A hundred twelve dollars and thirty-eight cents.”
“The recurring charges were due that week. I wanted it to look emptied without anything failing before you saw it.”
“You worked out the exact number that would frighten me and keep the electricity on.”
Mia wrote the sentence down as Eden said it. “Could I have found the dormant account?”
“In a branch, with your identification, yes. The app hid it because it had no activity and sat under a profile I controlled. I expected you to be two states away before it occurred to you.”
“Did you expect me to live on my aunt’s money?”
“Lodging, food, fuel. I intended to pay every dollar of it back.”
“With my own savings, once you gave them back to me.”
“Did you ever think I’d have an emergency while it was hidden?”
“I’d read the scheduled charges. I expected it closed before any large expense.”
“The oven was a large expense.” Her voice didn’t change at all. “The viewing was the following Tuesday. I’d been saving four years.”
“I knew the date. I planned to have the money back before it.”
“You planned my panic around my calendar.” She wrote that one down in her own hand, and I watched her do it, and it took her a long time because she pressed hard.
“The house. Did Bear know you told me the company would give it to Jess?”
“No. Nobody in the LLC knew. Her agreement gave her housing in another state under another name. She never expected a foot of it.”
“Then why say it.”
“You might have stayed and fought me over another woman. You wouldn’t live beside a baby.”
“There. Say the whole reason. The one you wrote in the margin.”
“I chose a pregnancy because you’d protect the child from the fight, protect her from the stress, and take yourself out before you’d make either of them live next to the wife. An affair might have made you dig in. A child would make you step aside.”
“So the first thing I did that you hadn’t planned for was refuse to give you my bedroom.”
“Yes. And everything I did after that was an attempt to push you back toward the woman in the plan instead of looking at the one in front of me.”
She checked two headings and turned the page. Somebody walked past in the hall and Leah’s voice said something low, and then it was quiet again. “Now the part where nobody was watching. You and her.”
I gave her the rented room with the door propped open to the walkway, Jess by the window, the contract and the phone and the cash on the table between us, separate arrivals, separate departures. She never entered the house, my bunk, or the motel in the messages.
“Did you kiss her. Did she kiss you. Did you see her undressed.”
“No. No. No.” The answers were simple; the fact that she had to ask them was mine.
“Did you touch her anywhere at all.”