Epilogue
JEREMY
I almost lost everything today.
Veronica. Teddy. My God, I almost lost Teddy.
All because of Naomi. I don’t quite know the entire story because Ronnie is still shaky and doesn’t want to talk about it, but Naomi is the one who set the fire. She burned down my house, and she almost burned down my son with it.
I can’t believe she almost killed Teddy. If I had lost him…
And it’s not even the first time I almost lost Teddy, thanks to Naomi. The first time was when Teddy was a little over two years old. I was walking through the underground parking lot at work, on my way to my Tesla, when I heard a voice call out, “Jeremy? Jeremy Roth?”
I turned around to find a nondescript man standing behind me. He was in his twenties, although he looked like he had led a rough life. He was a few inches taller than me but much thinner. Unless he pulled a knife on me, I could take him in a fight.
“Yes?” I said.
“My name is Clay Barkley,” he told me. “And I believe you have something that belongs to me.”
“What is it?” I asked irritably.
“My son.”
I brought Clay back to my office, where the whole story unfolded in a jumble of words. He believed that my wife had stolen his infant son out of his car two years ago. He had been searching for this little boy, Dominic, for the last two years, and now he believed he had found him.
“Why would you think Naomi took your baby?” I asked him.
He dug into the pocket of his ratty blue jeans and pulled out a small pink gemstone. “I was going to sell my car and was cleaning it out. I found this wedged under the mat in the back seat.”
I took the stone from him and turned it over in my palm.
A logo was emblazoned on it that looked like a triangle with a light blooming from the center of it.
I recognized it from when Naomi used to do that woo-woo crystal healing.
She had dozens of these stones with her logo made up to give to customers.
She even gave one to me after our first date.
In retrospect, that was the moment I should have made a run for it.
“I did a reverse image search,” Clay explained. “It took me to your wife’s website.”
Did my wife steal a baby and leave her calling card behind?
By then, I had already realized what I had gotten into marrying Naomi.
If that woman had one rational thought in her head, I’d yet to hear it.
We couldn’t even get in the car anymore without her performing some sort of bizarre ritual with her crystals.
If I dared to plan a family vacation, any information I gave her immediately flew out of her head so that when I told her it was time to pack, she acted like I had popped a surprise trip on her.
I thought about leaving her every day, but for Teddy’s sake, I was reluctant to break up our family. He needed me.
“What do you want?” I asked Clay Barkley in the same sharp voice I used during a business deal.
His voice broke. “I want my son back.”
“He’s not your son. I did a paternity test years ago.”
“You sure it was correct?”
I started to tell him that I was sure. It showed 99.9999998 percent certainty that Teddy was my son.
But then I started to rethink things. It was more than a little suspicious when Naomi showed up with that baby, especially when I’d been so careful about birth control.
And yet now we were trying for a second baby with no results whatsoever.
So much of what Clay was telling me fit into the idea that she stole him.
But in the end, what really made me hesitate was how much this man looked like my two-year-old son.
“Take another paternity test,” he urged me.
“I won’t go to the police yet, but I need to know.
I don’t want your boy if he’s not mine. But if he’s mine…
” He shook his head. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life.
But the thing I can’t stop thinking about is letting someone steal my son from me. I just want Dominic back.”
And then he collapsed into sobs.
I told him I would take the paternity test again and get back to him.
I expressed confidence that the test would show that I was Teddy’s father.
I didn’t mention any of this to Naomi. I bought the test online using a credit card Naomi didn’t know about, put in the swabs from my cheek and Teddy’s in two envelopes, and waited for the results, which came back just over a week later.
Teddy was not my son.
I couldn’t figure out how Naomi tricked me. I sent in the last test myself, but I never saw her swab Teddy. She must have done something with his swab, although I still don’t know what it was. Somehow, she outsmarted me.
But it didn’t matter what the test showed.
Teddy was my son now. The idea of this former drug addict taking him away from us so that we would never see him again…
it was unthinkable. Yes, Naomi would probably go to prison too, but I didn’t care about that.
I couldn’t let him take Teddy. It would’ve been like amputating my arm.
Clay Barkley turned out to be surprisingly easy to get rid of.
It’s all about knowing the right people to help make problems go away.
He had an extensive drug history with multiple arrests, so nobody batted an eye when he was found dead in his hotel room from a heroin overdose.
It wasn’t like his death was any big loss to society.
After that, Naomi was the only other person who knew the truth about Teddy. Eventually, she would have to go as well.
I bided my time for several years, settling into our family routine, waiting for the right moment. Then I met Ronnie and fell in love with her. I finally had a reason to get rid of Naomi for good.
It was easy enough to make Naomi appear unhinged during the divorce.
After all, she was unhinged. But I gave her a nudge.
Every chance I got, I would tell her incorrect times for when she had to be somewhere, but I would never put it in writing so she could refer back to it.
I hired Rosita and told her that I needed her because Naomi couldn’t get Teddy to school reliably.
And then, just to hammer it all home, I entered Naomi’s apartment when she was with Teddy at a karate lesson, and I planted the elephant with the knife stuck inside it in Teddy’s drawer. I felt bad about that one, because I knew how much he loved that elephant. But the photograph was worth it.
Still, things weren’t going my way in the mediation.
That lawyer of hers was too damn smart. So one day, I went into her apartment when she wasn’t home, ground up most of the contents of a bottle of Tylenol, and mixed it into that ridiculous kombucha she was fermenting in her fridge.
It smelled awful anyway, so I figured she wouldn’t notice, and Teddy would never touch it.
It was her own Tylenol, and it would look like a suicide when she died. But somehow it didn’t kill her.
I was getting desperate until Naomi went berserk at Teddy’s birthday party, smashing Ronnie’s present and practically assaulting that cop.
After she got herself arrested, we filed that order of protection, and Hardwick told me things were looking really good for full custody.
Like I said, Naomi was almost as unhinged as I made her out to be. Almost.
A few months from now, after she lost custody, Naomi would have taken an overdose of sleeping pills instead of Tylenol, and that would have finished her off. It would have been an easy way for her to go. I had it all planned out.
But somehow, it all worked out anyway. Now Naomi is dead, and I don’t have to concern myself with her ever again. I can start a life with Ronnie, who rescued my son from a burning house. Yes, she’s a keeper.
Naomi and Clay both tried to take Teddy away from me, but I wouldn’t let them. They are both dead—Clay lying in a grave and Naomi burnt to a crisp down in my cellar.
And anyone else who tries to take my son will suffer the same fate.
THE END