Chapter 40 Katie Morrow
Katie Morrow
“You know, Katie’s favorite movie growing up was Pretty Woman.
I think that’s why she was so gaga over Mark, from day one.
She wanted that knight-in-shining-business-suit to whisk her away to his mansion and feed her bonbons.
And apparently, she didn’t care if he might have murdered his first wife.
I told her it was a mistake, but she’s naive and thinks the best of everyone. Gets that from her father.”
“I don’t understand why she’s here. I don’t understand why you called her.
And I really don’t understand why you had her cell phone number this entire time and you never once told me.
” Katie’s words ran together, her voice hiccuping on the last sentence, and she pressed her fingers to both eyes, trying to stop the flow of tears.
Whirling away from Mark, she moved to the settee at the end of their bed and sank down on the expensive linen.
Mark stood by the set of double doors to their suite as if he was about to leave. He’d been hovering there ever since she’d said they needed to talk. Now he held up both hands in innocence and gave her an annoyed look. “Katie, you’re making this into something it’s not. I need you to calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down!” she spat. “You don’t know what it was like, having her waltz around our house like she owns the place.
She’s obnoxious, Mark. She looks at me as if she’s laughing at me.
And she can’t resist dropping all of these stupid comments to point out what she knows or what you and her have done.
I swear, I will kill her if I have to spend a week with her in this house. ”
“You’re not going to kill her,” Mark said reasonably, stepping closer. “Let’s face it, you don’t have the strength or capacity for that.”
She dropped her hands and glared at him. “You think you’re funny? You think any of this is funny?”
And he seemed to. From the moment he’d gotten back home, he’d been in a good mood. Lighter. Happier.
It was fucking infuriating. And it scared the life out of her.
“Look.” He crouched in front of her and gripped her shoulders. “Don’t be threatened by Willow, babe. You’re my wife. Our marriage . . . her visit doesn’t change anything about that.” He smiled, but his eyes flicked to the door, and she could feel his itch to get downstairs and talk to her.
“Why is she here?” Katie whispered. “She said you called her. Why did you call her?”
He stared in her eyes. He wasn’t as attractive from this angle.
“I called her because I didn’t like the questions the cops were asking me.
I can tell everyone till I’m blue in the face that Willow’s fine, but no one believed me then, and it was looking like it might turn into a big thing all over again.
So I asked her to come here for a short visit.
Just so everyone can see that I didn’t murder her and dump her into one of the golf course lakes.
” He grimaced at the thought. “You don’t .
. . you don’t know what it was like, when she left.
How people treat you when they think that you’ve done something terrible. ”
No, she didn’t know what that was like, but she had experienced the peripheral effects. She’d been left out of book clubs, snubbed at social events, and heard the snide comments—and that was all two years after Willow had disappeared. She couldn’t imagine what it had been like right after the fact.
There had been moments when even she had considered the fact that Willow was dead.
Not because she hadn’t believed in Mark’s innocence, but there had always been the possibility that Willow had met with some kind of foul play.
Maybe she had been driving away from their life, headed to a new one, and broken down on the side of the highway.
Gotten picked up by a stranger and ended up dead in a dumpster, her body never found.
Katie had listened to enough true crime podcasts to know that it wasn’t just a possibility—it was a probability. Women didn’t ever walk out of a situation and break all ties, without any trail. They didn’t stop using their credit cards, cut off their friends, and leave no forwarding address.
Not unless you were hiding. And that was what Katie had never been able to figure out. Who or what had Willow been hiding from?
Katie stared into Mark’s eyes and wondered whether he knew.