Chapter 10
She did not call ahead, and she did not go on a weekend, and she did not wear anything she had bought in the ten years she was married.
Jeans. Boots with the salt line. The gray sweater from before.
She put the ledger printouts and the filing page in a plain brown folder on the passenger seat — not the green one; the green one stayed home, because the green one was hers — and she drove west on a Wednesday morning in the middle of March with the heater on.
She had rehearsed nothing. That was deliberate. She had spent an entire evening in October rehearsing a sentence for her husband and the world had taken it away from her before she could say it, and she was not doing that again.
Instead she had made a list of facts, in order, on one page.
The building in the Gulch had a doorman and a lobby with a fireplace nobody had ever sat at. Laura stood in front of the panel and pressed the button for 1104 in the middle of the morning.
A long pause. Then a voice, thick with sleep. "Hello?"
"It's Laura Hayes."
The silence went on so long that the doorman looked over.
"...What?"
"I'm downstairs," Laura said. "I'd like ten minutes. I'm not going to make a scene and I'm not recording you and nobody knows I'm here. If you say no I'll leave and I won't come back, and then I'll do this the other way."
"What's the other way?"
"Crestline Content LLC," Laura said.
The buzzer went.
The condo was very white and very clean and smelled like a candle that cost sixty dollars.
There was a ring light on a stand in the corner with a coat thrown over it.
There was a wall of shelves styled with books that had been bought by color.
Through the door to the bedroom Laura could see a bed that had not been made and a laundry basket with clothes in it going gray around the collars, and she thought, absurdly, this is a small apartment.
Ashley Reed was not smaller.
She was twenty-six and barefoot in leggings and a cropped sweatshirt, with her hair up and no makeup on, and she was perfectly composed at nine forty in the morning with Jake Hayes's wife standing in her doorway, and none of that touched the main fact about her, which Laura's hands registered before her manners could stop them.
The girl was in absurd condition. Standing hip-square in a doorway with her weight even, calves like a sprinter's, shoulders set back where they belonged instead of rolled forward the way everybody's are by twenty-six.
A body that got worked four hours a day by somebody who knew what they were doing.
Laura had spent a decade being paid to look at people and she could not not look, and what she saw was a professional athlete in a laundry-day sweatshirt.
She thought, before she could stop it: I used to have forearms.
She had been reaching for a jar in her own clinic in January and felt something not be there, and she had made a note to start swimming again and never started, and here was that note, standing barefoot in a white room in the Gulch, with a training schedule and a nutritionist and twenty-six years old.
Laura let the thought all the way in and then set it down, because she had driven ninety minutes and it was not what she came for, and because a woman who lies to herself in the doorway is not going to hear anything useful in the room.
She had prepared herself, on the drive, for the possibility that she would want to hurt her. She had thought about it honestly at seventy miles an hour and decided that if the urge came she would leave.
It came in the doorway and it stayed for the whole hour, sitting just behind her sternum like something with a pulse, and Laura carried it around that white apartment and set it down carefully in a corner and did not use it once.
She was proud of that, later, and she was never entirely comfortable with being proud of it.
"Do you want to sit down?" Ashley said.
"I'll stand."
"Okay." Ashley stayed standing too, with her arms crossed over her stomach. "I want to say—"
"Don't." Laura said it gently. "Please. If you apologize I'll have to have a feeling about it, and I'd rather do this first."
Ashley's mouth closed. Two hours later, on I-40 somewhere past Lebanon, Laura would work out that the woman had not been winding up to apologize at all, and would have to pull into a weigh station and sit there for a while.
Laura opened the brown folder.
"I'm going to read you some things and you're going to tell me if any of them are wrong.
" She did not look up. "Crestline Content LLC was registered fifteen months ago in Tennessee.
Sole member, Ashley Reed. Address, this building.
Starting fourteen months ago, an invoice for four thousand dollars a month went to my husband's household account, and it has been paid every month since, and every single one of them was approved by Derek Mills. "
Nothing from the other side of the room.
"The first time you were ever in a room with my husband was the alumni weekend, eighteen months ago.
April." Laura turned the page. "You registered that company in July.
You put Derek Mills on four thousand dollars a month in August. And the first time anything happened between you was the twenty-ninth of the following August, which is sixteen months after you met him and a year after you started paying a boy who works in my kitchen. "
She looked up.
Ashley Reed looked back at her, entirely level, and Laura understood that she was not going to be denied anything and had not expected to be.
"Which one's wrong?" Laura said.
"None of them."
"Then tell me what it was for."
And she sat down on the arm of her own sofa, unhurried, the way you sit when a meeting is going to run long.
What came out took about twenty minutes, and Laura did not have to work for any of it, and that was the thing she would think about afterward, driving east — not that it was hard to get, but that it was easy.
There was no rush to it and no unburdening in it.
Ashley Reed answered her questions the way a competent person walks a client through an invoice.
She was not confessing. She was explaining, and she was mildly surprised to be asked.
It started at the alumni weekend, which she gave like a date of purchase.
"Hospitality thing on the Friday. The current squad works those.
You stand there four hours and hand people drinks.
" She had her arms folded, comfortably. "He came over and asked what I did in the off-season.
I said I was taking classes, he asked which ones, I told him, he listened.
Then somebody wanted a photo and he went. "
Laura waited.
"Four minutes," Ashley said. "And I stood there afterward and I thought, okay. That one."
"That one."
"You'd have to have been there." She said it without any warmth at all.
"He's not a person you can meet. There's no version where a girl on the squad runs into Jake Hayes twice.
There's a wall around him made out of men with jobs and the whole wall's job is keeping people like me on the other side of it.
" A small shrug. "So I stopped trying to get past it and I bought a piece of it. "
"You'd never met him before that."
"I've never even seen him play." She said it fast, like it mattered, like she had been saving it, and Laura understood that she meant it as proof of something — that she had not wanted the player, that whatever this was had been about the man. "I came in the season after he went out."
"And then you registered a company."
"In July."
"Two months later."
"Three." Ashley almost smiled. "I'm not impulsive."
"You bought a piece of the wall."
"I bought a name," Ashley said. "A publicist owed me. I said who does his calendar, and she said Derek Mills, and I said thank you."
"And you paid him."
"I hired him," Ashley said, and then heard it, and stopped. "I paid him. Four grand a month out of his own boss's budget, which he approves himself, and he thinks he's a genius."
"For fourteen months. To do what."
"To tell me where he was going to be."
"That's all."
"That's all. That's all, that's the whole —" and then she stopped, and Laura watched her arrive somewhere, and watched her not turn around and go back. "No. Not where he was going to be."
"And me?"
Ashley stopped.
"Why me?" Laura said. "Because that's the part I drove out here for. He was the one you wanted. I want to know why the woman who wanted my husband had fourteen months of my lunch calendar."
And Ashley Reed said, quietly, "Because you were the way to know if he was alone."
Laura did not move.
"That's it. That's the whole — " Ashley's hands came up and dropped. "You were on his calendar. If you were at the foundation thing, he wasn't. If you were going to your mom's, he was in town by himself. I never asked for anything about you. I asked where you weren't."
"You asked a man to tell you where I was not going to be. For fourteen months."
"Yes."
"That's the same sentence."
"It really isn't," Ashley said, "but I can see why you'd want it to be."
"Say the rest."
"He started sending me stuff I didn't ask for."
There it was.
"When."
"Like a year ago. Maybe a little more." Ashley had gone somewhere else, her eyes fixed on the carpet.
"At first it was normal. He'd send the calendar.
Then it was — a picture of your car. Then it was your kitchen.
And I said, what is this, and he said, context.
" She swallowed. "And I said okay. Because he was the only way I had of knowing anything at all, and if I made him stop he might stop all of it, and then I'd be back to four minutes at a drinks table.
So I said okay and I told myself he was being thorough. "
"You told yourself."
"Yes."
"He sent you a photograph of the inside of my house," Laura said, "and you paid the next invoice."
"Yes," Ashley said.
Laura looked at the wall of color-coded books.