Chapter 11
Bonnie didn’t sleep. Not that she actually expected to.
She lay in bed for the first hour after putting the kids in bed, staring at the ceiling while the house settled with its usual creaks and groans. The furnace kicked on. A branch scraped against the siding. Noah talked in his sleep, something about polar bears and firetrucks, and then went quiet.
At midnight she gave up pretending and got up.
The kitchen was dark except for the stove light, which she always left on because Cassidy sometimes came down for water and didn’t like navigating blind. She sat at the table without turning on any other lights because the darkness felt appropriate for what was happening inside her head.
Gray’s evidence played on a loop, over and over in her head. Every accidental cause systematically eliminated. Every innocent explanation, like doors shutting down a long hallway until only one door remained, disproved.
How could she not see Lucas Shoemacher standing behind it?
The man she’d worked for every day for four years.
But that wasn’t what drove her out of bed.
In the small, dark hours of the morning, with her children sleeping peacefully and the house wrapped around her like a coat, one specific memory detached itself from the chaos and floated to the surface with nauseating clarity.
Lucas handed her the evidence of his complicity.
Physically putting it in her hands. Did he think she was so na?ve or dumb that, even if she happened to look through the papers, she wouldn’t realize what she was looking at?
Or was he convinced she was so slavishly loyal to him, so indebted to him for bailing her out of the bind he’d put her in by killing her husband, that she would blindly do whatever he told her to?
She couldn’t stop replaying the moment in her head. The stew of emotions flitting across his face as he’d laid that envelope on her desk. His voice had been casual. Pleasant, even. He’d smiled at her and had gone back into his office.
He’d smiled at her.
He looked her in the eye—the woman whose husband died in his barn—and handed her the evidence of what he’d done. And he’d smiled.
Because he thought he owned her. Because she was his personal flunkey. Because she’d been loyal for four years, grateful for four years, obedient for four years. He’d had every reason to believe she would feed those pages into the shredder without a second glance.
He’d counted on it.
That was the part that sent her to the kitchen sink at two in the morning, gripping the edge of the counter with both hands, her knuckles white and her stomach heaving.
He hadn’t just committed a crime and tried to hide it from her.
He’d committed a crime and enlisted her in hiding it.
He’d made her the final layer of his cover-up.
The architecture of it was so elegant, so complete, that it took her breath away.
Who better to testify on a witness stand that she’d never seen any evidence of Lucas covering anything up than one of the widows from the fire?
He’d hired her three weeks after she buried Brent. She’d always believed it was kindness. She’d been destitute, shattered, barely able to function. Lucas had offered her a lifeline, and she’d grabbed it with both hands and held on for all she was worth.
Now she understood.
The job was never a lifeline. It was a leash.
Keep the widow close. Keep her grateful. Keep her so loyal and so dependent that she would never look too hard at anything. She wasn’t his secretary. She was his insurance policy. A broken woman he’d rebuilt just enough to be useful to him but not enough to be dangerous.
And the worst part, the part that made the nausea crest until she had to press the back of her hand against her mouth and breathe through her nose, was that it had almost worked.
She had almost done it. She’d almost fed every page into that shredder without reading a word.
Some part of her—the part she’d been trying to silence for four years, the part that had caught Brent in his lie and kicked him out of the house, the part of her that was not broken and had never been broken—had said, Read them first.
Thank God she’d listened to that voice.
She stood at the sink until the nausea passed. Washed her face with cold water. Dried it on the kitchen towel that said Bless This Mess in cheerful red letters.
She made coffee. The ancient coffeemaker gurgled and spat grounds into the carafe because of course it did. One of these days she was going to throw the wretched thing out the window.
She sat back down at the table and drank coffee that tasted like motor oil and betrayal and waited for the sun to come up.
She got Cassidy and Noah ready for school on autopilot. Made lunches. Signed a permission slip. Reminded Noah that socks were not optional. Located Cassidy’s library book under the couch cushion where it had no business being.
Noah appeared in the kitchen with his question notebook. “Mom, if a building is on fire and there’s no water, can you put it out with milk?”
“I don’t know, Sweetheart. Ask Gray next time you see him.”
“I wrote it down.” He held up the notebook proudly. It was getting thick with entries. “I’m on page fourteen.”
“Impressive.”
“Mom?”
“Hmm?”
“You look tired.”
“I didn’t sleep great last night.”
“Was it the sugar cube thing? I still think about that sometimes.”
Despite everything, a laugh escaped her. “No, Honey. It wasn’t the sugar cube thing.”
Cassidy was watching her from the doorway. Her daughter had her backpack on and her coat zipped, and she was holding two granola bars. One for herself, one she extended toward Bonnie with the wordless authority of a child who had taken over the feeding of her own mother.
“Thank you,” Bonnie said without bothering to hide her chagrin as she took the bar.
Cassidy’s gaze lingered on her face. “Did something happen?”
“Just a rough night. I’m fine.”
Cassidy studied her for two more seconds, then nodded and went to put on her boots. But she didn’t pull out her observation notebook before she left for school, and she didn’t mention Gray’s name once. Which told Bonnie her nine-year-old had shifted from matchmaker to bodyguard without being asked.
She walked them to the bus. Cassidy paused on the steps, the way she always did, and turned back.
“Eat the granola bar,” her daughter ordered.
“I will.”
“And something else. Something that’s actually food.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Cassidy pointed her bossy finger at her. “I’m checking when I get home.”
The bus door closed, and her children were gone.
She went back inside, ate the granola bar because she’d promised, and drove to work.
The mayor’s office smelled the way it always did. Coffee. Printer toner. The faint ghost of Lucas’s cigars, which he’d supposedly given up per doctor’s orders but still smoked on the sly. There was simply no way to keep the odor out of his clothes, and he didn’t notice the smell.
She unlocked the outer office at eight thirty. Turned on the lights. Started the coffee. Checked voicemails. A pothole on the lake road—again. A call from the county clerk about a zoning variance. A message from the Apple Pie Creek pharmacy confirming Lucas’s prescriptions were ready for pickup.
She sat at her desk and looked at the closed door of his office.
Four years. She had walked into this building five days a week, and every single one of those mornings she’d believed that the man behind that door had given her a second chance at life.
She’d been so grateful.
And she’d been so careful to please him.
So competent. So unfailingly loyal. She’d answered every phone call, filed every document, managed every calendar conflict, buffered every irate constituent, and never, not once, questioned what Lucas kept in his safe or why he closed his office door when he opened it.
Because that was the deal. He’d given her a job when no one else would have hired a woman who could barely hold a conversation without crying. She owed him. And Bonnie Watson paid her debts.
Except the debt was never real. He didn’t hire you because he was kind. He hired you because he was keeping a potential enemy close. Controlling her without her even knowing he was doing it.
She went through the motions of doing her job this morning, not for Lucas, but for the people of Cobbler Cove. Someone had to keep the town running.
Lucas arrived at nine forty-five. He moved slowly as if the air had thickened around him and every step required negotiation.
His breath rattled in his chest, and the short walk from the elevator to his office, maybe fifty feet, had winded him.
The tanning-bed bronze couldn’t hide the gray flesh beneath it any longer.
“Morning,” he mumbled.
“Good morning. Your ten o’clock is confirmed, and the county clerk sent over the variance paperwork. I left it in your inbox to sign.”
He grunted. The grunt meant he’d heard her but wasn’t going to acknowledge the work she’d done before he arrived to make his day run smoothly.
She watched him walk into his office. Watched the door close. Heard the desk chair creak as he lowered himself into it.
The same sounds she’d heard every morning for four years. Except now the creak of his chair sounded like the settling of a man who’d hired a widow to shred the evidence of her own husband’s murder.
She turned back to her computer and opened the day’s schedule.
This was the thing that was going to drive her insane.
Not the horror of what she’d learned. She could lock that in a mental compartment and deal with it later.
The thing that was going to break her was the normalcy.
The coffee. The voicemails. The grunt. The closed door.
The ordinary, mundane rhythm of a workday shared with a man who might have murdered her husband.
Might have. She caught herself on that word and held it. Gray’s evidence was compelling. The payoff emails were damning. But she was not going to convict anyone, not even Lucas Shoemacher, on the basis of might.