Chapter 6
Allison
The wind off the lake catches me full in the face as I step down to the Grand Avenue underpass.
The evening air in the last days of January smells of salt and exhaust. My boots strike the pavement with a hollow rhythm, echoing faintly in the tunnel beneath Lake Shore Drive.
Overhead: the low thunder of traffic, the vibrations carrying down through the concrete.
Harp already showed me photos. But I need to see it for myself. I need to see them in person, with my own eyes, for it to be real, for me to believe that he’s given up on us and gone back to his old ways, that I wasn’t enough for him, that we weren’t enough for him.
And this time, it means more than just parking outside Anna Cortese’s house on Palomino Drive.
Finley, bless his heart, has grown more cautious or just smarter. Why go to the mistress’s house when you have a swanky condo just off the Mag Mile in downtown Chicago, with a picturesque view of Lake Michigan? Y’know, the investment property we bought with my signing bonus from the law firm?
The underpass is colder than street level, the lighting a dull yellow, reflecting off wet walls streaked with salt stains. I hug my coat tighter, listening to my own breath.
When I reach the tunnel’s end, the lake wind hits me harder, whistling across the promenade. Ahead of me, Jane Addams Park, dark and skeletal in the dim light, bare tree branches waving helplessly. To my left, the faint glitter of Ohio Street Beach under the cover of snow.
I continue walking, boots crunching over frozen grit, until I reach the railing at the park’s western edge.
I look across Lake Shore Drive to the location of our condo building at 432 East Erie.
My vantage point is far from ideal. Cars hiss by in a steady stream in both directions, tires slicing through slush, breaking my view into flickers between moving headlights.
Like I’m watching something through strobe lighting.
Binoculars help. And the stretch of sidewalk along Inner Lake Shore Drive, from Erie to Ontario, is well illuminated. They’ll be walking slowly, anyway, given the weather.
The wind hits me in sharp, needling bursts, rattling the bare branches over my head, but I keep the binoculars pressed to my face, trying to ignore the numbing of my fingers in my gloves.
I can’t be sure they will take the same route as last Wednesday, when Harp surveilled Finley, so I move my binoculars back and forth to check all possible routes to the rear entrance of our building, with its dark gray basalt stone, the double-wide, heavy service door, the ramp down to underground parking.
Why did Fin choose the rear service entrance?
That’s easy. There are no cameras and no key cards scanned for entry.
All you need is a physical key to unlock the combination pack, then you type in the code, and the service door pops open.
No videos, no entries on a security database. No record at all.
There. There they are, the cute couple, lit by the orange wash of the streetlamps and the pale shimmer of snowpack, walking arm in arm, their breaths rising in plumes.
My eyes clouded with tears, my heart pummeling my chest, their images flickering between the headlights of traffic, I focus on the door, clinging to the most ridiculous of hopes that they are not headed up to our condo on the eleventh floor.
But of course, they are. Finley removes his glove and inserts the key to open the combination pack, then enters the code. The service door pops ajar. They disappear inside.
I wipe a tear sliding down my face and curse myself. You don’t deserve to cry. You were the one who gave him a second chance, the one stupid enough to believe he could change.
I won’t make that mistake again.