Chapter 35
“Excuse me?” I said, turning to face him.
“You heard me,” he said, now looking really pleased with himself. “I went to high school with her and her friend Jackie, the one who paid you to find a password. A few weeks ago, Trista hired me to do a little job for her. Figured out her husband was staying in the Bel Air Apartments.”
“How? Why?”
“Forgot about it until I came back to that stupid bar later that night we argued. I was going to give you a piece of my mind, but you weren’t there.
Instead, I overheard your little friends thick as thieves talking about some kind of petty business.
Really proud of themselves. The young one went out and got these flyers and started taping them up.
I saw that bullshit about the patriarchy and karma, and I knew it had to be you.
The older one mentioned me calling you petty and just cackled at the idea of it. So I called in a favor with Trista.”
So it wasn’t as good a business idea as Salcedo had thought? My stomach roiled. My body ran hot and cold at the same time, my face especially warm.
Of course your biggest client was fake, Stella. The whole idea was stupid, and you are a failure at everything you do. Almost forty, and what do you have to show for your life? You should’ve never let Havisham and Salcedo talk you into something so ridiculous.
Ken laughed. “I wish you could see your face. Little Miss Petty after taking a dose of her own medicine.”
Anger clawed its way past . . . shame. Yeah, shame. Maybe a little humiliation. Definitely embarrassment. But naming the feelings took away some of their power, and I could thank Brené Brown—the author, not the cat—for that.
Ken wanted me to feel all those things but mostly hoped I’d be humiliated. It was a trick I now recognized, a tool he’d used before to keep me in line.
Rolling back my shoulders, I took a couple of deep breaths. Tried out a new mantra.
Slow inhale: Yes, you are embarrassed.
Slow exhale: But comedy is tragedy plus time.
“What are you doing?”
“Breathing.”
“I can see that. Are you going to be okay? Do I need to call the doctor?” Had there always been an edge of anger behind Ken’s conversations with me? A sneer behind faux concern?
Yes. So much for my vaunted bullshit detector. It hadn’t worked on Trista, either.
“But Trista seemed so genuine.” My words felt and sounded foreign.
“She may be, but she hired you because I asked her to. I wanted to keep an eye on you, see what you were doing. She thought it would be fun because she really does despise her husband. Probably despises you, too, since you’re banging him.”
Another flare of shame and anger all rolled into one, but I sent those feelings to the vault. They could be felt later. Better to be as rational as I could be, and Ken’s assumption was telling.
If I hadn’t seen Blake Malone and my Malone standing together in the same room, my imagination would’ve concocted a gnarly story of how Malone had betrayed me, but I knew the answer was far simpler than that: My ex simply wasn’t good at his job.
In fact, my ex was so inept that his attempt to humiliate me had instead sent me a paying client. He was so inept that when the time came to serve papers, that client had ditched him in favor of me.
I stood a little straighter with that knowledge. “I’m not sleeping with Blake Malone.”
He snorted. “No need to lie about it, honey. I have the pictures to prove it. Got one through your apartment’s vertical blinds last night. You getting railed on your dining room table. I had no idea you liked it like that. I mean, we have a table right over there. All you had to do was ask.”
Reflexively, I glanced at the antique dining room table that had been a gift from Ken’s grandmother.
Nausea hit me in waves, the momentum of power swinging back to him.
Not only was the thought of sex with Ken now utterly repulsive, but the feelings of violation took me by surprise.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Was this how people felt when they saw the pictures I’d taken of them?
Of course, the difference was that I hadn’t been doing anything wrong. My ex had, though.
“You had no right to do that,” I said through gritted teeth. “So help me, if you ever come near me again on anything akin to surveillance, I will have you arrested for harassment so fast you won’t know what hit you. Trespassing, too, if I can manage it.”
“You mean harassment like when you put all those flamingos in that poor guy’s yard?”
And Ken wasn’t as stupid as I had thought.
“That was different!” Even I could tell my words held little conviction.
“Was it?”
Dammit, he was right. I had been on a job for Denise Dobbs, but it wasn’t a private investigator job; it was as her petty personal assistant.
Technically, what I had done could be construed as harassment.
Technically. If someone wanted to waste a lot of time and money to take it to court, they could.
Unfortunately, Denise’s husband struck me as one of those people who had time and money to burn.
Wait a minute. Somewhere in my law classes I had come across a handy phrase for what was going on here. “That’s a false equivalence. Any mistake I made does not excuse the mistakes you made. No one hired you to surveil me. You did not have ‘permissible purpose.’ Delete those pictures.”
“I wasn’t surveilling you. I was surveilling him.”
I thought about correcting him, but some instinct stopped me. If he wanted to believe I was sleeping with Trista’s husband, then so be it. Let him simmer in his own ignorance. If he tried to humiliate me with those pictures, then I could sue him.
But all this had to end now. “Ken, you don’t want to go down this road with me. I’m going to tell you once: The threats are over, the games are over, our relationship is over. If, however, you come for me or for my friends or my family, I won’t be petty. I will be vengeful.”
He laughed. He had the audacity to laugh at me.
“Sure you will. I let you have the title because I do think you’re petty enough to call the IRS on me, but I guess ol’ Malone’s doing something right based on watching you last night.
Too bad he’ll have moved on to another woman in three months like he always does. ”
He’s not talking about your Malone.
No, but my Malone had built an expiration date into our relationship. He might still be a tomcat, but he wasn’t a cheater.
So far as I knew. Since my BS detector was on the fritz, what did I know about anything or anyone?
“Hey,” Ken was saying. “When he leaves, I’ll be here waiting. We’ll be even then. We can start over then.”
Ah, so that was his play. I’d caught him cheating. He thought he’d caught me “cheating.” This all came back to wanting someone to take care of him, his house, and his business after Eloise got smart a lot quicker than I did.
A laugh burbled up. “No.”
“What do you mean ‘no’? I signed the car over to you!”
“Sure did, because that’s the right thing to do, the fair thing to do.
But you betrayed my trust, so we wouldn’t be ‘even.’ It doesn’t take a genius to see that the only reason you want me back is because I kept things running.
I was the woman who did it all. I kept your house clean, and I kept your accounting straight, but here’s the funny part. ”
“What’s the funny part?” Ken asked once it became obvious his participation in the conversation would be required.
“You’re not even that good of a private investigator.”
“What?”
“You heard me.” Time to try some rhetoric of my own with a redirect. “Whatever happened to Eloise anyway?”
That question wiped the smile off his face.
“We didn’t last a month. I proposed because she was a little skittish after you groped her, but then some friend of yours came and told her a bunch of lies about me.”
“Interesting.”
That had to have been Salcedo, but she’d never mentioned it.
“Not interesting. Horrible. She was . . .” He closed his eyes, smiling wistfully. “So young and firm and—”
“Pliant.”
His eyes snapped open.
“Yes, Ken. Your secret is no secret to me. Somehow, you charm women into your bed, but what you really love is being the boss, directing their lives for them. Maybe what happened with us is that I was no longer a challenge. You beat me down until it wasn’t as much fun anymore to bend me to your will. I’m glad Eloise escaped your clutches.”
His mouth opened and closed, but he couldn’t manage anything other than “You take that back!”
“No,” I said. “I don’t believe I will.”
You know you’re having a bad day when going to the tag office is an improvement over where you were before.
As I stood in line, a riot of feelings swirled within, and I didn’t care for that one bit.
Sure, there was the schadenfreude of imagining what Ken would do when he discovered I had messed everything up in his office.
There was the joy and pride of getting the car title without having to apologize or pay him any money.
Relief that I wouldn’t have to deal with him ever again.
But knowing Trista had initially lied to me cut me deep, and the scar from Ken’s betrayal was still fresh.
Mortification that he’d seen me having sex with Malone joined the party.
Fear that I would have to deal with him again.
Anxiety that I could’ve jeopardized my private investigator license over the flamingo stunt.
Feelings were, in my opinion, highly overrated.
0/10. Did not recommend.
Gradually, that swirl of emotion morphed into resignation, frustration, boredom, and irritation.
I’d forgotten to bring a book with me, something I usually did when I knew there would be a line.
I would’ve played on my phone, but the battery was almost dead thanks to my surveillance marathon earlier in the day.
My stomach growled, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten lunch, either.
Happy early birthday to me.