Chapter 5 #2
My vision blurs. I bite down on the inside of my cheek until copper blooms across my tongue and the tears back off. They don’t get to fall. Not here. Not in the shadow of this building.
A delivery driver walks up to the entrance, buzzes a unit, gets let in.
The glass door catches the sunlight when it swings shut.
Everything about this place is polished and new and expensive, and I am sitting in my car across the street with bile climbing my throat and my molars grinding so hard the pressure shoots up into my temples.
I should leave. I should start the engine and drive home and pour a glass of wine and wait for Randall’s headlights in the driveway like a good wife, like the wife he built this whole thing around—quiet, trusting, too grateful for moussaka and hand squeezes to ever look under the hood.
I don’t leave. I sit and watch the building and my knuckles go white on the wheel.
Forty minutes. A couple comes out with a dog. The parking lot entrance is on the side street—gated, keypad.
Then Randall’s Audi turns the corner.
My whole body seizes. Every muscle locks—legs, shoulders, jaw—and my lungs stop working.
The car slides through the gate and pulls into a spot three rows from the entrance, easy, familiar, a man parking at a place he knows.
He gets out. Tom Ford jacket. Fresh shirt.
The same cologne I smelled in my hallway two hours ago when he kissed my forehead and said Don’t wait up—these things always run late.
Blankenship dinner. That’s what he told me.
The Blankenship team at Whitfield’s with David.
My husband straightens his cuffs in the parking lot of his girlfriend’s building, and from across the street I watch him walk to the entrance and punch a code into the keypad without looking at it.
He knows the code by heart. He walks through the door and it swings shut behind him and he’s gone.
A sound comes out of me. Low, animal, pressed through my teeth.
My hands slam the steering wheel—once, hard—and the horn chirps and I jerk my palms back and press them over my mouth and hold them there, breathing fast and ragged through my fingers, until the scream that’s trying to rip out of my chest chokes back down.
He kissed my forehead. Two hours ago. His lips warm on my skin, his cologne in my nose, his voice soft—don’t wait up.
And I straightened his tie because that’s what I do.
That’s what I’ve always done. Straighten his tie, save his potatoes, plan rosemary chicken, lie in the dark with his hand on my hip believing I was the only woman in his life.
My face is wet. When did that happen. I swipe hard with the back of my hand and my mascara smears across my knuckles and I don’t care, I don’t care about the mascara, because the light in the fourth-floor corner window just shifted.
A shadow moved behind the curtain. Two shadows now. Close together.
I close my eyes and press my forehead against the steering wheel. The plastic is cool and hard and I breathe in through my nose—hand lotion, leather, the chemical tang of the air freshener—and out through my teeth. In. Out. My pulse is hammering so fast it feels like one continuous note.
You could still forgive him. The voice is faint now. Barely a whisper. The last gasp of the woman who loved him, reaching up from wherever I buried her. You could go home. You could try to understand. You could—
My eyes snap open. Through the windshield, the fourth floor glows warm and gold.
Two people behind that curtain. My husband and the woman he spent my inheritance on, standing in a home built from my grandmother’s cabin, and I am done understanding.
I am done forgiving. I am done sitting in the dark being the version of myself that was easy for him to rob.
I pick up my phone and call Natasha.
Second ring. “Hey. What’s up?”
“I’m outside the condo.” My voice sounds like someone scraped it over concrete. “Randall just went in. He told me he had a client dinner.”
Silence. Then: “Are you okay?”
“I’m going to knock on that door.”
“Bridgette—”
“A contractor knocked on my door two months ago. Manila folder, steel-toed boots, forty-two thousand dollars in invoices. I had no idea any of it existed. He stood on my front step and handed me the thing that blew my life apart.” My fingers curl tight around the phone.
“She doesn’t know where the money came from or whose life got gutted to pay for her marble countertops.
And I am going to walk up to that door with Gail’s folder and knock the same way Brendan Frye knocked on mine. ”
“When?”
“Not tonight.” My thumb traces the edge of the folder on the passenger seat. “But soon. I’ll know Randall is there—I know his car, I know his schedule, I know which nights he lies about working late. I just need to show up.”
“And do what?”
“Show her what she’s living in. Show him that I know everything. The LLC, the bank transfers, the money trail—every page of it, right there in her doorway, while they’re both standing in my grandmother’s money.”
Natasha is quiet. I can hear her breathing.
“I’m driving,” she says. “I’m driving you there and I’m waiting in the car and when you walk out I’m taking you home. That’s not up for discussion.”
My chin trembles. I bite down on it, hard, and my teeth dig into my bottom lip until the trembling stops.
“Okay.”
“Pick the night. Tell me when.”