Chapter 28
Tessa
Miranda had a room in her office that I had not been in before.
It was the kind of room a law office had on the inside, behind doors a client didn't see. Bare table. Four chairs. A window with the blinds half-pulled. The light through the slats fell in stripes across the table the way it would have fallen on a witness in a movie.
There was a man in a suit who was not a lawyer.
Detective Wilson. He was in his fifties, gray at the temples, the kind of contained presence that filled a room without taking it up.
He shook my hand when I came in. Ms. Marin—Miranda had told him what I went by.
He told me he was sorry I was meeting him under these circumstances.
His grip was steady. He had probably said the same sentence to a hundred women before me. He had probably meant it every time.
"I'm glad you're here," I said.
He nodded once.
Miranda walked us through the plan.
I was going to call Nicholas. Tonight. I was going to tell him what we had agreed I was going to tell him.
That I had been thinking. That the past few weeks had been hard.
That I was not sure I was as okay as I had thought I was.
I was going to ask him if we could meet.
Just to talk. He could pick the time. I would pick the place. Somewhere public. A hotel bar.
He would say yes.
He would say yes because he had been waiting eight months to hear me say what I was about to say.
He would say yes because in his head, the men in masks had worked.
He would say yes because his version of the story was that I had always come back to him, and now I was coming back, and that was right.
Detective Wilson explained the wire.
He showed it to me. It was smaller than I had expected. He showed me where it would go. Under my shirt at the sternum, taped flat. He explained the receiver in the surveillance van. He explained what the legal threshold was for what Nicholas had to say.
He didn't have to confess to the assault.
He had to confess to the pattern.
Miranda had a list of phrases that would meet the legal threshold.
Anything about controlling my movements.
Anything about tracking my money, my phone, or my friends.
Anything that framed his behavior as love.
I had to know where you were. I had to keep you safe.
I did it because I loved you. If he said anything close to those, the wire was admissible.
She told me he would say it because he believed it.
"Tessa." Miranda set the list down. She looked at me across the table and waited until I was looking back.
"I want to be clear with you. We are not asking you to do this.
If you walk out of this room and say no, we go forward with what we have.
We have enough to charge him. The wire makes it faster. It does not make it possible."
She let the words land. She didn't fill the room around them.
"I know."
Miranda kept her eyes on me. She had a way of holding still while she waited for a thing.
"You can say no."
I'd known I could say no since Cole had told me what Miranda had asked. I'd known it on the drive home from Savannah. I'd known it walking into this room.
I put my hands flat on the table. The wood was cool through my palms.
"I know."
She watched my face. She had her answer before I gave it.
"You are saying yes."
"Yes."
She nodded. Once.
The room held quiet around the word.
I called Nicholas from Miranda's office at five-fifteen.
The phone was a burner Wilson had handed me ten minutes earlier. I held it a moment before I dialed. My hand was steady. I hadn't expected my hand to be steady.
He picked up on the second ring.
"Natalie."
He still called me Natalie. He hadn't asked which name to use.
"Hello, Nicholas." I held the phone. I held my face. I did the thing I had been doing all afternoon, which was being the version of myself he would believe.
"I've been thinking."
He waited. The wait was patient. It was the patience of a man who had been waiting longer than I had known.
"About a lot of things. About—what I did. About leaving. About the case. I've been—"
I stopped. I let my breath go small.
"I'm not okay, Nicholas."
He was quiet. I could hear him breathing. I could hear something underneath the breathing. The small pleased sound of a man receiving a thing he had been waiting eight months for.
"Can we talk? Just—talk. Somewhere quiet. I just need to—"
"Of course, Natalie."
His of course had not changed in ten years. It came easily. It came like he had been waiting at the door for someone to knock.
"Tonight?"
"Tonight. Where?"
"Somewhere public. I just—I'm not—I need—"
"Of course. The bar at the Hotel Sterling. Eight o'clock. I'll be there."
He had picked the place. He had picked the time. He was already running the night.
"Okay."
"Natalie. I'm glad you called."
I made my mouth find the next words. The words that would land him.
"I know."
I hung up.
I held the phone a beat longer than I needed to. The line had gone. He was no longer in the room with me. My body was slower to know it.
I set the phone face down on Miranda's table. My hand was still steady. I noticed that. I made a small note of it somewhere I could come back to later.
Detective Wilson was watching me. He hadn't moved while I was on the phone.
"He's hooked," Wilson said.
"Yeah."
My hand was still steady. I had three hours to keep it that way.
The Hotel Sterling was on Broad Street.
I arrived at seven-forty. I had taken twenty minutes to dress.
The dress was navy. Wool crepe. Nicholas had bought it for our fifth anniversary at a shop in New York he had taken me to once and never again.
It fit me the way it had fit me at twenty-six.
I had not eaten well in eight months. The wire was taped flat at my sternum under it, between my breasts, the tape pulling slightly when I breathed in.
I had stopped noticing it. I would notice it again in an hour.
I sat at the bar.
I had eighteen minutes alone before he came in. I used the eighteen minutes to find my breath. The bartender brought me a glass of wine I had not ordered. I held the stem and didn't drink it. The wine was a prop.
I thought about Cole. I knew where he was. He was in a van across the street, headphones on, with Sam, Tyler, and Davis on three sides of the hotel. He was hearing nothing yet. He would hear everything in twelve minutes.
I held my breath all the way in and all the way out, and I did the thing he had once told me he did before walking into a fire. Run the room. Find the exits. Decide which one was yours.
The bar at the Hotel Sterling had three exits. The lobby. The kitchen. The back patio.
I picked the lobby.
Nicholas came in at eight-oh-four.
He stopped in the doorway. He looked at me. The look on his face was the look of a man who had just been told he had won.
He had not aged. Eight months of running from him had aged me. He had not lost a step.
He crossed to me at the bar.
He took the room with him. He had always taken whatever room he was in.
He kissed my cheek.
His cologne was the cologne he had worn at our wedding. He had not changed it. He had not changed anything.
I didn't flinch. I had practiced not flinching in Miranda's office for an hour that afternoon.
"Natalie."
He said the name the way he always said it. Both syllables. The first one long. The second one his.
"Nicholas." My voice came out the way I had practiced it. Soft. Tentative. The voice he had always liked best.
The voice was waiting for me where I had left it. I had thought I had emptied it out of myself in eight months. It was right there.
"You look beautiful."
He held me at arm's length for a beat. He looked at me the way a man looks at a thing he believes he owns.
"Thank you."
I had said thank you to him a thousand times before. The muscle remembered.
"Let's sit. Somewhere private. The booth in the back."
He had picked the booth before he had walked in. Back to the wall. Eyes on the room. Me where he could see me.
He led me to the booth.
He ordered for us. The wine I used to drink. An appetizer I had liked at the steakhouse we had gone to the night he proposed. The server wrote it all down without looking at me.
He remembered the order. He remembered all of it. He had remembered every preference of mine for ten years and used each one to build the room I had lived inside.
When she was gone, he reached across the table.
He took my hand.
I let him take it.
His hand was warm. I had spent ten years feeling that hand on the back of my neck, on my elbow at parties, on my thigh in cars, and I knew the temperature of it the way an animal knew the temperature of a thing it had been kept by.
"I'm so glad you called," he said.
His thumb moved across the back of my hand. Once. The small private gesture he had used to claim me at parties for ten years.
I made my mouth do what mouths did.
"I am, too."
"I have been worried about you."
"I know." I meant it. He had been worried about me. He had been worried about me for ten years. The worry had been the apparatus.
"I've always been worried about you, Natalie. That hasn't changed. None of it has changed."
He meant it as comfort. He didn't know he was reciting his own indictment.
"I haven't been okay since I left."
"I know you haven't."
He smiled when he said it. The smile of a man who had been waiting eight months for a truth he had always known to find its way back.
"I was—I was scared. I made decisions that—I should have called you. I should have come back. I tried to do it alone, and I—"
"Sweetheart. Stop."
He squeezed my hand.
The squeeze was a thing his hand did before his mouth had finished speaking. The body acting on the right it believed it had.
"You don't have to explain. I know you. I know how you get when you're scared."
"Yeah."
The wire was warm against my sternum. It lifted and settled with each breath.