After #4
She turned back to Mikey Pearce. “So to answer your initial question: I don’t know of anything unusual, and neither do the children. This has all blindsided us completely.”
Mikey stared at Gretchen for what felt like an absolute eternity. As if he were accusing her of something. Perhaps lying, which she both was and was not. Truth was such an overly roomy word. The same could be said of trust. Gretchen did trust Richard completely, but also, apparently not at all.
“Okay,” Scotty said finally. “The night it happened—do you know what time Richard got home?”
“No. I was in bed. It was very, very late.”
She had been in bed when he finally got home the night Frankie was murdered.
That part was true. She’d fallen asleep around 11:00 p.m., exhausted from a full day of Literary Lions nonsense.
Right before she turned off the lamp, though, she’d checked Richard’s location and seen he was at the office.
She checked his location all the time just for peace of mind.
The children’s, too. But when Gretchen had startled awake to find the bed still empty at nearly 2:00 a.m. and no text from Richard, she’d checked his location again.
It had been unavailable. It was never unavailable except when he was on a flight.
And then, suddenly, about thirty minutes later, there it was: Richard’s green dot sailing up the FDR.
A little while later, she heard Richard come in.
She expected him to wake her as he sometimes did, to complain about some unreasonable client on the West Coast who had tied him up at the office so late.
But he hadn’t made a peep. And Gretchen had pretended to be asleep.
She couldn’t say why. Actually, yes, she could.
She was afraid Richard would lie to her. And that she’d know he was lying.
The pattern of his movements had been very strange, too.
An odd rustling as he changed in the closet, of all places.
Like one of those deli bags being crumpled.
And afterward, Richard had left the bedroom to go back downstairs.
She’d even thought she heard the front door open and close.
He was going back out? Where? But after a moment, the door to their bedroom opened again.
And then Richard finally slid into bed. Storm passed.
Strangeness over. Not smelling of another woman’s perfume. She had checked that, too.
In the morning, he’d said he was supposed to have a drink with a client who never showed, then fell asleep on his couch in the office while he was working.
A plausible explanation for the lateness, but not for his location being unavailable.
It was also one that usually would have come with a lot more complaining.
Still, Gretchen hadn’t thought much of it until the police showed up at their door.
After that, she didn’t want to think about it at all.
“Is that unusual?” Mikey asked, bringing Gretchen back to the present. “For Richard to come home so late? I’d think someone as senior as him wouldn’t have to pull those hours.”
“It happens all the time,” Gretchen said, trying not to chafe. Whose side were they on, anyway?
“I’m only asking because sooner or later the prosecutor will,” Mikey explained—she must have made a face.
Or maybe he’d just picked up on her hesitation.
She was going to need to be more careful with him.
Very careful. “As Richard’s team, we need all the facts.
That’s the only way we can figure out how to properly manage them. ”
A lovely speech, but she still had no intention of sharing any of that strangeness about Richard’s return home with them. Not in front of the children. Not ever. It felt too awful to even think about what it might mean.
“Richard’s schedule changes all the time,” Gretchen said crisply. “He tries to let me know, but he’s so busy. He forgets sometimes.”
“Hilary gets furious if I try to slip into bed that late. You must be a heavy sleeper or very patient.” Scotty laughed, but really it was more of a snort. “She’ll bolt right up and then be up all night. She’s been like that ever since the kids.”
“So, what? You don’t come home?” Elizabeth pushed back.
“I sleep on the couch a lot.” He shrugged, but there was an iciness to the way he looked at Elizabeth. “Amazing what you can get used to.”
“That’s fucking weird,” Elizabeth said.
“Weird?” Scotty asked, the muscle in his jaw flexing.
“That your wife hates you that much.”
“Elizabeth!” Gretchen scolded when she saw the very real anger in Scotty’s eyes. He was so easygoing and warm usually. But she was also touched. It seemed like Elizabeth was, in her way, trying to defend Gretchen.
“So, you didn’t wake when Richard came in?” Mikey prompted. “And, therefore, you don’t know what time it was, exactly?”
“No,” she said. “I have no idea.”
Outright lie number…well, it had already been more than one. How many lies would there be, Gretchen wondered, before all was said and done?
* * *
Gretchen’s parents had begrudgingly come to accept Richard, but Brooks had been more right than wrong about their response.
Her mother, especially, never let her forget that they would have preferred she marry a young man from their world.
Thus, forevermore, from her mother’s perspective, everything in Gretchen’s life that was difficult—even Becks’s colic!
—was something she’d brought upon herself.
“Life involves choices. Don’t forget that you’ve made yours,” became her mother’s favorite saying.
But not all of Gretchen’s choices had been freely made.
It had been her mother who’d shut down the idea of Gretchen going to law school, the second she announced their engagement, just weeks after Dartmouth graduation.
Yes, it was quick in some ways. But they’d been dating for years.
Also, she didn’t want to be separated from Richard, and it wasn’t as though her parents would have tolerated them living together.
“That’s absurd. What do you need with a law degree?
” her mother had demanded. “You’re getting married. You’ll have a family.”
They were shopping for wedding dresses at Vera Wang on Madison Avenue.
These were the moments when Gretchen and her mother were at their best—when her mother found value in spending time together.
She didn’t much like being mother of the bride.
It made her feel old. But she did like shopping for expensive things.
“Mothers work these days,” Gretchen had shot back. “All the time.”
“Yes, sweetheart.” Her mother had laughed. “All the dreadful ones do.”
Gretchen never seriously considered law school again.
How could she possibly when, over the years, her mother had occasionally been right about her marriage?
Not right, exactly. But some of her digs had hit a little too close to home.
For instance, Richard always insisting that they support themselves on his salary without the help of Gretchen’s trust didn’t exactly make life very comfortable in the early days.
There had even been a few dark moments when Gretchen wondered if she should have married Brooks instead.
It would have been ridiculous, of course, like marrying a brother.
But deep down, she knew that Brooks would have jumped at the chance. Everyone knew it.
But then she’d inevitably be reminded in some small way of Richard’s warmth and genuineness—picking flowers in Central Park on his way home, leaving her these lovely little notes (always specific, thoughtful) on the bathroom mirror every morning before he left for work—and that rusty deadbolt on Gretchen’s heart would slide right open.
She loved who she was when she was with him.
More open to possibility than she ever could have imagined.
But it didn’t help that Richard traveled so much for work as he was climbing that (wholly unnecessary) Goldman Sachs ladder.
There was nothing quite so consistent among men—regardless of their upbringing or earned success—as the fragility of their egos, and the lengths they would go to protect them.
“Work, work, work,” her best mom friend at the time, Samantha, had sympathized one morning after Gretchen had dropped Cassandra at preschool.
They were walking in the park with their younger children, and she’d been complaining about Richard’s work hours, again.
It set her teeth on edge to do it, her mother’s voice worming its way into her brain like some kind of parasite.
Samantha’s husband was also a banker—Credit Suisse—and her children were almost the exact same ages as Gretchen’s.
The Upper East Side was filled with wealthy blond women who looked like carbon copies of Gretchen.
“Cartier widows,” they called themselves proudly, referring to the lavish jewelry they received from their husbands in lieu of actual companionship.
But Gretchen hated the very assumption, especially because it wasn’t her story.
She was freely choosing to be with Richard, which most of the time made her feel better.
Even when sometimes it made her feel like an idiot.
“Do you know who she is?” Samantha had asked, instead of launching into her own complaints, as she usually did.
“ ‘She’?” Gretchen asked, stomach tumbling. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, never mind—don’t listen to me.” But the look on Samantha’s face—as far as she was concerned, Gretchen was a hapless babe in the woods who should be left alone to die a swift death.
“Richard is so out in the open about everything—I’m sure he’s not actually doing anything. Also, not all husbands are mine!”