Chapter 6
For a long moment Ryan didn’t move at all.
He stared at her from the floor of the closet with her gray sweater crushed against his chest. His eyes were red and swollen. His mouth was slightly open. He looked at her the way a man looks at something he is afraid to believe in, because the last hundred times he believed in it, it wasn’t there.
“No,” he said. His voice was a scrape. “No. Don’t.”
“Ryan.”
He flinched at her voice like she’d hit him.
Then he was getting up. He did it badly.
His legs were stiff from sitting and he was drunk, and he knocked the whiskey bottle over and it rolled across the carpet, and he grabbed at the drawers to pull himself upright.
The sweater fell. He took one step toward her with his hand out, the way you reach for a ghost.
“Don’t touch me,” Scarlett said.
He stopped.
He stood in the middle of her clothes, a foot away from her, with his hand still up in the air between them. His whole body was shaking. She watched his eyes move over her. The short dark hair. The pink scar at her hairline. Jess’s old sweatshirt. Her face, which she knew had gotten thin.
“Scarlett,” he said. It came out of him like something breaking. “Scarlett. Scarlett.”
And then her husband, who had never in nine years let her see him cry, went down onto his knees on the closet floor and put both hands over his face and wept like a child.
* * *
She let him.
She stood in the doorway and let him, because she could not have stopped him, and because she could not have gone to him.
Everything in her body wanted to go to him.
Her hands ached with it. She kept them fisted at her sides and she made herself breathe, in and out, the way she’d breathed in the black water.
You are not here for this, she told herself. You are here to see his face.
She had seen it. She knew now, beyond any doubt. Whatever else Ryan Walsh was, he had not known. No man could fake what was happening on that carpet.
That should have made her feel better. It didn’t. It made her so angry she could barely see.
“Give me your phone,” she said.
He looked up. His face was wet. He didn’t understand.
“Your phone, Ryan. Jess is outside the gate. If I don’t text her in two minutes she’s calling the police and coming over the wall.”
He fumbled it out of his pocket and held it out. She took it without letting her fingers touch his. The screen lit up. At the top was a new message, sent less than an hour ago.
Alexis: I’m right downstairs if you need me. Try to sleep. You did everything a man could do.
Scarlett looked at it. Then she opened a new message, typed Jess’s number from memory, and wrote I’m okay. Stay in the car. Give me ten minutes.
She stared at those last four words. She deleted them. She wrote Give me a little while instead, and sent it.
* * *
“Where were you?” Ryan was saying. He had gotten up again.
He was holding onto the shelf. “Where have you been? They found your dress. They said nobody could have lasted that long in the water, they said the currents, they—” He stopped.
He pressed his fist against his mouth. “How are you here? How are you standing here?”
“A man pulled me out of the water at dawn. Off an island. I was in the water for about seven hours.”
“Seven hours.” He said it like the number hurt him physically.
“I swam.”
“I know you swam,” he said. “I told them. I told every one of them you could swim. I told them and nobody—” He stopped. “Why didn’t you call me? Two weeks, Scarlett. Two weeks. Why didn’t you call?”
And there it was. The thing that broke her calm in half.
“Because I didn’t know if you were part of it,” she said.
He went completely still.
“Part of what?”
Scarlett’s voice was shaking now. She let it. She was done holding it steady.
“I read your phone, Ryan. On the boat. The afternoon of the picture. I read all of it. Every call at one in the morning. Every message. You’re the only one I can say this to.
I don’t know how to talk at home anymore.
” She watched it hit him. She watched the color leave his face.
“Two months. I took pictures of every single screen.”
“Scarlett—”
“I’m not done.” She took a breath. “Alexis handed me a glass of champagne at dinner. I drank half. Within an hour I couldn’t stand up. Jess tested me on the island. There was a sedative in me. A prescription one. I have never taken a pill like that in my life, and you know it.”
His mouth opened and nothing came out.
“I came up to the sky deck and I told you something was wrong,” Scarlett said. “I said I needed you. And you looked at her. And you said, give me ten minutes.”
He made a sound. It wasn’t a word.
“And she followed me down to the back of the boat. And I told her I had pictures of everything. And she put her hand on my back and she put me into the sea.”
* * *
Ryan stared at her.
She saw him believe the first part. It went across his face instantly, like a light coming on.
The champagne. The way she’d gone white at the table.
How fast she had gotten sick. He had been there.
He had seen it. She watched him understand that he had seen it and done nothing, and she watched that understanding go into him like a knife.
“The champagne,” he said hoarsely. “You were fine. You were fine at the toast, and then you were—Linda said you went white—”
“Yes.”
“Oh God. Oh my God.”
But then she said the last part again. She put her hand on my back. And something else crossed his face.
It lasted one second.
“Alexis wouldn’t—” he said.
He stopped himself. She saw him stop himself. He shut his mouth so hard his jaw clicked.
But he had said it. The words were out in the closet with them, lying on the carpet in the middle of her clothes. After everything. After the messages. After the champagne. His first instinct, for one second, had been to defend her.
Scarlett felt something inside her go cold and quiet.
“No,” Ryan said. “No. God. I didn’t mean—I believe you. Scarlett, I believe you. I just—I can’t—she was here, she’s been—”
“She’s downstairs,” Scarlett said. “In the guest room. Asleep. With a bottle of pills on the nightstand.”
All the blood went out of his face.
* * *
He wanted to go down there. She saw it in his whole body. He started for the door and she stepped into the doorway and blocked it.
“You don’t go near her,” she said. “Not tonight. Not ever. You call the police.”
He called the police. His hands were shaking so hard he dropped the phone once. He gave the address. He said my wife twice and couldn’t finish the sentence either time, and Scarlett took the phone away from him and finished it herself, calmly, the way she would have given directions to a caterer.
Then she texted Jess to come to the gate, and she walked downstairs with Ryan behind her.
The guest room door was wide open.
The lamp was still on. The bed was empty. The covers were thrown back. The chair where the medical bag had been was empty. The nightstand was empty. The book was gone. The water glass was gone. The little orange bottle was gone.
At the end of the hall, the side door by the laundry room stood open, and the warm night air was coming in.
Scarlett stood in the hallway and looked at the empty bed and understood that Alexis had heard them. A man sobbing upstairs. A woman’s voice. The voice of a woman who was supposed to be dead.
She had not come up the stairs. She had not come to see. She had picked up her bag and her pills and walked out into the dark.
* * *
By seven in the morning there were news vans at the gate.
By eight there were helicopters. Scarlett stood in the living room with the blinds closed and listened to them go around and around over the house.
Somebody had talked. A cop, or a neighbor, or somebody at the hospital where the police had taken her at three in the morning to be checked over.
It didn’t matter who. Every channel had it.
They used the pearl-earring picture again, and under it, in big red letters: MISSING BILLIONAIRE’S WIFE FOUND ALIVE.
Jess was in the kitchen throwing away flowers.
She was doing it with a kind of violent joy.
She pulled the lilies out of their vases by the handful and stuffed them into black garbage bags.
She pulled out the little cards and read them out loud before she threw them away.
“She was a light. Nope. Gone too soon. Nope. Our deepest sympathies, the Pratt family. Sorry, Linda. Nope.”
Ryan sat at the kitchen island with his head in his hands. He had showered and changed. He had drunk two pots of coffee. He still looked like a man who’d been hit by a car. Every few minutes he looked up at Scarlett, as if to check that she was still there, and then he looked down again.
He hadn’t tried to touch her. Not once.
* * *
The FBI came at ten.
There was only one of them, at first. A woman in her late forties in a plain gray pantsuit, with short gray hair and a pair of reading glasses pushed up on top of her head. She showed her badge at the door and walked in like the house was a bus station.
“Special Agent Andrea Kerr,” she said. “The Halcyon is a U.S.-flagged vessel, so what happened on it is my problem now. You’re Mrs. Walsh.”
“Scarlett.”
“Scarlett.” Agent Kerr looked at the scar at her hairline, and at the short dark hair, and at the garbage bags full of lilies. “Heck of a two weeks.”
“Yes.”
“Is there somewhere we can talk without your husband in the room?”
Ryan stood up without being asked and walked out to the patio.
They sat at the dining room table. Agent Kerr put a small recorder on the wood between them and a legal pad beside it. She didn’t smile. She didn’t frown. She just listened, and wrote, and every few minutes asked a short, dry question that went straight to the middle of things.