Chapter 6 #2
Scarlett told her everything. The phone.
The pictures. The champagne. The sky deck.
The stern. The hand. The water, and the island, and the memory coming back on the harbor road.
She gave her the folded paper from the Gull Cay clinic.
Jess came in and described the bruise and the concussion and the test, in her ER voice, with dates.
“Your phone,” Kerr said. “The one with the pictures on it.”
“Gone. I had it in my hand at the stern. I don’t know if it went in the water.”
Kerr wrote that down. She underlined something. Scarlett couldn’t see what.
“All right,” Kerr said finally. She took her glasses off her head and folded them.
“Here’s where we are. What you’re telling me is attempted murder.
I believe you went into that water. I believe somebody gave you something.
The rest, right now, is your memory against her word, and your memory had a concussion.
So I have work to do.” She looked at Scarlett.
“And I need you here. In Miami. Where I can reach you. No flying off to islands. No disappearing again. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
“One more thing.” Kerr unfolded her glasses again.
“You came into this country on a boat with no passport. I’ve already talked to Customs and Border Protection.
You’re the victim of a crime who ran for her life, and the man who brought you is a witness, not a smuggler.
Nobody is going to bother either of you about it.
” She tapped her pen on the pad. “Now. Where are you going to stay?”
* * *
Jess answered that before Scarlett could.
“With me,” Jess said. “Obviously.”
Scarlett looked around the dining room. The long table where she had hosted a hundred dinners. The paintings she had picked. The window looking out on the patio, where her husband was sitting alone on the low wall with his elbows on his knees, staring at the bay.
Alexis had slept in this house. For two nights, Alexis had made coffee in her kitchen and answered her door and walked through these rooms as if she belonged in them. And then she had walked out in the dark, taking her pills with her.
If Scarlett left now, what was that? It was leaving. It was letting Alexis Burke drive her out of her own home the same way she’d driven her off her own boat.
And there was something else. Something she didn’t say out loud, even to Jess.
She wanted to watch him.
She wanted to be in the same house as Ryan when Agent Kerr called.
She wanted to see his face when Alexis tried to reach him.
She wanted to know, every single day, whether that one second in the closet, Alexis wouldn’t, was the whole man or only a scared one.
She wanted Alexis charged, and the only way to see that done right was to stand in the middle of it with her eyes open.
“I’m staying here,” Scarlett said.
Jess stared at her. “Are you out of your mind?”
“It’s my house.”
“It’s his house.”
“It’s mine too.” Scarlett turned to Kerr. “I’ll be here. You’ll know where I am.”
Kerr looked from one of them to the other. Something that was almost a smile moved at the corner of her mouth, and then went away. “I’ll be in touch,” she said, and picked up her recorder.
* * *
She told Ryan the terms on the patio after Kerr left.
She stood. He stood too, because she was standing. The helicopters had gone, but a news van was still parked at the gate, and a man with a camera on a long pole was trying to shoot over the wall. Scarlett didn’t care. Let him shoot.
“I’m staying in the house because the FBI needs me here,” she said. “That’s the only reason. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll take the upstairs. You take the downstairs. Not the guest room.” Her voice went hard on that. “Sleep in your study. I don’t care. You don’t come upstairs unless I ask you.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t touch me. Not my hand. Not my arm. Not my back. Nothing.”
Something went across his face when she said back. “Okay.”
“And you never speak to her again. You don’t call her. You don’t answer her. You don’t read what she sends you. If she contacts you, you give it to Agent Kerr, and you tell me. Every time.”
“Yes,” Ryan said. “Yes. All of it. Yes.”
He said it too fast. She didn’t trust fast.
She didn’t tell him about Gull Cay. About Cooper’s boat, and the dock, and the dress, and the night she walked halfway down the harbor road. She didn’t tell him that she had watched him dive, or heard what he said to reporters. She held that like a stone in her pocket. It was hers.
* * *
He didn’t go back inside when she was done.
“Can I say something?” he asked. “You don’t have to answer. You can walk away in the middle.”
She crossed her arms. “Say it.”
He looked at the water for a moment. Then he looked at her. His eyes were red, but his voice was steady. It was the steadiest she had heard it since the closet.
“You came up to the sky deck and told me you were sick,” he said, “and I looked at her, and I said give me ten minutes. I didn’t come in ten minutes.
I didn’t come at all. I stayed up there with her until after one, because I liked how I felt, talking to her.
Then I went down to the salon, and I thought about going to our cabin, and I didn’t want the fight I thought was waiting.
So I lay down on the couch in the salon, and I slept.
I slept, Scarlett. While you were—” He stopped.
He made himself go on. “Nobody told me you’d gone to bed.
Nobody lied to me. I just didn’t look. I didn’t come and look for my wife.
And in the morning the steward knocked on the salon door and said the cabin was empty. ”
Scarlett didn’t move.
“And before that,” he said, “for two months, I called another woman at one in the morning and told her things I should have been telling you. I told her I didn’t know how to talk to you.
That was a lie. I knew how. I just didn’t want to do the work of it.
It was easier with somebody who didn’t know me.
I’m sorry. That’s not enough. I know it’s not enough. I’m just saying it so it’s said.”
It was the best apology she had ever heard from him. It was specific and plain and it did not ask her for anything.
It made her want to scream.
“Words are nothing, Ryan,” she said. “You were always very good with words. You were very good with them at one in the morning.”
She went inside.
* * *
His lawyer came at four.
Scarlett knew the man. Harold something, silver-haired, from the firm that had written their prenup. When she saw his car at the gate, her whole body went cold. Here it comes, she thought. He’s scared. He’s protecting the money.
She went into the study with her chin up, ready for it.
Ryan was sitting at the desk with a pen. The lawyer stood beside him with a folder open. Ryan looked up when she came in and pushed a paper across the desk toward her.
“This is the house,” Ryan said. “It’s yours.
Just yours. Not both of us. Your name only.
” He pushed a second paper. “This is an account in your name. It’s funded today.
Nobody at my company can touch it. I can’t touch it.
” He pushed a third. “And this is a letter to my lawyers telling them that whatever happens, whatever you decide, they don’t fight you on anything. Not the prenup. Not anything.”
He had already signed all three.
Scarlett looked at the papers. She looked at the silver-haired lawyer, who looked like he had a headache.
“I didn’t ask for this,” she said.
“I know,” Ryan said. “That’s why.”
She didn’t know what to do with it. It didn’t fit. She had spent two weeks building a version of this man that she could survive, and a man who gave her the house without being asked did not fit inside it. It unsettled her more than the crying had.
“This doesn’t change anything,” she said.
“I know that too.”
* * *
Agent Kerr called at eight that night.
Scarlett took it on the patio with the phone Jess had brought her, a cheap new one with a number no one had. The bay was dark. Inside the house, Ryan was in the kitchen, not eating a sandwich.
“I thought you should hear it from me,” Kerr said. “Dr. Burke walked into her attorney’s office at noon today. By two, the attorney had sent us a written statement.”
Scarlett gripped the phone.
“In it,” Kerr said, “Dr. Burke says she had been privately treating you for anxiety and insomnia since March. She says you were drinking heavily on the cruise. She says you were emotionally unstable. She says she followed you to the stern that night because she was afraid you would hurt yourself, that you pulled away from her and told her to leave you alone, and that she went back upstairs thinking you’d go to your cabin and sleep it off.
” Kerr paused. “She says she now believes you jumped. She says she’ll never forgive herself for leaving you. ”
The night air was warm. Scarlett was freezing.
“There’s more,” Kerr said. “At four o’clock we got a second statement. From your brother-in-law. Luke Walsh. He says that you had been, and I’m quoting, struggling for months. He says the family had been worried about you. He backs every word of hers.”