Chapter 9
Ryan was humming when he made the coffee.
Scarlett heard it from the stairs. A low, off-key, tuneless hum, the kind he used to do on Sunday mornings in their first apartment when he thought nobody was listening. She stopped on the bottom step with her hand on the rail. She hadn’t heard that sound in years.
She came into the kitchen. He turned from the coffee machine, and his whole face lit up.
He didn’t come toward her. He didn’t try to kiss her. He just stood there by the counter in a T-shirt with two mugs, looking at her like the sun had come up in the room.
“Morning,” he said.
“Morning.”
He held out one of the mugs. She took it. Their fingers didn’t touch.
She looked at the kitchen island. It had been wiped clean. Her underwear was not on the floor by the stove anymore. Somebody had picked it up. She felt her face go hot.
“Ryan,” she said. “Last night.”
“I know.”
“It doesn’t mean—”
“I know,” he said again, gently. “I’m not assuming anything. I promise. You don’t owe me anything for it.” He looked down into his coffee. “I’m just glad. That’s all. You don’t have to be. I’m just glad.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. She drank her coffee. It was made exactly the way she liked it, with too much milk.
His phone buzzed on the counter.
* * *
He glanced at it the way you glance at a phone. Then he looked again. And she watched the light go out of his face, all at once, like somebody had shut a door.
“It’s an email,” he said. “From her lawyer.”
He picked the phone up. He read. His eyes moved down the screen, then stopped. His hand went tight around the phone.
“What,” Scarlett said.
He didn’t answer. He put his coffee down. He scrolled once more, and his face went a color she hadn’t seen since the closet. Then he did something she didn’t expect. He turned the phone face down on the counter and put his palm flat on top of it.
“I read the first page,” he said. “I’m not reading any more. It’s yours.”
“What is it?”
“It’s you.” He slid the phone across the island to her, still face down. “It’s your phone, Scarlett. She has your phone.”
* * *
Scarlett turned it over.
The email was short and polite. It was from a downtown law firm with three names on the door.
It said that the firm represented Dr. Alexis Burke.
It said that a personal cell phone belonging to Mrs. Scarlett Walsh had been found by their client on the aft deck of the yacht on the morning after the incident, and had remained in her safekeeping since.
There was a photograph attached.
It was her phone. Her real phone, in its scuffed green case, lying on a white table. The screen was lit. Her lock screen picture was a photo of a row of SwimSafe kids in red caps, grinning, from last summer.
Scarlett stared at it.
The last time she had seen that phone, she had been holding it up at the stern of the Halcyon in front of Alexis’s face. I have pictures of every message. And then the hand, and the gate, and the water.
She had thought it went into the sea.
It hadn’t. Somebody had caught it. Somebody had picked it up off the deck. Somebody had taken it with her, and kept it, and charged it, and waited.
Her fingers were cold. She scrolled down.
* * *
The email went on.
It said that the phone contained private communications that were highly relevant to Mrs. Walsh’s state of mind in the months before the incident. It said that their client, out of respect for the family, had not yet provided those communications to federal investigators.
Then there were pictures. Screenshots. Of her own text messages.
To Jess.
From January. From February. From the long gray stretch of winter when Ryan was never home, when she ate dinner alone at the big dining room table four nights a week, when she started going to bed at nine just to make the day end.
Me: I think I want to leave him.
Me: He hasn’t really looked at me in a month. I could shave my head and he wouldn’t notice.
Me: I don’t even know who I’d be without all this. That’s the scary part.
Me: Bad day. Some days I want to swim out past the buoys and keep going.
Scarlett read them. Her own words. Her own private, sad, three-in-the-morning words that she had typed to her best friend in the dark and never, ever meant for anyone else to see.
Her face was burning. Her stomach turned over.
Under the screenshots, the email got to the point.
Our client is deeply concerned that these communications, together with Mrs. Walsh’s documented intoxication on the night in question, indicate that the incident was a tragic act of self-harm, and not the event Mrs. Walsh now describes.
Our client has no wish to cause the family further pain.
If Mr. Walsh would confirm to investigators what he personally observed that evening — that his wife was intoxicated and distressed, and that the fall was accidental — our client sees no reason these private messages should ever leave this office.
Should that not be possible, our client will have no choice but to provide them to investigators. We cannot, of course, control what may become public after that.
And then, at the very bottom, one more line. It was in a different tone. A softer, more personal tone. Scarlett knew exactly who had written it.
Our client also wishes to note that these messages are consistent with what Mr. Walsh himself shared with her in confidence in March — namely, that his wife had “stopped trying.”
* * *
Scarlett put the phone down on the counter carefully, as if it might explode.
She could hear her own heartbeat. The refrigerator hummed. A bird called outside. Ryan’s breathing came fast and shallow from the other side of the island.
“Did you say that?” she asked.
Her voice was quiet. It came out perfectly calm. That was worse than yelling, and both of them knew it.
“Scarlett—”
“Did you say to her, in March, on the phone, at one in the morning, that I had stopped trying?”
Ryan closed his eyes.
“Yes,” he said.
She nodded slowly.
“I said it,” Ryan said. He opened his eyes.
They were wet. “I said it because I was tired, and she asked me what was wrong at home, and it was easier to say that than to say the truth. It wasn’t true.
You didn’t stop trying. I stopped. I was the one who stopped.
I stopped coming home. I stopped asking.
I stopped looking at you. And then I called a woman at one in the morning and told her it was your fault. ”
Scarlett picked up her coffee mug. She looked at it. She put it down.
“Last night,” she said, “was a mistake.”
“Don’t—”
“It was a mistake. I shouldn’t have done it.
I don’t know what I was thinking.” She could feel her face shaking.
She held it still by force. “I woke up this morning and I told myself, it doesn’t matter, it was just your body, you can put it away.
And I was almost ready to believe that. And now I’m standing in my kitchen, the morning after I let you into my bed, reading my own private texts in an email from the woman who pushed me into the ocean.
And I find out that while I was lying awake in this house writing I want to leave him, you were on the phone with her, telling her I’d stopped trying. ”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I know you are. You’re always sorry.” She picked up his phone and held it out to him. “Send this to Agent Kerr. Right now. And then don’t come upstairs.”
* * *
She locked her bedroom door that day.
She hadn’t locked it once since she’d come home. Not the first night, not the bad nights, not ever. She turned the little brass knob and heard it click, and she stood with her back against the door and listened to the click echo in the big bright room.
Then she sat down on the carpet with her back against the bed, in the same place Ryan had sat the night she fell asleep with him beside her bed, and called Jess on the cheap phone.
Jess picked up on the first ring. “What happened? You sound weird.”
Scarlett told her.
There was a silence on the line. And then Jess started swearing. She swore for a long time, creatively, in two languages, with a few medical terms mixed in.
“Those were to me,” Jess said finally. “Those were private. Those were you and me at three in the morning in January.”
“I know.”
“And the buoy thing. You told me what you meant. You meant you wanted to swim until you were too tired to feel anything. You meant a long swim, Scarlett. You said it after that awful dinner with his board people. You sent me a picture of your goggles five minutes later.”
“I know what I meant.”
“She’s making it sound like a suicide note.”
“I know.”
Jess breathed hard. “I’m coming over.”
“No. You have a shift.” Scarlett pressed her fingers against her eyes. “Jess. I slept with him.”
Silence.
“Last night,” Scarlett said. “Twice. After the kickoff. I was so angry, and he just stood there and let me be angry, and then I—” She stopped. “And then this morning, this.”
Jess didn’t say I told you so. She didn’t say he doesn’t deserve you. She was quiet, and when she spoke again her voice was gentle.
“Okay,” Jess said. “Okay, sweetheart. That’s allowed. You’re allowed to be a person.” A pause. “Are you okay?”
“No,” Scarlett said, and she finally, finally cried.
* * *
After Jess hung up, she sat on the carpet and remembered the night she wrote it.
It was a Thursday in January. The Walsh Development board had come to the house for dinner.
Twelve people at the long table, and Scarlett had planned all of it: the menu, the seating, the wine, the little cards with everybody’s names.
She wore a red dress. She laughed at the right jokes.
She asked the chairman about his daughter at Duke.
Halfway through the main course Ryan’s phone buzzed. He looked at it. He got up and said excuse me, I have to take this, and he went out onto the patio and shut the glass door, and he didn’t come back for forty minutes.
She had finished that dinner alone at the head of her own table. Twelve people watching her pretend it was normal.