Chapter 10 #2
“Yesterday, someone gave you text messages my wife wrote to her best friend last winter,” Ryan said. “You printed them. You’ve been reading them out loud on television all morning. So I’m going to tell you what they are.”
He stopped. He swallowed.
“They’re messages from a lonely woman,” he said, “about a husband who had stopped paying attention to her. A husband who came home late, and left early, and didn’t look at her, and didn’t ask how she was, and walked out of dinner parties to take phone calls, and let her sit alone at the head of her own table.
” He looked straight into the nearest camera.
“I was that husband. Every word she wrote about me was true.”
The noise from the crowd changed. It went quiet in a different way.
“And for two months before my wife went into the ocean,” Ryan said, “I had an emotional affair with my doctor. With Dr. Alexis Burke. It was never physical. It didn’t need to be.
I called her at one in the morning. I told her things I should have been telling my wife.
I told her my marriage was my wife’s fault.
That was a lie. It was my fault. I want that on the record.
I want every one of you to write it down. ”
* * *
Scarlett was holding the windowsill with both hands.
“My wife did not jump off my boat,” Ryan said.
His voice shook now, and he didn’t hide it.
“My wife was drugged. She went into the sea at night. She hit her head. And she swam. She swam in the dark for seven hours. She swam six miles, with a concussion, to an island, because she is the strongest person I have ever known, and because she was not ready to die, and she was not going to let anybody kill her.”
Somebody on the other side of the gate shouted a question. He didn’t even look at them.
“My wife built the SwimSafe program with her own two hands,” he said.
“Before she ever met me. There are hundreds of kids in this city who know how to swim because of her. There are kids who are alive because of her. That’s who she is.
That’s what she wrote about in those messages.
She wrote that she wanted to swim until she was too tired to feel how lonely I’d made her. And then she went home.”
He took a breath.
“Those texts came from the woman who has my wife’s phone.
They were given to a lawyer. The lawyer sent them to me with an offer.
If I would tell the FBI that my wife was drunk and fell, those texts would go away.
” His jaw went tight. “I said no. So somebody gave them to you instead. So understand what you’re printing.
You’re not printing a sad story about a rich woman.
You’re printing a criminal’s leverage. Every time you read them out loud, you’re doing her work for her. ”
He stepped back from the gate.
“Leave my wife alone,” Ryan said. “She’s been through enough. And all of it is my fault.”
He turned around.
A voice shouted after him, louder than the others. “Mr. Walsh! Are you getting a divorce?”
Ryan stopped. He turned his head. For a second he looked up, at the house, and Scarlett thought he might have seen her in the open window, and her heart went into her throat.
“That’s up to my wife,” he said. “Everything is up to my wife.”
Then he walked back up the drive, and the cameras followed him all the way, and he didn’t look back once.
* * *
He didn’t come into the house.
From the hall window, she watched him go straight past the front door to the garage. A minute later his car came out. The gate opened. The crowd surged, and the car nosed through them slowly, and then it was gone down the street.
Scarlett went back into her bedroom. She sat on the bed.
She turned on the little television, and every channel already had it.
RYAN WALSH ADMITS AFFAIR WITH WIFE’S ACCUSED ATTACKER.
BILLIONAIRE: “I WAS THAT HUSBAND.” They were playing it over and over.
The white shirt. The gate. She swam six miles.
She watched it four times.
She was so angry that it moved her. She was angry at how much it moved her.
She was angry that he had stood in front of the whole world and said every word she wrote about me was true, and that it was the thing she had needed someone to say her whole life, and that it was him saying it.
She was angry that her eyes were wet. She was angry at the small, stupid, warm thing that had opened in her chest while she stood at that window, like a flower that didn’t have the sense to know it was still winter.
Everything is up to my wife.
* * *
Sheila Gaines called at four.
“He came to the office,” Sheila said. Her voice sounded shaken. “Ryan. He walked into the board room in the middle of an emergency meeting. He didn’t sit down.”
“What did he say?”
“He said the vote to put you on leave would be reversed by five o’clock today, or every dollar the Walsh family has ever given to this foundation would be gone by Monday.
” Sheila made a small, shocked sound. “And then he said that you were the best thing that had ever happened to this foundation, and to him, and that he’d been too stupid to notice either one, and that if any of us ever used the word wellbeing about you again, he’d take it personally. And then he left.”
“And?”
“We voted again. It was unanimous. You’re reinstated.” Sheila’s voice wobbled. “Scarlett, I’m so sorry. I should have fought them. I should have said what he said.”
“Yes,” Scarlett said. “You should have.”
She hung up.
* * *
The sun went down. Ryan’s car did not come back.
Scarlett sat on her bed in the dark with the little television off and the cheap phone in her hand. She didn’t open Jess’s link again. She opened the lawyer’s email, which Ryan had forwarded to her before he sent it to Kerr.
She scrolled down to the photograph.
Her phone. Her green case. The SwimSafe kids on the lock screen. Lying on a white table in a white room.
A personal cell phone belonging to Mrs. Scarlett Walsh was found by our client on the aft deck of the yacht on the morning after the incident.
She looked at it.
Something was bothering her. Something that had been bothering her since Kerr said the morning after. It was like a splinter just under the skin.
Alexis’s statement said she had followed Scarlett to the stern. It said Scarlett had pulled away. It said Alexis had gone back upstairs, thinking Scarlett would go to her cabin and sleep it off.
Went back upstairs. Leaving Scarlett alone at the rail. Alive.
Scarlett closed her eyes and went back there. Not to the hand this time. To her own hand. Her right hand, wet and slick, holding up the green phone in front of Alexis’s face. I have pictures of every message. The deck light. The white wake. The gate banging.
She had been holding the phone when the hand touched her back.
She had been holding it when she went over. It had been in her hand one second and gone the next.
So if Alexis had left her at the rail and gone back upstairs, and Scarlett had still been holding the phone when she went over, then the phone went into the sea with her. It could not have been lying on the back deck in the morning.
And even if it had fallen, the crew had been all over that back deck at dawn, looking for her. Troy. The steward. Everyone. If a green phone had been lying there, one of them would have picked it up.
It wasn’t in the sea. It wasn’t on the deck.
It was on a white table in Alexis Burke’s lawyer’s office.
Scarlett opened her eyes.
There was only one way that phone got from her hand to that table. Somebody had to be standing at the stern, close enough to catch it, or pick it up off the deck, at the exact moment Scarlett went over the rail.
And the only other person at the stern of the Halcyon that night was Alexis.
Alexis had not given Ryan a weapon. She had told a lie that the whole crew of the Halcyon could check.