Chapter 48
ONCE AMBER AND LILY LEAVE, things get much quieter. Now it’s just me and Ben and, a little while later, Hailey.
When Hailey came home from school and I told her that Amber and the baby would be gone for a bit, she shrugged. Might as well have told her we were running low on paper towels.
Now Hailey is studying for her “stupid asshole midterms.” And Ben, the charming art dealer who has a million friends and customers, is his usual bipolar self, trying to avoid me.
I walk the dogs, then go upstairs. With little to do, I busy myself putting away all the clothes that Hurricane Amber left on the bed and the floor when she whipped through the room, packing at breakneck speed.
Where does her sister even live? Did she pack any sweaters, now that it’s late October?
And what about boots? From the looks of it, she took too many summer things.
It’ll start getting much colder here in a week or so.
Is she planning to be home by then? I have no idea.
Slowly, I hang up everything she dropped.
I’ve never gotten a chance to really study Amber’s walk-in closet until now.
It’s bigger than my bedroom, and the clothing is gloriously color-coded, light to dark.
Hot shades of yellow, orange, and red on the left that end in a flourish of cool tones, purples and blues and greens on the right.
The huge wraparound top shelf displays handbags in coordinating colors.
With racks and racks of footwear on the bottom. Lots of shoes, lots of hues.
My closet at home is organized too. Only it’s by weight. My weight. Trousers that start at size 8 and grow bigger and bigger till they end in a series of elastic-waist pants on the opposite end.
Between the shopping, the photos, the fight, and Amber and Lily leaving, I’ve had a long, stressful day. My brain is fried and the rest of me is too. Nothing a nice quiet night in my room won’t cure. But first, I head to the kitchen and make myself a sandwich.
Ben enters. He doesn’t say hello, of course.
With his back to me, he rummages through all the kitchen drawers.
Then he goes into his office. I hear his desk drawers open and shut.
He does the same with the dining-room sideboard, the eighteenth-century secretary, and every drawer and cabinet on the first floor.
He heads upstairs. Whatever he’s looking for, he’s starting to lose patience. Now he’s slamming drawers shut. Same with the closet doors.
He comes back to the kitchen. He seems nervous.
“Need help with something?” I ask.
He looks at me as if he’s surprised to see that I’m in the room. “No,” he says. Then he quickly adds, “Well, maybe, yes. I can’t find my passport.”
“Sometimes when you’re looking too hard for something, you can’t see what’s right in front of you,” I tell him. He nods slowly as he lets this information sink in. I feel like a guru on a mountaintop.
“When did you last have it?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Last time I went out of town, I guess.”
“And you checked your suitcases?”
He shrugs again. “Well, not all of them. Come with me,” he says. He leads me upstairs.
His closet is not quite as organized as Amber’s. And there’s a lot more leather: Six Mark Cross suitcases of various sizes. A gaggle of Versace black leather jackets. Lots of black leather oxfords.
We start with the suitcases. He can’t remember which one he used last, so we look in all of them one at a time, opening zippers, checking inside flaps.
Here I am, looking through all of Ben’s personal things, exactly what I was assigned to do, and he’s completely cool with it.
With all due respect to my extraordinary undercover abilities, this is what the FBI would call dumb luck.
But I find nothing.
Now we check the pockets of all his bespoke suits. I go from pants to pants, jacket to jacket. Sure enough, in the inside pocket of a navy Prada blazer, my hand touches something at the bottom. It’s the passport.
His reaction? A quick smile and an even quicker Thank you as he grabs the passport out of my hand before I even get a chance to glance at it.
I go back down to my sandwich as he begins to pack.