Chapter 10 #2
She had spent five months imagining this woman.
She had built her carefully, on nights when there was nothing else to do — glamorous, malicious, bored, laughing at her over a glass of something.
She had needed her to be enormous, because you can be robbed by something enormous without it meaning anything about you.
And she was not enormous. She was worse than enormous. She was ordinary and extremely organized, and she had done all of it on purpose, in order, over eighteen months, with receipts.
Laura moved on to the last page in the folder, which she had put last deliberately.
"The tenth of October," she said.
Something happened in the room. Not much. Ashley Reed's chin came up about half an inch, and Laura, who had been watching bodies since she was twenty-two, saw a person get ready.
"What about it."
"Lorne's is on Division. Jake doesn't drink on Division, he drinks in Green Hills where the valet knows him and there's a back way out. Whose idea was Lorne's?"
"Mine."
"Why."
"Because it's on the corner," Ashley said, "and there's a wall on the other side of the street you can sit on."
Laura put the folder down on the arm of the sofa.
She had known. She had known since eleven fifty at night on the tenth of October, in a fourth photograph, in a chin.
She had spent five months refusing to know it because the alternative — that a stranger had reached into her house and taken it apart with a telephone call — was not a thing she could carry alongside everything else she was carrying.
"You called them," she said.
"I called a picture desk." Ashley said it the way you would say I called the plumber. "Around two in the afternoon. I told them a name and a place and a time and they said thank you very much."
"Why."
And here Ashley Reed did the only genuinely astonishing thing she did that morning, which was to look mildly impatient.
"Because six weeks is a long time," she said.
Laura did not say anything.
"You want me to be sorry and I'm not going to be, so we can both stop waiting.
" She uncrossed her arms. "He was never going to do it.
Men like that don't leave, they wait, they wait until somebody makes the decision for them and then they're relieved about it for the rest of their lives.
I'd put eighteen months into it. I wasn't going to spend eighteen more sitting in this apartment on a Thursday night while he had dinner with you. "
"So you decided for him."
"Somebody had to."
"And you knew where I'd be." Laura's voice stayed level.
It cost her something to keep it there and she paid it without hesitating.
"That's what I actually came for. Not why.
You paid a boy in my house four thousand dollars a month for fourteen months, and on the tenth of October you looked at my calendar and you saw that I was going to be by myself in that house, and you picked that night. "
"Yes."
"Say the whole thing."
"I picked a night you'd be alone," Ashley said. "Because I wanted you to see it before anybody handed it to you nicely."
There it was.
Laura stood in the middle of a white apartment and felt something in her chest turn over and come to rest, and what it was, she realized with something close to disgust, was relief.
Because for five months she had been carrying a version of that night in which she was collateral — in which her marriage had been an accident that happened near her — and here at last was the truth, which was that she had been aimed at, by name, on a schedule.
Being a target was easier to live with than being an afterthought. She would want, later, to have been a better person about that.
"And Jake," she said.
"He didn't know any of it. Not the company, not Derek, not the phone call." Ashley shook her head. "He thought I was a girl at a drinks table who turned up in places."
"He thought right."
"That's fair."
"And now you want to tell me he was helpless.
" Laura said it flatly, because she had seen it coming for ten minutes, the way you see a patient winding up to ask you to tell them it wasn't their fault.
"You want me to walk out of here believing you built a machine and my husband got caught in it, and that none of it was him. "
Ashley's mouth opened.
"He was drunk once," Laura said. "The first time.
He was sober for the other three, and he went back three times with a clear head, and he knew my name every single one of them.
You didn't do that. You don't get to have that.
" She closed the brown folder. "You bought a calendar and you made a telephone call.
He made four decisions. Those are different sizes, and I am saying it out loud in your front room because if I let you hand me the other version I would take it, and I would carry it for the rest of my life, and it would be a lie — and I have gone to a great deal of trouble this year not to lie to myself about anything. "
For a second something went across Ashley Reed's face that Laura could not read and did not want to.
"Okay," she said.
And that was where Laura should have left. She had it all. She had the answer to the question she had come with, and she had a woman diminished in front of her, and she had her dignity in both hands, and she was almost at the door.
She turned around because of the laundry basket.
Something about it had been bothering her the whole time.
A woman with a nutritionist and a ring light and two million people watching does not have gray collars and a week of laundry on the floor.
Something in this apartment had stopped.
And the deadbolt on the inside of that white door had a second lock above it, newer, brass, the brass still bright.
"When did you put that lock in?" Laura said.
Ashley Reed went completely still.
And then her face changed, and Laura watched a person stop performing in real time — the last of the poise coming off her like a coat sliding off a chair — and underneath it was somebody who was frightened all the way down and had been for a while.
"You need to leave," Ashley said.
"When did you put the lock in."
"Please leave."
"Ashley." Laura did not raise her voice. She had not raised it once. "You've told me everything else. Finish it."
The girl stood up. She went to the window and stood with her back to the room and her arms wrapped around herself.
"March," she said.
"Two weeks ago."
"Yeah."
"Why?"
"Because he stopped taking my money," Ashley said.
The room was very quiet.
"I sent the February invoice and he didn't approve it. First time in fourteen months. And I called him, and he said—" She stopped and started again. "He said he didn't work for me. Like I'd insulted him. Like I'd said something dirty."
Laura felt the cold start at the base of her spine.
"He stopped sending stuff to me and started sending it at me.
Like showing me. He sent me a picture of a road, at night, and I said what is this, and he said it's the road up to her house.
" Ashley turned around. Her face was wet.
"I said Derek, she's in Tennessee somewhere, it's over, we're done, there's nothing left to watch and I don't need a calendar anymore, and I said don't contact me again. "
"And?"
"And he said, you don't get to say when it's done." Her voice broke on it. "He's called me forty times. He knows this building. That's why the lock. I've been sleeping at my sister's in Antioch four nights a week."
Laura stood in the middle of a white apartment.
"Call him off," she said.
And Ashley Reed laughed — one high cracked sound with nothing in it — and said, "Do you not understand what I'm telling you?
I can't. I made him. I gave a kid nobody ever looked at four thousand dollars a month for fourteen months to go and look at you, and I told him he was the smartest guy in the building, and I kept telling him, because it worked.
" She pressed her hands over her mouth for a second.
"And now it's not about the money and it's not about me. He doesn't want to be paid. He thinks—"
She stopped.
"Say it," Laura said.
"He thinks he's the only person who ever paid attention to you," Ashley said.
"Show me," Laura said.
"What?"
"The forty calls. The messages. Show me your phone."
Ashley hesitated for about two seconds, and then she did, because at that point she would have done anything to have somebody else in the room with it.
Laura scrolled.