She wanted to live on the edge, push the boundaries, walk on the wild side while she was young. She hadn’t been ready to settle into a life where she already knew the beginning, the middle and the end. Graham lit her up. She’d loved him wildly. She’d loved Will, too. It was just—different.
“I met someone the other night,” she said. Will’s expression made her clarify.
“No,” she said. “Not like that. On the train the other night, I met a woman.”
He issued a little laugh. “I’ve heard that one before, too.”
“Stop,” she said with a smile. “She’s been—texting me.”
A frown. “What about?”
She tried to explain the encounter to him, the odd energy, why she felt compelled to tell this stranger about her life, what the woman had revealed to her. How she’d been ignoring the texts that arrived.
“Did you give her your number?”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t. I don’t even remember giving her my last name.”
Will’s frown deepened. “That’s odd.”
“I’m just telling you because—there is someone out there who knows about Graham. Or knows that I suspected him of being unfaithful.”
He nodded carefully. “What was her name?”
“Martha. I didn’t get her last name. I blocked her the first time. But the later texts came from a different number. It was almost like she knew I blocked her.”
She handed Will her phone and he scrolled through the texts.
After a moment, he shrugged.
“Ghost her. Certainly don’t engage.”
“What do you think she wants?”
“Maybe nothing,” said Will. “Maybe she’s just looking for a friend.”
Selena shrugged. There was a connection there, wasn’t there? Maybe the other woman felt it, too. Maybe she was lonely. “Seems like an odd way to try to connect.”
“These days, the world is full of people with bad ideas on how to connect with others.”
“If this becomes a thing,” she said, reaching for his hand, “she knows that Graham had an affair with the nanny. Or that I thought he might be.”
“But it’s not a thing yet,” Will said, taking her hand in both of his. “The media is not involved—all we have is a girl who missed a breakfast date with her sister, then didn’t show up for work. There’s no evidence of more. Geneva could return at any point. You’re always ten steps ahead. Just stay here now.”
“Right,” she said. But the world, the swirling possibilities, seemed so manic, out of control.
“And the next time you need to confide in someone, call a real friend. Like me.”
He pulled her into an embrace and held on tight. She felt herself sink into him—the expensive material of his suit, the subtle scent of his cologne. When she was younger, why had the safe and predictable life seemed like a straightjacket? Now it was all she wanted.
When she saw Graham watching from the window, his dark form dominating the frame, she didn’t pull away from Will.
EIGHTEEN
Pearl
“Pearl S. Buck?”
Charlie trying to make conversation. His words leaked through the thick fog surrounding her awareness.
“No,” she said, after a long pause where the road was black and the tires hummed, and the wind roared around the vehicle. “The Pearl by John Steinbeck.”
Her voice was thick in her throat, her arms and legs leaden with fatigue.
“That’s pretty grim reading.”
It was—a difficult, sad story with a hard ending. Still, Stella had loved it for its stark beauty.
There it lay. The great pearl. Perfect as the moon, her mother used to whisper to Pearl when she was small.
“Stella wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine,” said Pearl. But, Pearl thought, she loved me, I think. In her broken-down way. And now she’s gone.
“She had her moments,” said Charlie. He wore a sad smile, eyes straight ahead.
“A few, I guess. Here and there.”
They drove and drove; they’d been driving for days.
Pearl had never been out of the northeast—the gray ceiling winters and fecund green summers, the smell of leaves in autumn, the gray slush of late February. The tentative burst of color in March. It was all she knew. From the highway every place looked more or less the same until they got to Texas, where things got dusty and flat. Then the southwest exploded in bold clay reds, and towering browns and evergreen. Diners got kitschy and full of themselves. Big cerulean-blue sky, towering cumulous clouds. And a night filled with so many stars it didn’t seem real. The painted desert at sunset. Low adobe structures surrounded by scrub and silence. The hustle of the modern came to a dusky stillness.