. . Can we please just talk outside of this office?”
I backed her into the living room and shut the door and locked it behind me. I slipped Martin’s office keys into the pocket of my shorts. Her gaze followed my hand. I noticed only then that she carried a big bag and that a manila envelope stuck out of it.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “You spooked me.”
“I told you—I did knock. But no answer. The sliding door was open, so I figured you had to be in here somewhere.”
“Yeah, well.” I pushed my damp bangs off my brow. “I told you I wanted proof. I was looking for . . . stuff.”
“What did you find?”
“It’s nothing.” My brain reeled. I was trying to process, trying to decide how much to tell her, how it might help or hinder me. “What have you got in there?” I nodded at the manila envelope sticking out of her bag.
Her mouth tightened. “It’s from the private investigator. I thought you’d want to see it stat.”
“What is it?”
Willow wavered. “Are you sure you’re okay, Ellie—you want to see this now?”
“Yes,” I snapped.
“Shall we sit down?”
I glanced around the white cage of this “architecturally designed” brand-new home on the banks of the Bonny River—the house that now belonged to the bank, unless I died; then it was all paid up and went to Martin. I pressed my hand against my stomach.
She touched my arm, eyes wide, gentle. “Ellie?”
“My studio,” I said. “Let’s . . . let’s talk in my studio.”
I still felt watched in here—I couldn’t explain it. I’d read, however, that this sensation was real. And after I’d seen what was in Martin’s files, my paranoia couldn’t stretch far enough. I trusted nothing. And right now I felt like this room had eyes.
“It’s looking good in here, Ellie,” Willow said as she entered my studio behind me. I slid open the glass door that led onto the little dock. I shuddered as I caught sight of the river mouth where it fanned into the sea—the channel where we’d navigated the waves breaking on the bar.
I was 100 percent certain now that Martin had been trying to terrify me. He was a sociopath. A glib liar. A trickster. A cruel and power-tripping sadist who got off on control. I was certain, too, that he’d raped me more than once while I’d been drugged. And yes, I was pretty certain now that he had been drugging me, and he’d stopped when I’d declared my abstinence and given all my pills away—I’d made it difficult for him to con me into thinking I was addling my own brain.
I motioned for Willow to sit on the daybed.
Before she sat she peered closely at some of the photos I’d framed and hung on the wall above the bed.
“Who’s with you in this photo?” she asked.
“My friend Dana,” I said flatly.
She glanced at me. “The one who doesn’t like Martin?”
“Yeah, the friend I lost over him.” Dana had been right about Martin. She’d sensed the changes he’d wrought in me right off the bat.
“Yet you still hang her photo here.”
“She finally returned my calls,” I said. “She accepted my apology. We’re working on being friends again.”
Dana and I had spoken for over an hour across the oceans while I’d stared wistfully at that photo of the two of us shot in the Mallard Lounge on the night I’d met Martin. While I had listened to her voice, a dissonance had started crackling along the edges of my subconscious again, something about that image of Dana and me at the bar that night—a just-hidden sense of something important, overlooked—but I couldn’t place it.
“So what’s in the envelope?”
Willow seated herself on the daybed. I sat across from her, a small coffee table between us. She opened the envelope and extracted several glossy photographs. She hesitated. “Are you sure, Ellie?”
“Just show me.”
She placed the photos on the table and spread them out to face me. Glossy. Big. In my face. I couldn’t seem to make my brain register what the photos depicted. Time stretched. Hung. A buzzing sounded in my ears. A spider ran along the edge of the table, and Willow smashed it.
I didn’t flinch.
“Redback,” she said. “I hate those things. The females kill their mates after mating.”
Her words circled around and around my head as I stared with vile hatred at the images of Martin, my husband, my business partner. With Bodie “Rabz” Rabinovitch. There he was, getting out