he wouldn’t fail with her, and to her continued astonishment his plan had nearly worked. The gifts Simon bought her, that opal necklace, the eggplant dish he’d made, movies and TV shows they both enjoyed, his orangey-woodsy smell, things he’d say to her, even the truck he owned—all so comforting to a woman in distress, so familiar. And that special attention he’d paid to Connor, his eagerness for time together as a family, it had all come from the same source, little tips Simon extracted to ensure he got his prize.
It sickened Nina to think of the time she had spent in Simon’s bed, making love to him, while her husband had been chained up below, perhaps aware she was there, calling out to her in a voice she couldn’t hear. Her children, too, had come to Simon’s, toured the house, gone to the lake, unaware their missing dad was so close by. Simon was so twisted that he probably got off on the danger.
“You and the kids. That’s what I thought about the most down there. I thought how I’m going … to … miss you all so much.”
When Glen’s voice broke and he began to weep, Nina reached over to take hold of his hands, consoling him.
“It wasn’t all your fault, Glen,” Nina said. “It took me a lot of therapy to come to terms with the role I played. Maybe if I had helped you forge a stronger bond with the kids, you would have taken a different path. But I was selfish. I think I wanted them all to myself. I liked making all the decisions, liked having them come to me. I needed them, maybe even more than they needed me. But I’m not that person anymore.”
Nina took her hands away. It was her turn and she wanted no comfort as she fumbled her way through her admission.
“I know you’re carrying a lot of guilt for what happened, but I’ve got my fair share of it, too,” she began. “I’m the one who let Simon into our lives so quickly. I ignored my better judgment, my own doubts, Maggie’s warnings, misgivings from my parents and my closest friends. I was needy and vulnerable, and I put us all in danger and I have to live with that now.
“You’ve paid your price and I’ve paid mine. We can’t erase the decisions we made, we can’t undo what happened to us, but hopefully, we can try to rebuild.”
“With what? I have no job. We have no money.”
A slim smile crested Nina’s lips.
“I thought about that,” she said, “so I got us a cushion.”
And that’s when Nina shared what she really did when she’d gone upstairs to call the police from Simon’s place using Simon’s cell phone. Obviously, she could have made the call from his basement.
She had gone to the bedroom at the end of the hall, and again saw the picture of Allison Fitch, who bore such an uncanny resemblance to her. But she had other things on her mind.
She opened the closet door.
He said it was here, didn’t he?
There was hardly anything in the closet, making it easy to locate the box she was after. It was big enough to hold a pair of hiking boots, but there was no footwear inside.
“Two hundred thousand dollars, cash, tax free,” Nina told Glen. “I put the box in my car before I called the police. I didn’t tell the kids. They don’t need to know.”
“You clever girl.” Glen was smiling.
“We deserve that money for what we went through. But I’m putting some of it into a nonprofit in Hugh Dolan’s name to support addiction recovery.”
Glen nodded in approval.
“You know, he killed Hugh,” he said. “He broke into his apartment, subdued him, shoved a fentanyl-laced injection into his arm—revenge for his interference, that’s what he told me.”
Nina wasn’t surprised. She already knew Simon had spied on her Facebook messages, so in a way, she had played a role in Hugh’s death. The money wouldn’t cleanse her conscience, but it would help take away some of the guilt.
“Remember how we met?” Nina said.
“Match dot com,” Glen said with a laugh.
“I always wanted a better story to tell,” she said. “My broken jar of pasta sauce. We might not have the greatest how-we-met story, but we do have a good story to tell.”
From a pocket, Nina produced a business card belonging to a major book publisher. A large figure was written on the back.