Strike Me Down - Mindy Mejia Page 0,50

hurt when you’re kickboxing.”

Logan had never worn her ring, either. She used to keep it on a necklace, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her wear it.

“But you are married.”

“Yes, to a former cook who sometimes finds me amusing. We live in Eagan. I’m a mother, too, but I don’t have any pictures in my wallet to prove it.”

Her tone threw me as much as the words. I didn’t know what I’d expected by asking about her husband, but it wasn’t this controlled fury, simmering underneath a veneer of etiquette. She had a child? Nora Trier seemed about as maternal as Logan. I couldn’t imagine this woman changing diapers or playing patty-cake. As I searched for an appropriate response, she continued, and it sounded as though she’d carefully inventoried every word.

“Marriage can feed you—a good marriage. But trying to wring everything from it, expecting one person to fill your every need and anxiety and desire, then yes, I agree; it can easily destroy you. Maybe even before you realize it exploded.”

We walked in silence for a minute, an entirely different silence than before.

“I don’t want you to think that I sleep with women outside my marriage.”

“Why does it matter what I think?” She didn’t glance over or change her pace, but I sensed her anger fading as the focus shifted back to me.

“Everything depends on what you think, doesn’t it?”

“Everything depends on what I can substantiate. I can testify, for example, that you have slept with someone outside your marriage, but that’s irrelevant to this investigation.” There was no emotion anymore, not a hair out of place. She could have been calmly reciting a human resources policy, and I’d never been more attracted to her than I was at that moment.

It’s amazing how parts of your life can only be read backward, and what you thought was impulse starts to align behind you in disturbingly obvious patterns. Logan had seemed unattainable in that ring at the MGM. And hadn’t Nora—the seeming opposite of everything Logan Russo represented—been exactly the same? Out of my reach. Untouchable.

“Did you think about me at all … afterward?”

Nora looked at me for the first time since we’d left the office and suddenly I was back in Atlanta, remembering the whole thing. I’d been drinking a scotch and working on a bullet-pointed list on a cocktail napkin. The hotel bar had been full of stranded Midwesterners, all of us delayed due to a Valentine’s blizzard obliterating the Great Plains. I’d noticed a woman at the far end of the bar and asked the bartender what she was drinking.

“Hendrick’s and tonic. No twist.” He glanced down the mahogany at her profile. “Don’t bother, man. She’s all business.”

I sipped Glenlivet. “So am I.”

She’d been checking email. There was a fundamentally different energy from someone checking and replying to email than someone who was scrolling vacantly through social media. They sat taller and held their jaws tight, eyebrows down, sometimes even whispered drafts of their replies. This woman didn’t give off the usual tells, but her feet were tucked under the barstool and she rotated one of her gray heels slowly from side to side, like a typewriter ball working its way across a page. No one else seemed to see her. She could’ve given the Mona Lisa lessons in subtlety, a woman so contained her very expressionlessness became a thing of beauty. When I had one finger of scotch left, I stretched and glanced over, but all I saw was a twenty-dollar bill tossed by an empty glass. Which was good, I told myself, looking over the list I’d made on the napkin. There wasn’t room for any more bullet points on this plan.

As I left the bar, I tossed the napkin into the atrium fireplace and waited, watching it burn.

The next morning, I went to the gym. I loathed hotel gyms—they had a universal bouquet of zero-fucks-given in the air. The rooms were always strangely proportioned, full of outdated, bottom-shelf equipment and supplied with a sad stack of towels that managed to be simultaneously itchy and filmy. Meeting a fellow guest in the hotel gym was the easiest sell in the world; I always kept company cards in my phone case, because anyone who worked out in a hotel gym was dedicated. And dedication was the cornerstone of Strike.

When I found the fitness center, I stopped two feet inside the door. The woman from the bar ran on the last treadmill at the end