wasn’t registered at the Hartley Hotel when I went to return the cuff links.
Like the way he’d disappear until I grew desperate to see him, then suddenly reappear and say he needed me to make a decision at once and then he’d sweep me away on some trip.
Like the orange Subaru outside my apartment.
The way he isolated me, brought me here, far away from everything I knew . . . the way he terrorized me with the fishing trip even though he knew all about my past and my mental vulnerabilities.
“It’s like he was one Martin before he got the funding for the Agnes Marina project, and a completely different Martin after. He no longer needs to be nice. I think he . . . tricked me into this, but the weird thing is I was the one who proposed to him. I was the one who suggested we go into a business partnership with my father’s money. He even protested and argued against it, but I insisted. I wanted to help him finance everything. I wanted to move out here away from my family and friends. I wanted to help with the Agnes development. I gave him everything, Willow. Voluntarily. It was all my idea. I asked for it all. It’s my fault.”
She studied me in silence. Waves boomed. Rain ticked against the windows.
“You’re really sure about this?”
I nodded. “I’m so . . . ashamed that I might have let this happen.”
She edged forward on her seat and clasped her hands together. “Ellie, some people can be deviously clever that way. Con artistry says more about ourselves and how we see the world than it says about the con artist. The genius of a trickster lies in figuring out precisely what it is we want or need most to hear, and then that’s how they present themselves to us—as a vehicle for delivering our deepest desire. They show up in the guise they’re needed when they’re most needed.”
I considered how Martin had just shown up in my life on that chill January night. In my path on the way to the bathroom. How he seemed to say all the right things about life and children and art and parents that made me believe he was the answer to everything that I’d been looking for right at that moment. I’d lived in the public eye, thanks to my father. Stuff had been written about me, especially after Chloe drowned, especially after I went off the rails. It was all still probably accessible in online archives. I’d even been arguing loudly with my father in the Mallard Lounge that night, everyone listening. With a simple Google search anyone could have learned some very personal things about me. I felt sick.
“We want to believe what a con artist tells us, Ellie,” she said softly. “They manipulate our reality. And if this is truly what you think it is, a long con, the kind that takes weeks, months, or even years to unfold, it requires manipulation of reality at a far higher level, and it plays with our most basic core beliefs about ourselves.”
I fiddled with a thread on my capri pants. “You seem to know an awful lot about this.”
“I had a patient once. A smart—very smart—woman, a widow who’d been sucked in by someone on an online dating site. It’s sadly not uncommon. People use sites like that to troll for victims. They can learn a lot about them; then they use that information to lure their prey and suck them dry.”
I glanced up. Her words made me think of that funnel-web spider with its trip lines and silk lair.
“I could be wrong, still.”
“Yes. I hope you are, Ellie.”
“My friend Dana warned me. My dad warned me. Yet I was convinced they were all just bitter because I’d finally found something good, something I believed I deserved. A decent man. A second chance.”
“Is he physically abusive—is he a bully? Does he have a mean streak?”
I looked out the window. I couldn’t voice it.
Quietly she rephrased her question: “Did he hurt you, Ellie?”
I touched the silk scarf around my neck that hid my terrible bruises, and I realized too late that my involuntary movement had given me away.
“Maybe I deserved it,” I said very quietly. “I abused him verbally, too. I cut him with a knife. And . . . and I wanted to cut him, Willow. I wanted to hurt him, kill him, even.”