you anything. This is the last time I’m going to meet you.’ She just smiles at him. ‘If you don’t drop this, I’m going to the police. They’ll arrest you for attempted blackmail.’
‘I don’t think so. Not when you hear what I have to say.’
He turns on her then. He hisses, ‘What is it you think you have? What makes you think you can get them to take another look at a perfectly open-and-shut case? It was an accident! Everybody knows that. You can’t change that, no matter how much you may want to. There was never any question that it was anything else.’
‘But they don’t know everything,’ she says. ‘They don’t know that you had a motive to kill your wife.’
‘Motive! What motive? You can’t be serious!’
‘Oh, I am deadly serious,’ she says, in a lowered voice.
His heart is pounding furiously. She means to go on with this – he can’t believe it. ‘You can’t honestly think that because I had meaningless sex with you, that I deliberately murdered my wife! No one will believe you.’ His voice is low but he can hear the desperation in it; he knows he needs to calm down. He shouldn’t let her see how riled up he is.
‘Perhaps it wasn’t as meaningless as you say,’ she says slyly.
He feels a chill down his spine. She’s going to make it out to be more than it was. ‘You lying bitch,’ he says venomously. ‘It’s your word against mine.’
She reaches into her handbag, takes out her wallet and withdraws a small photograph. ‘What you don’t know is that I had a baby. It’s yours.’ She holds out the photo of a newborn in a blue crocheted hat. He looks down at it in horror, then back at her, stunned. ‘What?’ He can’t process it. This must be another lie. ‘That’s impossible.’
‘Why is it impossible? We had sex.’ She leans in closer to him now and says, ‘And if you remember, it was very, very good.’
He recoils from her. ‘You’re lying. There was no baby.’
‘How would you know? You got the hell out of Colorado as fast as you could. But yes, about eight months I gave birth to a bouncing baby boy.’
‘It’s not mine.’
‘I know he is.’
‘You can’t prove it,’ he says, and then immediately realizes, stupidly, that he’s wrong. Of course she can prove it – she can force him to do a paternity test. His fear grows, threatening to overwhelm him.
‘He’s almost nine years old now.’ She takes the photo of the infant and returns it to her wallet, and pulls another one out. She hands it to him.
Patrick takes it from her reluctantly. It’s a picture of a boy with dark eyes and hair and a crooked grin. A cute kid. His anxiety spikes. The boy looks remarkably like he did at that age.
He draws away from her, shaken. This is terrible news, the worst news. He might have a son. A nine-year-old son. With her – a lying, manipulative bitch. If it’s his. But he knows it’s quite possible that it is. The timing is right. The photo is convincing, but what if there is no baby, and this is just another lie? ‘Why didn’t you tell me back then?’
She looks out at the river. ‘I was afraid to. After Lindsey died, I thought – I still think – that you killed her on purpose. So that we could be together. We talked about it, remember?’
‘No,’ he says, shaking his head in disbelief. They had never talked about that. It was just sex between them. ‘What utter horseshit.’
‘We talked about being together,’ she amends, ‘not about you killing her. I thought you meant divorce.’
There’s a funny buzzing in his head. He feels like he’s having trouble breathing. ‘No. We didn’t,’ he says, appalled. ‘You’re making it all up!’
She looks at him through narrowed eyes. ‘Of course, you say that now.’
His heart is pounding furiously; he’s afraid.
‘I thought you’d killed her to be with me,’ she says again. ‘It did something to me. It really messed me up. And I’d just lost a close friend. I couldn’t bear to look at myself and I couldn’t bear to look at you. I was sick with guilt at what you’d done.’
She looks so convincing, he thinks, staring back at her in horror. Anyone would believe her. A jury would believe her. He’s absolutely terrified now. He swallows, his throat dry, and says, ‘I didn’t kill her at all – it was an accident