The End of Her - Shari Lapena Page 0,35

sleeping with Erica in her apartment. What had she said to him when her head was next to his on the pillow?

Patrick tries to tamp down his concern, but it’s hard to stop worrying about the two of them together. Fear paralyses him. Erica had waltzed into this firm on a pretence, had pretended not to know him. And Patrick had pretended not to know her. He doesn’t want to admit now that he does. How would he explain it? He can’t warn Niall about her – about the kind of woman he’s getting involved with. How can he confront Niall about Erica without admitting he was peeking in Erica’s window yesterday? He can’t. He can’t say anything.

But Erica knows things about him, things he’d rather his business partner not know.

He hears Niall coming down the hall, and then Niall’s cheerful face appears at his door.

‘Good morning,’ Niall says.

‘Good morning.’

‘Are you okay?’ Niall asks, looking at him more closely. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

‘I’m fine, just – tired.’

Stephanie puts the twins down for their afternoon nap and starts tidying up the house. She’s deeply exhausted – she’s been stumbling through her routine tasks, her eyes are burning and her body aches all over – but her mind is racing, flitting from thought to thought, unable to settle on anything. She knows she should lie down herself, but how can she sleep with all this running through her mind?

Can she really trust Patrick to tell her everything? Should she talk to Erica herself? Patrick has warned her to stay away from Erica, told her that she’s dangerous. But the doubts have started to creep in … What if Patrick just wants to keep Stephanie from talking to Erica? From hearing her side of the story? Everything she’s heard so far has been mediated through Patrick.

Maybe Erica will turn up again. If she does, Stephanie decides, she won’t run away. She will ask questions. Maybe even try to get Erica to see reason.

She finds herself in their bedroom, but instead of lying down, she glances restlessly around the darkened room.

She turns on the overhead light and starts searching through her husband’s chest of drawers. She doesn’t even know why she’s looking – there’s nothing there; she puts away his clothing in these drawers all the time. She looks anyway. When she’s done with his chest of drawers, she goes through his side of their closet, feeling disloyal and wondering why she’s wasting her time. She searches through shoeboxes on the floor. He keeps his handgun, a Glock 19 9mm, in a safe on the top shelf. She knows the combination. She opens the safe and looks inside. Nothing in there but the gun and a few rounds of ammunition. There’s nothing else in the closet but clothes.

Next, she tries his office at the end of the hall. Patrick’s old computer is on the desk. She has her own laptop and so does he; he never uses this one any more. Is there anything about his old life on this computer? It doesn’t matter, she has no idea how to get into it. It’s a mystery why he even keeps it. She pauses and thinks.

Why does he keep it?

Maybe there is something there. She turns it on, tries a few combinations related to her name and the twins’ names and birth dates, but nothing works. Sighing, she turns it off again and searches through his filing cabinets. There’s absolutely nothing there pertaining to his earlier life with his first wife.

She’s reaching around inside his filing cabinets, about to give up, when she feels something stuck to the underside of a drawer. She touches it tentatively – it seems like a small key, covered by tape. She tears at the tape gently, careful not to rip it.

She pulls it out and looks down at it. She’s right: it’s a small, silver key, covered with masking tape. It can’t be the key for the filing cabinets, because they aren’t lockable. She studies it closely. There’s nothing on it except a number: 224. She has no idea what it’s for. But if it didn’t come with the filing cabinets, what is it doing there? The only conclusion is that Patrick must have put it there, where she wouldn’t find it.

It doesn’t look like any of the other keys they have in the house. She wonders if it’s for a lockbox, or a safe. If it is, it isn’t in the house or she’d know