but that doesn’t mean you won’t be robbed if you leave your door open. With the rise in internet shopping, there’s been a rash of thefts of packages left on people’s doorsteps, and probably more opportunists about.
There’s something else that’s bothering Hanna. A couple of days earlier, she’d seen Stephanie talking on her front porch with the woman who’d looked at the house for sale two doors down. Hanna remembers her friendly chat with the woman when she first came by to check out the neighbourhood. But from where Hanna was – glancing out of her living-room window, while walking around and burping Teddy – it didn’t look like she and Stephanie were having a pleasant conversation.
Hanna isn’t nosy; she doesn’t like to pry. And she’s discovered that Stephanie is a private person, not quick to disclose personal information, so she’s not sure she should bring it up. But if this woman is thinking of buying that house …
She picks up the phone and soon the two women and three babies are comfortably ensconced in her living room. Hanna notices that Stephanie looks worse than the last time she saw her.
‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ Hanna says sympathetically, ‘but you look terrible.’
‘I feel even lousier than I look,’ Stephanie admits.
Hanna offers her a cup of coffee and asks casually, ‘Who was that woman you were talking to on your porch the other day?’
Stephanie averts her eyes, accepting the coffee cup. She takes a sip, and says, ‘Just an old school friend of Patrick’s.’
‘Oh.’ Hanna considers the information and says, ‘Is she still interested in buying the house?’
‘What house?’
‘The one for sale two doors down from you. I spoke to her early last week, and she’d just been in to see it.’
‘Oh no, I don’t think so,’ Stephanie says. Then she changes the subject.
Hanna thinks to herself, Something here isn’t adding up.
Nancy tries to learn everything she can about E. Voss. She does the obvious things – Google searches, Facebook – but she doesn’t find anything helpful. She keeps an eye on the Tesla app. She’d seen her husband driving out to Newburgh when he was supposed to be working on Sunday afternoon, but she’d been trapped at a birthday party for one of Henry’s little friends. She has taken to following her husband whenever she can – after all, Niall could be meeting this woman anywhere – but on a time lag. When she sees where he’s gone and parked, she goes there later, sometimes with Henry with her in the car. So far he’s only been to legitimate job sites.
But on Thursday afternoon, she sees the little blue dot on the move, heading to Newburgh. She’s overcome with rage. At him, and at herself for not confronting him. At home they continue to act as if nothing is different. He’s pretending he’s not having an affair, and she’s pretending she doesn’t know about it. They could both win Oscars.
She arranges for her mother to pick Henry up from afternoon pre-school and keep him until she returns. And then she takes to the highway, seething. When she arrives at her destination, she parks across the street again, and then spots her husband’s Tesla in the parking lot. She wants to take a sledgehammer to it.
Instead, she sits in her own car and waits, her eye on the front door of the building. Eventually, Niall comes out, alone. She waits for him to get into his car and drive away. She takes a deep breath and gets out of the car, walks into the building and presses the buzzer for apartment 107. She wants to see this homewrecker for herself.
When Nancy hears a woman’s voice on the intercom, she suddenly doesn’t know what to say. What if she refuses to let her in? At that moment, a man comes out of the lobby and Nancy slips past him and inside, without speaking into the intercom.
Nancy walks down the corridor until she finds apartment 107. She stands there for a nervous moment. Will the woman who’s sleeping with her husband answer the door, or look out the peephole and figure out why she’s there – the angry wife? She steels herself and knocks.
The door opens. ‘Yes?’
Nancy stares at her. She’s not as young as she was expecting, but she is certainly beautiful. Blonde, where Nancy is dark. Anne O’Dowd was blonde too. Nancy wonders at her husband’s sudden penchant for blondes. She feels envy, insecurity and anger in equal measure, looking