The End of Her - Shari Lapena Page 0,72

know from watching the news – Stephanie asks breathlessly, ‘Where are they?’

Hanna steps back and Stephanie can see her twins in the living room from here. She slips off her shoes and rushes to them. She sinks down on the carpeted floor and pulls her babies to her, breathing them in, feeling their warm bodies against her. She tries not to cry, but the tears spill forth anyway. And then she thinks, fuck it, what mother wouldn’t cry on seeing her babies again after a whole day and two nights? She cuddles them, knowing that she would do anything for her children. They are the world to her.

She looks up as Hanna comes into the living room, smiling down at her. ‘They were great. Fed well and slept well. But they’re obviously happy to have you back.’

Stephanie regards her smiling, babbling infants, both of whom are starting to root for her breasts. She needs to take them home.

‘I’ll help you gather up their stuff,’ Hanna says, beginning to pack toys and blankets into the baby bag.

‘Thanks so much, Hanna. If there’s any way I can ever repay you—’

‘Oh, please don’t worry about it. It was my pleasure.’

‘I know, but if you ever want to leave Teddy with us, we’d be happy to take him.’

Stephanie notices something come over Hanna’s face, but it quickly disappears. And she realizes that Hanna will never leave little Teddy with them. Because Patrick may have murdered his wife.

The chill Stephanie feels follows her all the way back across the street to her own house and settles in her heart, to make a permanent home there.

Sheriff Bastedo waits for the DA to sit down behind her desk and then settles himself heavily in the chair across from her.

‘What a mess,’ Dominguez says. ‘A classic case of he said, she said. Who’s telling the truth?’

‘Or another way of looking at it,’ Bastedo says, ‘which one of them is lying?’ He sees her eyebrows go up. He says, ‘One of them clearly is.’ He adds, ‘I’ll have to bring him in for questioning.’

She nods thoughtfully. ‘Yes, by all means, bring him in,’ she agrees, frowning. ‘But I don’t want to prosecute something I don’t have a good chance of winning.’ She leans forward, over her desk. ‘His wife was in the running car, the exhaust pipe blocked with snow. Did he know? Did he do it on purpose? It will be practically impossible to prove the necessary intent for a murder-one conviction – unless he told someone what he was planning. And I’m sure he didn’t.’

‘Maybe we could go after him on a lesser charge?’

She shakes her head, slowly. ‘No. He either did it deliberately, knowing what he was doing, or he didn’t. If he didn’t, it was an accident. We can’t treat him differently from other cases like this unless he did it intentionally.’

The sheriff nods. ‘I’ll bring him in and ask him to take a polygraph.’

She nods. ‘Try to wear him down. Maybe you can get him interested in a plea bargain.’

Patrick knows Niall isn’t expecting him to come in to work today, but he wants to get this over with. He has to explain the unexpected verdict. Stephanie has a twin in each arm. ‘Why don’t you try to rest,’ he says gently. ‘You look exhausted.’

She nods absently. He kisses her on the top of her head and says, ‘Will you be okay if I go out for a bit?’

‘Where are you going?’ she asks, looking up at him.

‘The office.’

There’s suddenly more tension in the room than there was the second before. To each other, they had always pretended that only one verdict was possible – that it was an accident.

‘How do you think he’ll react?’ she says now.

Patrick shrugs. ‘I don’t know. None of us thought this would happen. We didn’t really talk about it.’

He turns to leave the room and says, ‘I won’t be gone long.’

Stephanie paces the living room, imagining what’s going on at the office. Niall will want Patrick out. Anyone would. You can’t have a business partner with a possible murder charge hanging over him.

She hears Patrick’s car pull into the driveway. She stops and stands in the living room, waiting for him to come into the house. He enters, throws his keys on the table by the door and turns to look at her. She can tell by the look on his face that the news is bad. ‘What happened?’ she asks.

‘He’s going to dissolve the partnership.’

‘Can he do