of his wife popped into his head. It was wrong to compare them, it wasn’t Lindsey’s fault that she was bloated, stretched, darkened, and marked with veins – she was about to become a mother. But God, how he wanted more of this, the perfect woman lying right beside him.
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘It would kill her.’
Was she waiting for him to say something? ‘Will we do this again?’ he asked.
She didn’t answer him. She just smiled and said, ‘You’d best be getting back to your wife.’
That was what she was like. She liked to be the one in control. She hasn’t changed. He’d gone home feeling like he’d been dismissed, wondering how the hell he would be able to act normally around Erica and his wife when they were all together.
But then she’d called him at work that Monday – she was all he’d been able to think about – and asked him to come over to her apartment on his lunch hour. And that had been their routine. A pleasurable, exciting, but meaningless affair – for both of them.
He lies in bed, awake, staring at Stephanie’s back, thinking about the past and everything that has led to this moment. He’d never loved Erica – there was something inherently unlovable about her. Perhaps it was that she herself seemed incapable of loving anyone. She frightened him a little, even then.
And now, it’s ten years later, and Erica has wrecked everything. His once-adoring wife believes he’s a murderer. He’s afraid she’ll leave him and take her inheritance with her.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
THE NEXT MORNING Stephanie stumbles out of bed and robotically goes through her morning routine. She’d felt her husband’s eyes on her back during the night, as she feigned sleep. She wondered what he was thinking, while she was thinking about the gun.
This can’t go on.
She’s coming up with a plan. It frightens her, but she needs a way out. She’d thought of it in that darkest hour right before dawn, when the mind turns to things that shouldn’t survive the cold light of day.
But now it’s morning, the sun is streaming through the windows, and she’s still thinking about it.
Hanna has invited her over again today. Stephanie hasn’t asked Hanna over to her place because Patrick is home and she can tell that Hanna no longer wants to set foot in her house. Hanna thinks Patrick is guilty, regardless of how much Stephanie has pretended otherwise. She’d let her guard down that one time, after the arrest, and now she’s afraid Hanna knows what she really thinks.
She will go to Hanna’s this morning because she wants to – she’s desperate for normalcy – and also because Hanna is now part of Stephanie’s plan, although she does not know it.
She takes the twins over in the buggy and knocks on Hanna’s door. She lifts the twins out of the buggy and carries them into the house. She puts them on their playmats on the carpeted living-room floor. Hanna has taken to baking comfort food for each of these visits – today Stephanie can smell chocolate chip cookies, and she is absurdly grateful for Hanna’s attempts to make her feel better.
‘Here, have one,’ Hanna says when she comes back into the living room with a plate of cookies fresh from the oven. ‘I’ve just put the coffee on.’
‘You’re a godsend, Hanna,’ Stephanie says, meaning it. There’s no one else she can turn to, or even comfortably hang out with. She never realized, before, just how isolated she’s become. She hadn’t made enough of an effort to keep up with people from work when she went off on maternity leave, she thinks. She’d let the women in her moms’ group fall away, not up to making the effort with everything that has been going on. She wonders what they think. Like Hanna, they probably think her husband is guilty. They all know he cheated on his first wife and how she died. She’s sure they must ask themselves why she stays with him. Stephanie wonders if Hanna discusses her situation with the other moms in the neighbourhood. She probably does, she realizes, finishing the cookie and reaching for another. She must.
They talk about the babies, what they’ve been doing, how they’ve been sleeping, little Teddy’s latest visit to the paediatrician. But then there’s a pause, and Hanna looks at her expectantly.
There’s a long silence broken only by the sound of the babies babbling. Stephanie screws up her courage and says, ‘I’m going to leave