Mrs. Shipley’s dead, dead, pretty face, blood in strings like spiderwebs across her white skin, her eyes wide open, their blue washed down to pale gray in the moonlight, was the last. The hardest thing to never, never see.
3
I stirred, tumbled in the horrid wave of fear and worry that had pulled me into dreams of drowning and rolled me in and out of sleep all night. Drifting between sleep and waking, I was certain, for an endless, awful second, that Angelica Roux had all my past in her possession. If she owned my past, then she owned me with it. She could center it in her palm like a tiny gift—a fig, a wish, a duckling—and hold it out to Davis, to Maddy, to Charlotte, every neighbor, all my coworkers. Would it change me in my husband’s eyes? The very thought knocked me fully awake, left me breathless and askew.
I scrubbed at my face, sat up. It was impossible for Roux to know my past. Truly impossible, unless she was a mind reader. The gray light at the window told me it was dawn, and logic told me that Angelica Roux could have no power over me. But not even taking diver’s breaths, slow and even, could set my heart to rest. I kept hearing her throaty voice, seeing her knowing eyes as she told me, Come by my place. Soon. We have a lot to talk about.
A thin, unhappy humming began piping through the baby monitor. Oliver’s waking-up-hungry sound. I got out of bed and turned the volume down to zero in case he started sounding serious about it before I could reach him. My husband was sleeping. I wanted him to stay asleep.
I changed Oliver’s bloated overnight diaper and then brought him back to our bed. He blinked up at me, giving me his gummy, lopsided smile with its lone pair of tiny teeth poking up from the center bottom. He seemed mercifully oblivious to my anxiety.
I smiled back in spite of myself, whispering, “Morning times, good baby.”
He rolled to me, making little grunty snuffles and rooting, and I hiked up my T-shirt so he could latch. He settled in to nurse in earnest, his hands fisted in my top. I wondered if the storm of bad memory that had been released in me was dripping into my baby as surely as the gin I’d pumped and dumped last night would have. I breathed, tried to be only in this sweet and quiet now, to only see my boy.
The very shape of him was beautiful and so dear to me in the faint light. I loved his big, round Charlie Brown head, still mostly innocent of hair. Takes after his dad, Davis liked to say, wry and smiling, rubbing at his own hairline, which was just beginning to recede. Oliver did favor Davis, but he had my eyes, wide-set and Irish green. He was unequivocally a good thing, and I had made him. I had put him in the world.
I rested my hand on his back to feel the pit-pat of his small, strong heart. Nursing released a cloud of hormones that could blunt life’s sharper edges. Most mornings doing this most basic job reduced the wide, black world to the rise and fall of my husband’s broad chest, the knowledge of our Mads sleeping right down the hall, and outside my fall pansy bed getting prettied up by dew to meet the sunrise. But not today.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that Roux’s game had been aimed specifically at me.
That could not be true. It only felt that way. It was a game for gaining social leverage, like something Tate would pull if she were smarter. I should have seen it when Roux took Char’s seat, the obvious power chair, as if she happened to be standing there. That had been choreography, designed to up herself in the pecking-order game women played with each other at our very worst. She’d gone fishing for guilt, and her hooks had sunk deep into me and Tate Bonasco. She’d hauled Tate up in one smooth move. But really, Roux only knew what Tate herself had confessed; she could have no idea how high the stakes were for me.
All I had to do was outbrain Tate—not a high bar to clear. Last night I’d overreacted, panicking. It had made Roux home in on me. All I’d revealed, though, was that I felt guilty about something, which was an almost universal human