if it’s an ongoing lie, an affair, you have to tell Charlotte. So she can get out and not waste any more time.”
I had my answers then. For every question. Even the one I’d actually asked, the one about my friend. Char was in real trouble, separate and distinct from mine. I’d let my worries about her husband slip off my radar, and that wasn’t like me. I had her back, always.
But I had to know if Phillip was seeing Tate before I acted. If he was cheating, he wouldn’t be too hard to catch. Smug, entitled Phillip would leave a trail. As soon as this ugly business between Roux and me was settled, I would devote myself to finding out. When he told Char he was golfing, I could call the course and ask for him, to see if he at least was where he said he was. I could keep up with Tate on social media, see if her absences matched his “boys’ weekends.”
The answer to my unstated question was even more clear.
Davis preferred the past in the past, so I would leave it there. Even though my lies were a living thing, they were not about him, or us. Not really. I was not actively betraying him, so that was that. Of course, he might not see it that way. His old hurts from Laura, they ran deep. I wouldn’t risk it. Silence was my best, my only, choice.
Yet I couldn’t simply hand the money to Roux. Not if I could help it. I’d done good with the first half of Nana’s trust. I had put a little justice, that word that Roux had tried to use against me, back into the world. I needed to do good with the second half as well. It would be wrong to use it to save my own ass, to let Roux bask in unearned luxury.
That meant I had to find a third way out.
Roux had begun this as a game. She’d told me not to play. But I already was. I had to. More than that. I had to win.
It was an easy thing to say. I have to beat her at her own game. But I had never played before. I didn’t even know all the rules, and she was a pro. It was as crazy as my challenging LeBron James to a driveway round of Horse, and yet I couldn’t see another choice.
Also? I was pretty fucking good at it.
My past and my quiet, watchful nature combined to make me a natural. I’d seen through Roux, after all. She’d gambled, claiming to be Lolly Shipley without all the facts. God, if it had worked? I’d have given her anything. It was emotionally smart. But it had tipped her hand. Coming at me unprepared like that, plus the dingy house—I’d understood gut deep that she was under some external pressure. Money or time, she was short on one or both. I’d used that understanding to buy myself this night to decide. How much more rope would she give me if I pushed her?
Quite a bit, I thought. She only had the one great big red button. She wouldn’t push it. Not as long as she believed she’d get my money in the end. The moment she understood that I was never going to pay, I had no doubt she’d wreck me, but in this gap I had some room to work.
I was up half the night, staring into the darkness, thinking while Davis slept deep and easy. I could hear Oliver through the baby monitor, sighing and shifting every now and again, but mostly sleeping sweetly, innocent.
I needed a plan that did not involve the police or an appeal to Roux’s better nature. The first option ensured that all my secrets would come out, and as for the second—a better nature—Roux didn’t seem to have one. At some point I shifted from waking to dreaming, falling into a fantasy world where Roux had simply disappeared. Mysteriously. Never to be seen again. I understood that this was on me. If she disappeared, it would be because I made it so.
I jerked awake, startled and sweating. Beside me Davis stirred briefly. I froze, waiting for sleep to reclaim him, my body stiff, my eyes staring wide into the darkness.
Disappearing Roux was a road I would not let myself go down. Not even in dreams.
I had once, long ago, taken a human life. I understood the kind of gap that created