long con, and she’d dragged him along for the ride.
My heart flew out to Michael. Maybe I should have been frightened for myself, but I felt strangely calm instead. Stonehaven was mine; I could send her away anytime. I had so little left to lose, so little that I really loved. But what about him? Sensitive, thoughtful, intellectual Michael: He had no clue how dangerous she was. I needed to warn him.
But—how? A confrontation might backfire. I had no proof to shove in her face, other than an out-of-focus picture from twelve years back. She would deny everything, and then she’d leave Stonehaven in a huff with Michael by her side, having lost nothing at all. And I’d be alone again, licking my wounds.
What I wanted instead was to take from this woman everything that she and her mother had taken from me: family, security, happiness, sanity.
Love.
And suddenly, I knew what I was going to do. I was going to save Michael from her. And in the process, I was going to make him mine.
* * *
—
Anger is a magnificently blinding force. Once you step inside its scalding beam, it’s impossible to see past that light. Reason vanishes into the darkness beyond. Anything you do in fury’s service feels justifiable; no matter how petty, how small, how nasty or cruel.
The thing is, the anger made me feel so giddily alive.
That night, back at Stonehaven, I went around the house locking every door. I drew every curtain on the ground floor (shaking out a pound of dust, an army of dead spiders.). And then I retrieved one of the pistols from its mount on the wall in the games room, loaded it with ammunition that I found locked in a drawer, and tucked it under my pillow.
Yes, I was angry, not frightened; but I also wasn’t about to be stupid.
26.
AND SO: A DINNER PARTY. Time to play the part of elegant hostess.
With each whack of my butcher knife against the chicken, I imagined that her neck was on the cutting board and my knife was a guillotine. I pared potatoes, imagining the peels as her flayed skin. When I fired up the burners on the behemoth of a stove, I thought of what it would feel like to shove her hand into the flames. I cooked all day, my anger simmering and bubbling along with the stew on the stove.
By five, darkness had settled on Stonehaven. The wind had died away and everything was still out on the lake outside. I could hear the migrating geese down at the water’s edge, honking in protest as they prepared to flee the coming storm.
From my father’s bar, I prepared three martinis, ice-cold gin with a generous splash of vermouth and an even bigger slosh of olive brine: not a perfect martini, but sloppy by design. The brine and booze would serve to disguise the presence of an additional ingredient I’d put in one of the coupes: the contents of a bottle of Visine.
The coq au vin was almost done, a simple salad was cooling in the fridge. I polished off my martini as I waited for the potatoes to boil, and then mixed myself another. The rain announced itself with an artillery spray of drops hitting the windows. I looked up, startled, and spied Ashley and Michael running up the path from the cottage, their jackets held over their heads.
I went to greet them at the back door with a cocktail in each hand and a smile on my face, and they flew through the door in a sodden flurry. Already, I was thankful for that second martini. The gin had loosened me, it pleasantly blurred the whole surreal endeavor so that I didn’t have to look past this moment—the martinis, the chattering guests, and the surprised pucker of Ashley’s brow as she took the first sip of her cocktail: “Wow, you pour a stiff drink.”
“Should I have made something else for you? Matcha tea? Green juice?” I could pretend, too. My lips stretched unnaturally over my teeth: You fake.
She looked a little alarmed at this. “Oh, no. It’s delicious.”