assistant. Tell your brother to call my office.”
After a while he asked if she would like to see the rest of the house.
He took her hand as they walked down the hall. Neither of them had any doubts about the fact that this wasn’t your neutral, ordinary house tour.
HE WOULD HAVE hired Rocco even if she hadn’t slept with him. This wasn’t a quid pro quo business deal. The only thing exchanged between them was pleasure and how good it felt.
They never mentioned Eli, or the Argentine wife and two children she’d seen on the internet. That would have spoiled everything. Neither wanted anything more. Neither wanted to see the other like this again; neither wanted whatever this was to go any further.
In the morning they kissed goodbye. A friendly, affectionate kiss. Charlotte turned her phone back on. She hadn’t even realized that she’d turned it off.
Eli called on her drive back to the city. She said she’d slept over at Matt and Holly’s farm. Sometimes she did that. He’d never check.
She was good at repressing things. She had—she still has—a talent for not thinking about what she doesn’t want to think about.
Driving back to the city from Andrew John’s, she wondered when she would stop thinking about him. Soon, she decided. What had happened in his glass house would begin to seem unreal, almost as if it never occurred.
The memory was already beginning to fade by the time she got to the FDR Drive.
She assumed that Andrew John wouldn’t think about her, either. He had a wife and kids and a mega-farm to run.
And she would have forgotten about it. Well, maybe not forgotten, but chalked it up as one of those things that happen . . . except that three months later she found out that she was pregnant.
Eli had been home from Panama for only two months. She waited another month to tell him.
She’d never lied to Eli before or after. Only that one time. She began to have trouble sleeping, until the pregnancy hormones kicked in and she slept all the time.
Eli never did the math. He had no reason to doubt her. Of course he thought the baby was his. Who else’s could it possibly be?
It was lucky, in a way, that the one time she cheated on him had been with a man who looked a little like Eli. Not exactly. But close enough. Eli chose not to notice the differences between himself and Daisy. If he had, he might have said that some Panamanian great-grandma was showing up generations later.
Did the truth occur to Andrew John when he and Rocco chatted about their families and Rocco mentioned his niece? Andrew John worked with numbers. But it was not in his interest to calculate precisely when his employee’s niece was born.
Charlotte and Eli and Daisy were happy. Their lives were peaceful and loving. It wasn’t that she kept silent because she wanted to lie to Eli, or even to protect herself.
She was protecting Daisy. The fallout from Charlotte’s confessing the truth would have been like a bomb blowing up their happy home, like an act of violence directed at the baby. Not that Eli would have been violent. But their lives would have exploded. And as the youngest and most vulnerable, Daisy would have suffered the most. Charlotte had often thought that Daisy’s asthma was Charlotte’s punishment for what she’d done. She knew it was irrational, but she couldn’t help it. And it was something she’d have to live with.
Charlotte told no one but her therapist. And no one else ever knew.
But now, it seems, Ruth knows. Somehow she guessed. Or found out. Ted said that disturbed, unhappy people often have superior powers of intuition. They pick up on signals.
Was that why Ruth called Andrew John? To say that she has his daughter? That she is holding his daughter hostage? To blackmail him in some way? Unless it’s what Rocco suggested: that Ruth is planning to lie about Rocco as revenge for his breaking up with her.
Ruth assaulted Reyna. She’s capable of violence.
It’s too late for good manners. Charlotte pushes past Rocco into the bedroom. The room is girly in a hippie sort of way, with a Persian scarf over the lampshade casting everything in a red glow. But it stinks of whiskey and sweat and sleep. Charlotte holds her breath.
In the corner is a small desk, and on it a stack of photos. Who prints out photos anymore? Everyone keeps them on their