I want so badly to believe that. But he’s making it very hard for me.
“So why were you at a motel with her?” I ask.
“I was not!”
“The detective told me—”
“Is not true,” he insists.
“Enzo,” I say. “I smelled her perfume on you.”
He’s quiet again, absorbing this piece of information. I glance over at him as I pull over to the side of the road, not wanting to crash the car while we have this conversation. He looks like he’s turning things over in his head. Is he going to confess everything?
Do I want him to confess everything?
“Okay,” he finally says. “I checked into a motel that night. Is true.”
I didn’t realize until that second just how badly I had wanted him to deny everything. “I see…”
“But not with Suzette. I swear to you. They only know it was a woman and they assumed.”
What? “So who are you cheating on me with then?” I snap at him.
“Not cheating,” he says firmly. “I was… It was Martha. Suzette gives her leftover perfume, I think. Or maybe… she might take it.”
“Martha, our cleaning woman?”
He nods slowly.
Okay…
Of all the people I would have thought my husband might cheat with, my sixty-year-old cleaning woman was at the bottom of the list. Of course, he is claiming he didn’t cheat. But if he didn’t, why was he at a motel with her?
“I went over to her house to give her last paycheck,” he begins.
I clench my teeth, remembering how I asked him not to do that, yet he did it anyway. “Okay…”
“And she had…” He touches his hand to his face. “Bruises everywhere. I had sensed it when I spoke with her before, but that day was when I knew. Her husband… He took her whole paycheck, and that’s why she was stealing things—to save up enough to leave. He would have killed her, Millie. Plus he was angry she got fired from another job. I needed to help her get away.”
Enzo would never lie about that. Never. If he says Martha was getting beat on by her husband, it’s the truth. Or at least it’s the truth as he believes it.
“Maybe she was manipulating you to get money,” I suggest.
“No,” he says. “Is real. In fact…”
He stops talking, as if unsure if he should tell me anything else. But this is not the time for holding things back. “What?”
“She wanted to talk to you,” he sighs. “She knew about you.”
“She… she did?”
I wonder how she knew. I wonder who told her.
The thing is, I have a bit of a… history with women like Martha. Women who are in terrible situations and have no way out. I became the way out for some of those women. So did Enzo. I have to say, I can’t help but look back on it all with pride. We have done some good things in our time.
Some bad things too, maybe, along the way.
“Yes. And she was trying to work up the courage because she wanted your help. But then you accuse her of breaking things and then you say she is stealing…”
“She was stealing!”
“I told you why!” He shakes his head. “She did not take much from us. Suzette thought she was stealing too, and that is what she was talking to me about that night in the backyard. I had to convince her there was no stealing so Martha would not lose her job.”
I can see in his dark eyes that every word of what he’s saying is true, and I feel a stab of guilt. Martha wasn’t staring at me because she meant me harm. She was staring at me because she thought I was her only hope for escape and she was working up the nerve to ask for my help. What has become of me that I wasn’t able to see that?
“So,” I say quietly, “you’re telling me the gun was for her?”
“She needed it until I could get her away from him, and after she left, she needed it even more. He was coming for her, Millie. I had to help. She’s hundreds of miles away right now, but he could still find her.”
“Okay, okay.” I grip the steering wheel tighter. “I understand what you did. I can’t say I wouldn’t have done the same, but… why didn’t you tell me? You know you can talk to me about stuff like that. I mean, we used to be a team. Right?”
We used to help women in trouble all the time. It was how we got to know each other. It’s the reason we fell in love in the first place. I could have helped—I would have wanted to help. Why did he leave me out this time?
He’s silent, measuring his next words. “I was worried about you.”
“Worried?”
“You have so much stress. Your blood pressure…”
