“Stop,” Simon’s voice was taut, strung like a bowstring about to snap. “Please, just stop.” He raised his hands up in surrender.
“No, you wanted to talk about it. So, I’m talking about it.”
Another slash of wind whipped through the space between them. A lone dog walker approached from the opposite end of the park before turning and heading back in the direction they came.
“But it turns out this savior of ours was a drunk—is a drunk—and he starts making mistakes. He actually cuts into Tom with a penknife, supposedly to relieve the pressure from the internal bleeding, but he misses and punctures Tom’s spleen, and worsens the bleeding. It also turns out that this doctor was driving after downing a fifth of whiskey, so he was terribly drunk and shouldn’t have been helping anyone, let along cutting them open on the side of the road.”
The weight of his guilt sunk onto Simon’s shoulders, holding him in place while Trina listed out his sins.
“They said he would have survived if you hadn’t been there.” Trina was quieter now, her voice barely audible over the wind. “And nothing happened to you. You’re still practicing, you didn’t even get charged because of Good Samaritan Laws. And now you want to follow up with me, check in on me, give me money. As though I owe you something.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” Simon said, and instantly regretted it.
“Of course I don’t,” Trina replied. “And you owe me everything.”
She stopped and stared at him. A few strands of hair blew across her face, and Simon was reminded strangely of being with Joyce on a vacation to Switzerland, when they were first married. It had been winter, and the skiing conditions were perfect. They were at the top of a mountain slope, the sun shining across the snow, and he’d looked at his wife and realized just how lucky he was to have her.
The energy vibrated off Trina so intensely it was almost visible. She clenched her fists, reached up with a jagged hand and pulled the hair off her face, and then silently walked back to her car, turned it on, and pulled away. Simon was left standing there in the empty park, watching her leave, willing her to go.
CHAPTER NINETEEN LAURA
Laura thought Dermot’s sister would never leave, but Susan finally stood up after another half hour of going round and round about the letter Dermot wrote and made her way out, pausing at the door to put a hand on Laura’s shoulder and remind her she was there for Laura if she needed anything. And then Susan got in her fancy car and drove off, leaving in her wake more questions for Laura than she’d been able to answer.
Laura’s phone beeped. It was a text from Rosie, wanting to get together for drinks or something a little later in the day. By drinks, Laura knew it meant holding court on the sunken couch in the apartment Rosie shared with her cousins, slugging back shots of cheap vodka and shouting at reality TV shows. Laura didn’t really like going, but Rosie was one of her few friends and she didn’t want to be here when Terry got back.
It was just a two mile walk into town, even though it seemed like their trailer was parked in the middle of a vast forest, so it didn’t matter that Terry had the car. Laura could be over to Rosie’s in twenty minutes if she walked fast, thirty if she was tired. And she was always tired now.
She texted Rosie back, telling her she would be over soon, bundled herself into her hand-me-down men’s coat, hat, and gloves but then decided at the last minute she needed to change her outfit. She still had on her work clothes, and she didn’t need to be seeing friends in the dingy polo and polyester pants issued by the Marriott. Laura rummaged around in her closet and eventually found what she was looking for. Dermot took her shopping a few weeks back, insisting she get whatever she wanted, and so she’d asked to go to one of the little boutique stores in town with mannequins that always featured tiny black dresses with strappy heels and chunky necklaces.
“I’d thought something more like a sweater,” he’d teased, moving over to the storefront next door that sold hiking gear and their window display of colorful fisherman’s sweaters.
“You don’t need to buy me anything,” Laura told him.
“I know.” Dermot smiled, running his hand through his dark hair. “But I want to say thank you, for everything you’ve done to help me these last few months. Being with you.” He paused, and in that pause Laura heard more than anything Dermot could have said to her.
Dermot went on. “Being with you has been one of the few things in my life that have made me happy. Truly happy.”
Laura stared at her closet, remembering those words. She pulled out the dress he’d bought for her, not too short or tight—Dermot had insisted—but a beautiful fabric and cut. Body conscious without being sleazy. There was a word for the type of dress, but she couldn’t remember it. It was higher end than anything else Laura owned. She’d come out of the dressing room and she swore she saw Dermot’s face light up with desire when he first saw her. He’d shifted his features quickly into one that was more brotherly, but Laura knew what she saw.
That had been the beginning of the end, she thought now.
Laura pulled off her clothes and slipped the dress over her skin. The fabric felt rich and clung in all the right places. Looking in the mirror, she expected to see a beautiful woman staring back at her. Instead, she saw her gaunt face and pale skin. The dark circles under her eyes and sunken hollows around her collarbones. She was a ghoul, not a princess.
She ripped off the dress, let it crumple into a pile on the floor, and grabbed whatever she found first in her closet to wear. A chunky sweater, paired with clean but beaten-down jeans, and she walked quickly back to the front of the trailer, rushing out the door while still pulling her coat and hat on.
Snow and a crust of ice crunched under her boots as she walked. She ran her fingers over the roll of bills coiled in her pocket. The pharmacy should still be open in town.
Susan’s voice rolled around in her head as she walked. “He said he’d killed him.”
Tom.
But neither Susan nor Laura knew who Tom was. Dermot’s sister said she couldn’t think of anyone from his childhood or high school years that she knew of, and Laura had no memory of a Tom coming up from Dermot’s catalogue of clients he worked with. She’d told Susan Dermot didn’t seem to have too many friends. He was always working, meeting with clients all over town.
Except when he was with her, Laura silently added.
None of it made any sense.
Laura kept walking, trying to think through everything that had happened in the last few weeks. Losing Dermot, his sister showing up—claiming that Dermot confessed to killing someone. Laura missing her period. Terry getting angrier and angrier each day, and Laura never sure what was going to upset him.
Chickadees played in the bushes along the road, and their mechanical call cut through the riot of Laura’s thoughts.
A car drove past, going too fast down the icy country road, and almost clipped Laura on her elbow before she could safely get to the side berm. Once the car passed, she promptly bent over and threw up the small bit of food she’d managed to eat today. She put her hand against a tree to brace herself and tried to steady her vision, which was spinning.
A bit of vomit landed on the top of her boots, and she rubbed them in the leaf litter scattered on the ground. Laura was thankful she hadn’t worn the dress.
A trail opened up to her right, marked with a painted blaze of red and orange. Laura had forgotten the Midwest Appalachian Trail cut through her road. She and Dermot had never hiked this one. He always preferred to take her further afield, to see new spots and visit lookouts that weren’t familiar.
She stopped, trying to decide whether she should turn back home and rest or keep going towards town, her friend, and some more answers to where her life was about to head. Her fingers on the tree trunk rubbed against something smooth, and Laura looked up to see initials carved into the bark. Cut fresh enough to still be seeping sap from the gouges, she brought her fingers to her nose and smelled the bright spark of pine.
Laura took a step further to the right, where the initials faced the inner part of the trail. D.C. + J.L., with a heart drawn around them.
Dermot had done something similar when they were on the waterfall trail, taking out his pocketknife and marking a tree with D.C. + L.T. Dermot Carine loves Laura Taylor.
That’s what she assumed it’d meant, anyway.
Laura knew there was a chance of another D.C. carving their initials into this tree, but her instincts told her it was Dermot. After all, he’d done the same thing with her.
Which left her wondering: Who the hell was J.L.? And riding right behind that question, like an avalanche about to crack, was another one. How many secrets could one man have?
CHAPTER TWENTY JOYCE
She followed Simon to where he met up with Trina at the park. Joyce was constantly surprised by her husband’s failure to recognize that she was in fact the jealous type, although she hated to admit to even herself how she fit such a familiar mold.
Her mother had also been a jealous wife, folding her tired children into the back of the family Buick and following her husband when he returned to the office after dinner, supposedly to catch up on paperwork. As Joyce remembered it, most of these reconnaissance missions were unproductive. Joyce and her brother would sit in the car, taking up a distant place in the parking lot, for what felt like ages, until their mother decided she’d seen enough and it was time to go home. They always made it back before their father, who Joyce realized now must have been working long hours as a way of avoiding his home life. She’d seen Simon do it, too.
This was the way her childhood weekday evenings went, until one night. Her mother was dozing off in the car, her head bobbing onto her chest, but Joyce was wide awake and terribly bored, blowing her breath onto the cool glass of the back window and writing messages in the steam. Joyce saw a woman, perfectly done up with her sleek black coat pulled tight around her shoulders and red lipstick outlining a pouty mouth. She remembered the woman had curly blonde hair piled on top of her head, like a poodle. She was very pretty, and Joyce found herself waking up her mother to point her out.
“Who’s that pretty lady?” Joyce had asked.
Her mother woke with a start, took a look at the back of the woman as she went through the entrance to her father’s office building, and then instructed the children to stay there. Joyce remembered her mother paused a moment before getting out, like she was making a decision. Then she leapt out from the car, through the glass double doors of the building, and disappeared into the darkness of the foyer. She returned what must have been only a few minutes later, her eyes red and bulging and wiping at her nose, started the car without a word to Joyce or her brother, and drove them home.
Her father never came home that night, and a few months later Joyce found herself living in a run-down apartment with her mother during the week and sharing her old home with her father and the poodle-woman, whose name turned out to be Marla, on the weekends.
But so far Simon had proved to be faithful to Joyce when it came to Trina, as far as the physical aspect of intimacy was concerned. But just like Joyce learned in one of her archaeology courses when she was at university, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Simon didn’t touch Trina the entire time he was with her at the park, but Joyce knew her husband. Even from a distance, she could read his face. He’d somehow convinced himself that he was in love with this woman, through some special alchemy of guilt and attraction and—if she were honest with herself—neglect.
She followed Trina now, driving behind her car at a distance. Simon was still in the park. The appointment with the lawyer was coming up soon though. Joyce saw it scheduled on Simon’s calendar when she checked it this morning. But after seeing Trina’s reaction to him, Joyce assumed Simon was giving her space before they joined up for the meeting with the lawyer Simon arranged for Trina.
