Part 2
Grant had removed her access.
“Take me to Naomi Park’s office,” Clara said.
Marcus started the car. “Downtown?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Sunday.”
“She’ll come.”
Clara said it with the confidence of a woman accustomed to people answering, then hated herself a little for it.
Marcus glanced at her in the mirror.
“Should I call her?”
“My phone isn’t working.”
He took his own phone from the center console and handed it back.
Clara knew Naomi’s number by memory. She had learned it twelve years earlier, after Naomi had negotiated the purchase of the company’s first West Coast property and celebrated by falling asleep over room-service fries. Their friendship had outlived two office moves, Naomi’s divorce, Clara’s father’s funeral, and the slow deterioration of Clara’s marriage, though Clara had concealed enough of that deterioration to make the word friendship feel generous.
Naomi answered on the fifth ring.
“This better involve a body.”
“It involves Grant.”
A pause.
“What did he do?”
“He married someone.”
Another pause, longer this time.
“You’re still married to him.”
“I’m aware.”
“Where are you?”
“In the car.”
“Are you safe?”
Clara looked down at the faint red mark the wineglass stem had left across her fingers.
“Yes.”
“Did you confront him?”
“Yes.”
“What does that mean?”
“I threw wine at her.”
Naomi made a sound that was neither judgment nor approval. “Did you hit anyone?”
“No.”
“Did he?”
“No.”
“Were there witnesses?”
“The bride.”
“Anyone else?”
“Marcus was outside.”
“Cameras?”
Clara looked back through the rear window as the mansion disappeared behind hedges. She had approved the installation of security cameras three years earlier after a burglary at a neighboring property.
“Yes.”
Naomi exhaled. “Do not post anything. Do not call him. Do not text him. Do not threaten him, even poetically. Where do you want to meet?”
“Your office.”
“I can be there in forty minutes.”
“I don’t have forty minutes.”
“You have exactly forty minutes, because that’s how long it takes me to put on pants and drive into the city.”
“Naomi.”
“Clara, listen to me. Your husband appears to have committed bigamy, fraud, or both, and you may have just provided him with footage he can use to portray you as unstable. Forty minutes is not the emergency. The last year is the emergency.”
Clara closed her eyes.
Across from the mansion’s gate, a lawn-service truck idled at the curb. One worker leaned over the hood eating from a foil-wrapped breakfast sandwich. Another watched the black coupe pass, then looked away.
The world had not altered. People still ate. Traffic lights still changed. A woman in running clothes waited at a crosswalk with a golden retriever pulling toward a storm drain.
“Fine,” Clara said.
“Where will you wait?”
“My apartment.”
Naomi was silent.
“What?”
“Do you still have access?”
Clara almost laughed. It would have been the wrong kind of laugh, the abrupt ugly sound that sometimes emerged at funerals.
“I own it.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
The apartment occupied the upper floor of a limestone building overlooking the park. Clara had bought it before she met Grant, when Laurel House Hotels consisted of three properties and a payroll she checked herself every Thursday night. The deed had remained in her name because her mother had insisted that every woman should possess one key no husband could demand.
Clara still carried that key.
The doorman’s face changed when he saw her.
It was small, the change. A lift of the eyebrows. A delay before he stepped out to open the car door. Clara had trained thousands of hospitality employees to control those delays, to greet guests without revealing what the staff had already heard.
“Mrs. Bennett.”
“Good morning, Luis.”
He glanced toward Marcus.
“Is everything all right?”
“Yes.”
The lie came easily. That frightened her more than the trembling.
Luis followed her into the lobby. The vase on the center table held white hydrangeas, already browning at the edges.
“Mrs. Bennett,” he said again, quieter. “Mr. Bennett was here on Friday.”
Clara stopped.
“With whom?”
“A locksmith.”
The elevator chimed behind them.
Luis swallowed. “He had paperwork.”
“What paperwork?”
“He said you were transferring the apartment as part of your divorce settlement. He asked us to update the resident file.”
Clara pressed the elevator button, though the doors were open.
“Did you?”
“The manager did.”
“And the key?”
Luis looked embarrassed. “The locks were changed.”
Marcus stepped closer, not threateningly, but enough that Luis noticed the difference between a chauffeur standing by and a man deciding whether he might have to intervene.
Clara took the old brass key from her purse.
It lay across her palm, suddenly weightless.
“Did Grant remove anything?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have cameras.”
“Yes.”
“Preserve the recordings.”
“The manager would have to—”
“Preserve them, Luis.”
Her voice sharpened. He flinched.
Clara saw it and regretted it, but she did not apologize.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll tell him.”
“No. Send him a written request now. Copy me.”
Luis looked down at her phone in her hand.
“My account has been changed,” she said. “Use my old personal email.”
“I don’t have that.”
She recited it. He typed.
Marcus touched her elbow. “We should go.”
Clara looked at the elevator, at her own blurred reflection in its brass doors. Her makeup remained perfect. Her hair had held. She looked like a woman who had planned a difficult meeting and expected to win it.
“Mrs. Bennett,” Luis said, “I’m sorry.”
She put the useless key back into her purse.
“Thank you for telling me.”
Outside, Marcus waited until the car doors were shut before asking, “Hotel?”
“My hotel accounts may be frozen.”
“We can use mine.”
“No.”
“It wasn’t a loan.”
“That makes it worse.”
May you like
Marcus looked through the windshield. He had been with the family for nineteen years, long enough to understand when Clara’s pride had turned from armor into stupidity.
“There’s a place on West Forty-Sixth,” he said. “Small. Clean. My sister stays there when she comes down from Albany. They don’t know your name.”
