Chương 6
Ethan stared at her.
“What?”
“She’d covered losses.”
“What losses?”
“Personal.”
“Mara didn’t gamble.”
“No.”
“Drugs?”
Victoria said nothing.
Ethan’s grip tightened on the chair.
Mara had hidden pain pills after Noah’s difficult birth. Ethan had found the bottle once behind winter boots in the closet. She had cried, promised it was temporary, entered outpatient treatment, and apparently improved.
He had believed her.
“How much?”
“Almost eighty thousand dollars over eleven months.”
Ethan sat down.
The number was simultaneously enormous and stupidly small compared with the size of the life that had been destroyed around it.
“She was afraid you’d find out.”
“She could have told me.”
“You say that now.”
“I would have helped her.”
“I told her that.”
Ethan looked up.
Victoria’s eyes were red, but she was not crying.
“She did not believe me.”
“Why?”
“Because there was something else.”
There it was.
Ethan felt it before she said it.
He looked at the table rather than at her.
Victoria spoke carefully.
“Mara had been seeing someone during the year you separated.”
“We were apart six weeks.”
“Eight.”
He hated the correction.
“Who?”
“She never told me his name.”
“You’re lying.”
“No.”
“You know whose son Noah is.”
Victoria’s face tightened.
“I know what Mara believed.”
Ethan waited.
“She believed the other man could have been Noah’s biological father.”
The room stayed ordinary.
That seemed obscene.
A brass vent rattled once when the heat came on. Someone pushed a housekeeping cart down a distant hallway. Victoria rubbed her thumb over a coffee stain on the table as though they were discussing an overdue bill.
Ethan heard himself ask, “Did she test?”
“No.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t know.”
“No.”
“You told a six-year-old I can’t know whose son he really is.”
Victoria flinched.
“I was panicking.”
“That’s your explanation?”
“No.”
“It better not be.”
“She heard from Mara last week.”
Ethan stared at her.
“Who did?”
“I did.”
“You.”
“Yes.”
“What did she want?”
“To come back.”
The words were quieter than everything before them.
Ethan sat very still.
“Back where?”
“To face what she did. To see Noah eventually. To tell you herself.”
“You arranged tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Why here?”
“She knew we were coming for the board retreat. She said she would meet me somewhere public but private enough to talk. She refused my office. She wouldn’t come to Denver.”
“You met her in the service corridor.”
“I told her she was out of her mind.”
“She is here.”
“She was.”
“Where is she now?”
Victoria shook her head.
“I don’t know.”
“You just handed me the name Anna Reed.”
“That’s what she calls herself.”
“Calls herself?”
“She has documents under that name.”
“Real documents?”
“I never asked.”
“You helped fake her death and never asked how she got identification?”
“I did not help her get identification.”
“But you helped her disappear.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
Victoria’s breathing changed.
There was the line she did not want to cross.
Ethan leaned forward.
“How?”
“She staged the car.”
“I know that part.”
“No, you don’t.”
He waited.
“She drove it through the guardrail herself.”
Ethan looked at her.
“She cut her arm and put blood on the seat. She left the coat and phone.”
“Where were you?”
“Waiting six miles away.”
He pushed his chair backward.
The legs scraped sharply across the floor.
“You picked her up.”
“Yes.”
“And drove her where?”
“To a bus station in Utah.”
Ethan stood.
He felt physically ill.
Victoria remained seated.
“She had cash. She had already arranged somewhere to go.”
“You let search teams spend sixteen days in that canyon.”
“I know.”
“A rescue volunteer broke his leg.”
“I know.”
“They put divers in that river.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying that.”
Victoria lowered her eyes.
Ethan walked to the door, opened it, then stopped.
A thought came.
He turned.
“What did you get out of it?”
Victoria looked genuinely confused.
“What?”
“You do not do something like that for free.”
“I didn’t take money.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Silence.
He understood before she answered.
“You loved her.”
Victoria stared at him.
“No.”
He almost laughed.
It was not funny.
“You loved Mara.”
“I loved both of you.”
He looked at her.
Victoria’s face hardened with humiliation.
“Not like that.”
“Then explain it.”
“She was my closest friend for fifteen years. She was sick. She was terrified. She believed Noah would be safer with you than with her.”
“So you helped her die.”
“On paper.”
“You helped her abandon her child.”
“Yes.”
The admission finally broke something in Victoria’s voice.
She looked away.
“She said she needed six months. She said she would get sober and turn herself in and explain everything.”
“And?”
“She disappeared from me too.”
“How long before you heard from her again?”
“Eleven months.”
Ethan stared.
“What did she say?”
“That she was alive. That she was sober. That she could not come back yet.”
“And you accepted that.”
“No.”
“But you kept it from me.”
“Yes.”
“Then you married me.”
Victoria’s eyes closed.
There it was.
The thing beneath every other thing.
She opened them again.
“I should not have.”
“That’s all?”
“What would satisfy you? If I said I married you because I was guilty? Partly. Because I loved Noah? Yes. Because I was lonely? Yes. Because after Mara disappeared you and I were two people sitting in the same kitchen at three in the morning while Noah had a fever and neither of us knew what to do? Yes.”
“Don’t make this tender.”
“I’m not.”
“You built our marriage on a dead woman who wasn’t dead.”
Victoria pressed her palms against the table.
“I did not plan to fall in love with you.”
“Stop.”
“I’m answering.”
“Stop.”
She did.
Ethan stood there breathing.
After a while Victoria said, “Mara contacted me because she saw the foundation audit settlement in the news. She thought enough time had passed.”
“Enough time for what?”
“For you to forgive her.”
May you like
Ethan stared at Victoria.
Then, unexpectedly, he laughed.
