Chapter 35: Pearls

Chloe turned on her heel and walked into the ladies’ room like it was a hotel lobby she owned, and Rachel, who had just won her first fight in court and should have taken the win and gone home, followed her in.

The door hissed shut behind them on its slow arm.

Four stalls, all empty. A sink with a crack running through the porcelain like a vein. One of those hand dryers that sounds like a jet engine and dries nothing. The whole place smelled like pink soap, and for one second Rachel was back in Sal’s gas station at five in the morning, washing her hair with her head in a sink, and her stomach rolled.

Chloe was at the mirror reapplying lipstick. She’d opened her white coat, and there they were. The pearls.

Rachel’s mother’s pearls, a little yellowed, the clasp held with the gold safety ring her mother had fixed at the kitchen table with eyebrow tweezers.

They sat on Chloe Sutton’s collarbone like they’d always lived there.

“Take them off,” Rachel said.

Chloe blotted her lips on a paper towel. “Excuse me?”

“The pearls. They were my mother’s. They were in a jewelry box in my bedroom closet, top shelf, behind the shoe boxes, and your lawyer told a court officer the box was lost. It’s not lost. It’s on your neck. Take them off and give them to me.”

Chloe laughed, and it wasn’t even a mean laugh, it was a delighted one, like Rachel had told a good joke at brunch.

“Oh my God. You’re serious.” She turned from the mirror. “Rachel. Honey. You don’t have a closet. You have a guest room in another man’s apartment.”

“Take them off.”

“Or what? You’ll cry on another stand?” Chloe tilted her head. “That was cute, by the way, the Dottie thing. Very Lifetime. Michael wanted to throw up.”

“I’m asking one more time.”

“And I’m telling you no.” Chloe stepped close, close enough that Rachel could smell her perfume, something with gardenia that cost three hundred dollars a bottle and smelled like a funeral home. “Everything in that house is mine now. The sheets. The car. The pearls. Your husband. You want something back, you should’ve held on to it better.”

Rachel reached out and touched the strand. Just two fingers, at the clasp, on her mother’s tweezer repair.

Chloe slapped her.

It came out of nowhere and it came hard, open-handed, the new ring catching her across the cheekbone, and Rachel’s head snapped sideways so fast her ear rang. One high, held note, like the noise a TV makes when it’s on in an empty room. Her eyes watered instantly. Her cheek went hot, then hotter, then numb.

She stood there with her face turned toward the hand dryer.

Every cell in her body wanted to hit back. She could see it, exactly how it would go: one good swing, Chloe’s blonde head bouncing off that cracked mirror, blood on the porcelain. Tessa would have done it already. Tessa would be sitting on her chest by now.

But this was the Westchester County Courthouse. There was a court officer twenty feet away. And Rachel Hayes, as of Exhibit F, was the unstable one.

And under the navy sheath, under the belt Mrs. Ruiz had insisted on, there was a heartbeat the size of a lentil that didn’t need its mother rolling around on a bathroom floor with a woman in four-inch heels. That one decided it. Rachel would’ve been happy to lose a tooth. She wasn’t risking that.

She turned her face back, slowly, and didn’t touch her cheek.

Then she took her phone out of her coat pocket, swiped to the camera, and raised it.

Chloe’s eyebrows went up. “What are you…”

Click.

The fake shutter noise was loud in the tiled room. Rachel looked at the screen. Chloe in the mirror light, mouth half open, red lipstick fresh, and around her neck, perfectly in focus, a strand of slightly yellowed pearls with a gold safety ring at the clasp.

December 3, 11:42 a.m. in the corner of the screen, in the info, in the cloud, wherever those things lived.

“Stolen property,” Rachel said. Her voice came out level. She was proud of that later. “The box went missing during a court-supervised retrieval, which means there’s a court record saying it was in that house. Now there’s a picture of where it went, taken in a courthouse, with a date on it. My lawyer is going to love you.”

Chloe went pale.

Not dramatically, though. It was quick, a flicker, color draining out under the blush like somebody’d pulled a plug. Her hand came up to the pearls on its own, covering the clasp. For one second she looked twenty-seven, which is to say young, which is to say a girl who hadn’t thought this all the way through.

Then it was gone. She dropped her hand. The smile came back, slow and sweet as syrup.

“You think you’re so smart,” Chloe said. “You know what Michael says about you? He says you were the smartest girl he ever met, and the easiest to fool. Both at once. He says it like a compliment.”

“Michael says a lot of things.”

“He does.” Chloe picked her lipstick up off the sink and capped it with a little click of her own. “Like how you were never able to give him anything. Eleven years. Nothing. He used to say it to me in bed. She’s like a nice empty house.”

Rachel didn’t move. Her ear was still singing.

Chloe walked past her toward the door, then stopped and glanced down, a quick deliberate drop of the eyes, from Rachel’s face to the flat front of the navy dress, right below the belt, and held there.

Rachel felt it in her knees first.

The clinic lobby. The red coat. The phone lifted slow, like a camera at a wedding. Ten days of checking I*******m on a toilet lid, waiting for the bomb, and the bomb had been sitting in Chloe’s pocket the whole time, ticking politely.

“Funny thing about that,” Chloe said softly. “Michael doesn’t know about the baby yet.” She pushed the door open with her hip. Hallway noise rushed in, a lawyer on his phone, a child crying somewhere. “Keep it that way and so will I. For now.”