Chapter 39: The Morning After

The photo was blurry, a little tilted, shot one-handed through a windshield while a driver snored eight inches away, and Rachel looked at it eleven times in the Audi on the way home.

She held her phone low against her thigh. Linden Court Holdings. Legible if she pinched in.

Linden Court. Her street. Her house, with the maple out front. Somebody had turned it into a company. Somebody was mailing it checks from the place Julian suspected was being robbed, and Julian’s own board chairman had been parked at midnight next to her husband’s car.

RM Consul. Linden Court. Her initials, her address.

Two points made a line. She didn’t have a line yet. She had a feeling, low in her stomach.

She looked over at Julian. He drove with both hands on the wheel, eyes on the West Side Highway, and he hadn’t said a word since P2.

She could hand it to him right now. The chairman of his board, on top of everything. And she thought about two weeks in November when he’d known exactly why she was in his house and hadn’t said a word.

He didn’t tell me for two weeks, she thought. I get one night.

She put the phone away.

* * *

The penthouse was dark. Mrs. Ruiz had left one lamp on in the foyer.

Julian dropped the keys in the bowl and stood there with his back to her.

“I almost did it,” he said. “If you hadn’t come in. I want you to know that about me.”

“I know.” She didn’t go to him yet. “You walked out without asking me, Julian. You said ours and then you went and decided the rest by yourself. That’s November. That’s the same thing.”

He turned around. He didn’t argue. “Yes.”

“Don’t do it again.”

“I won’t.”

“You don’t get to say won’t. You get to show me.” She took a breath. “Now ask me what I said to him.”

He almost smiled. “What did you say to him?”

So she told him. The sidewalk. Kemp’s phone call. Cheaper to bury. Her question for Michael. Julian let out a rough breath that was almost a laugh.

“You put the fear of God in him with my board chair.”

“I put the fear of Harold in him. Worse.”

“Rachel.”

“Wait here.”

She went down the hall to the guest suite, unlocked it, and took the folder out of the nightstand drawer where it had lived since the day he gave it to her. Thirty-one pages, the last one torn short. You write the last line. Or don’t.

She’d been carrying it around in her head for nine days. She uncapped a pen from the desk and wrote it on the torn edge in her own hand, skinny R and all.

Assessment: She’s reviewing him.

She brought it back and held it out. He read it under the foyer lamp, and she watched his throat work.

“Twenty-five days,” she said. “I said a month. I’m not done being mad. I just don’t want to sleep down the hall tonight.”

He folded the page once and put it in his breast pocket like a boarding pass. Then he looked at her like he was asking.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s me saying yes.”

He kissed her like he’d been drowning all night.

There was nothing careful about it. She pulled at his tie with both hands, tugging his shirt out of his trousers, backing him down the hall while he walked her backward the other way and they ended up crooked against the wall by the linen closet, laughing into each other’s mouths. Then not laughing.

“Bed,” she said. “I want the bed. I want to see you.”

He picked her up, one arm under her knees, and she said, “Oh my God, put me down, I’m pregnant, not dead,” and he said, “Noted,” and didn’t put her down.

In the dark of his room he undressed her slowly even though his hands were shaking. The navy dress from court. Her bra, unhooked with a care that made her throat tighten. When she was bare he knelt on the bed and just looked at her, like something he’d nearly lost on the way home, and then he bent and kissed her stomach. Not through a sweater this time. Skin. On purpose.

She pulled him up and dragged his shirt off over his head.

His skin was hot. She undid his belt herself, and he groaned into her shoulder when she wrapped her hand around him, slow, learning what made his breath catch. When he slid two fingers into her she was already wet, and he swore against her mouth.

“Now,” she said. “Julian. Now.”

He pushed in with one long, deep stroke, and they both went still, foreheads together. Then he started to move, and there was nothing slow left in him, urgent and deep and a little desperate, her nails in his back, his hand under her hip lifting her into him, the headboard tapping the wall and neither of them caring. She heard herself saying things she’d never said out loud in her life. Harder. Like that. Don’t you dare stop. He didn’t dare.

She came first, hard, clutching at him, and he followed her down a few strokes later with her name in his mouth like a prayer he’d forgotten the rest of.

After, he stayed over her, holding his weight on his elbows, and pushed the damp hair off her forehead.

“Whatever a lab says, whatever Michael does, whatever Harold does,” he said. “You don’t walk into any of it alone. And you don’t get walked into anything without being asked first. Not ever again.”

“That’s a big promise,” she whispered.

“I’m a big man.”

She laughed so hard she snorted, which ruined the moment completely, and it was the best ruined moment of her life. Later, when his breathing went slow, she thought about the photo on her phone in the pocket of the navy dress on his floor, and didn’t get up.

* * *

Morning came in gray and wet, the rain back, beading on the bedroom windows. Julian’s side of the bed was empty and still warm, and she could hear the shower running and him on the phone in the bathroom, saying Owen in that clipped voice.

Rachel pulled on his white shirt from the floor, the one with a button missing, and padded barefoot toward the smell of coffee she couldn’t drink. She walked into the kitchen.

A woman was sitting at the gray stone counter.

Tall, even sitting. Glossy dark-brown hair, a cream cashmere sweater. A Hermès bag on the next stool like a small dog. She was holding Julian’s mug, the black one with the chip on the handle he wouldn’t let anybody throw out, and she was drinking out of it.

She looked Rachel up and down, from her bare feet to the missing button, taking her time.

“Hello,” she said, warm as anything. “I’m Vanessa Hart. I was supposed to be Mrs. Cross.”

Down the hall, the shower shut off.