All Chapters of The Other Mrs. Cross : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Isla POVJulian reached for her the way you reach for a skittish animal, one palm out and held low, and when he said her name it was in the voice I heard him use on Mabel a hundred times over a plate of untouched vegetables. "Ren. Come on, let's go in the back and talk.""No.""You're upset, and I understand that, but this isn't the place..""Don't tell me what I am." She hadn't raised her voice, and it reached the far wall anyway, because the room had gone so quiet that I could hear the chandelier ticking as it settled. "You've been telling me what I am for six years. Reliable. Discreet. The only one who doesn't talk."He glanced toward the front row, where the director with the cropped gray hair had lowered her page, and I watched him work out which of those faces still belonged to him. "She's been putting in eighteen-hour days," he told them, lightly, almost fondly. "It's been a long month for everyone, and I'm afraid…""Six y

Isla POVThe silence didn't last past the sound of Lorraine's heels. Somewhere in the middle of the ballroom a man said "Jesus Christ" in an ordinary conversational voice, and after that the room came apart, chairs scraping and a dozen conversations starting at once, the press table on its feet and a waiter at the back dropping a tray of glasses that rang across the parquet like a bell. Julian stood at the stand saying "Everyone, please" into a microphone nobody was listening to anymore. A waiter I didn't know came up the side steps with a single black pump in his hand, found at the bottom of the service stairs, and held it out to Renata, who looked at it for a long moment before she took it. She didn't put it on. It seemed to me that nobody had told her she was allowed to leave.I went down the steps because Mabel was down there, and nothing else in the building had the right to hold me.She was sitting on Harold's lap. I hadn't known he could be gentle,

Isla POVWalt had been waiting at the curb the whole time, which I hadn't expected. Nobody had told him the evening was over, and he stood by the open rear door of the sedan with his cap in his hand while Harold carried Mabel out through the lobby, already asleep with the felt hamster crushed under her chin, and laid her across the back seat like a loaf of bread."Mr. Cross didn't say a word about the ride home, Mrs. Cross," Walt said. "So I'm taking it I'm still yours.""I'd be grateful.""Then I'm yours." He put his cap back on and drove the twenty minutes the way he would have driven a hearse, steadily and with great respect. Neither of us spoke until we turned onto our street, when he asked whether I wanted the porch light left on, and I said I did.I carried Mabel up myself,but he offered, because I wanted the weight of her. She stayed asleep while I unbuckled the yellow shoes and worked the dress over her head, but when I tucked the hamster in beside her chin she opened one eye

Isla POVI kept my face where it was. Priya had told me once that people lose in court by reacting to the first thing the other side says, so I folded my arms over my old T-shirt and treated Julian the way I used to treat a suspicious invoice, which was to stop reading it as a whole and go through it line by line."Which weeks?" I asked."Hm?""You said you've known for weeks. Give me a date.""You always did want it in writing." He seemed pleased, as if I passed something. "Does it matter?""I'd like to know.""The mixer, then." He said it easily. "The hallway by the elevators, when Renata fixed my tie. You came around the corner and stood there for about eleven seconds, and you thought I couldn't see you in the glass of the awards case." A small, almost apologetic smile. "I fixed my tie exactly the way I always do."Eleven seconds. I felt what I used to feel when a column of figures stopped adding, a cold, lev

Isla POVPriya had called Marcus four times before lunch, and every call went straight to a voicemail greeting that was twelve seconds of him laughing at the beep. "Either he's turned it off or he's sitting on it," she said, "and a man who won't answer a lawyer will usually answer his own front door."He lived on the third floor of a converted warehouse near the river, in the condo Julian had once waved off as nothing, and Dorian parked across the street under a bare maple and cut the engine. He didn't tell me to be careful. It was something I'd come to value in him, that he saved his warnings for the things that needed them."I'll be right here," he said."Don't come up unless I text.""You haven't texted anything but yes in two days.""Then I'll try to be dramatic."I took the stairs, because that elevator had always been slow and I wanted three flights to level out my breathing, and I knocked twice on 3C. The door ope