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“The fuck you are,” I snap. “Nat Cohen is dead.”
Her laugh is dry. “I didn’t know if you’d fall for it, if my story would bear scrutiny, but it did. Don’t feel too bad about it, Meghan. I don’t talk to many people from high school either. They could be dead and I wouldn’t know.”
“But why? Why would you do this and who is Declan?”
“Haven’t you figured it out by now?”
“Figured out what?”
“Declan doesn’t exist.”
“But the bruises and your swollen lip,” I say in disbelief. She snickers and it dawns on me what happened, the reality of it a blow. How stupid I’ve been. “You did this to yourself. You let someone hit you or you hit yourself so that I’d think you were being abused, so I’d take pity on you.”
Her reply is a cruel smile. The answer is yes. She did something like slam her own face against something hard enough to sustain a black eye, a bruised forehead and other injuries.
My jaw goes slack. “Why?”
What kind of sick person would do such a thing?
The same type of person who would fake a kidnapping and steal ten thousand dollars from me.
She doesn’t say. She only shrugs. In her silence, I say, still finding it hard to believe, “But that night at the restaurant, he was there, outside, looking through the window. I saw what you were looking at, the condensation on the glass.” I didn’t imagine it.
She stares, looking smug. “The timing was fortunate. I couldn’t have planned that better myself.” It takes a second before I realize what she means, that while someone was at the window, it was unrelated—a man looking into the restaurant to see how crowded it was or if a friend had arrived, something like that—and she used it to her advantage to make me believe her husband was there.
I shake my head, going through everything that happened, trying to understand it. “But the Find My app on your phone. It said Declan could see your location. And the awful texts from him that night,” I say, thinking back to that night when the text messages came rapid-fire—You fucking bitch and I own you. “I don’t understand. I was with you when they arrived. You couldn’t have sent them to yourself.”
I’m so desperate to make sense of it, not wanting to believe that I could be so easily fooled.
“Couldn’t I?”
“Did someone help you?” I ask. Someone would have had to help her, unless it’s possible she has two phones and was able to schedule the texts in advance.
“Why would I tell you that, Meghan? You think I’m going to tell you all my secrets?” she asks, and I feel stupid because that’s exactly what I did. I told her, a stranger, my secrets. I didn’t think I was the type of person who could so easily be a victim of manipulation. I thought I was smarter than that. I think back, going back in time. She did her research. She studied me. She knew the way I walked home from work every night. She knew that sometime after seven o’clock, I’d be walking north on Sheffield that same night the horrible texts from Declan arrived. She put herself there, on my route, when I’d be passing by, and then she did something to piss off the man who screamed at her, creating a scene so that I’d notice her, so that I’d take pity on her, so that I’d welcome her into my home.
Everything was premeditated. Everything was done with purpose.
“Why are you doing this to me? Why are you following me? What do you want from me?”
“I like you. I miss talking to you, I miss you. Under different circumstances, we could have been friends.”
My laugh is barbed and cynical. “You like talking to me? The only thing you ever told me were lies,” I say in disbelief. The sad thing is that I liked talking to her too. I was so relieved to have finally found a friend I could be open with and trust. “Do you know how many nights I lost sleep worrying about you, thinking he’d hurt you or worse? Nothing you said was real. The thing I don’t get is why. Why did you do this? What did you have to gain from it?” Was it just an intricate but well-devised plan to steal from me? She pretended to be someone I knew because the odds of gaining my trust were in her favor. She appealed to my compassionate side, and I let her into my home so she could help herself to my things.
“I’m calling the police,” I say, boring a hand into my bag for my phone, trying to keep this woman between my body and the edge of the bridge so she can’t leave. The police will come and I’ll tell them what she’s done. “You’re not going to get away with this.”
“Call them. I dare you,” she says, and in that moment, as the sun peeks out from behind a cloud, the light catches on her hand and I look at the bright, shiny object on her finger and gasp.
My ring. My wedding band, which I know is one hundred percent mine because it’s not like other wedding bands but is one of a kind. On the inside is a message inscribed from Ben, one that doesn’t ring true anymore. You and me forever.
The engagement ring isn’t here, but still, she has the impudence to wear my wedding ring, to not only steal from me but to flaunt her loot in public like it’s hers.
“Give me my ring. Give me my fucking ring,” I shriek, feeling something in me start to snap.
“You mean this ring?” she laughs, holding her hands up but out of reach. She thinks this is funny. She’s not sorry for what she’s done to me, for how this has made me feel. She’s completely without remorse.
I step closer, trying to take my ring from her, to wrench it off her finger if I have to. She steps further back, laughing at first, but there’s nowhere to go. She backs into the bridge’s rail and her face tightens. She makes a grave mistake then. She puts a foot on the bottom rail, lifting herself up, rising higher, trying to gain leverage, distance, to shimmy away from me somehow, to get her feet disentangled from mine so she can get past me and run away with my ring. But it’s a mistake. Because the upper rail now comes to just below her hip, and she’s unbalanced. I can see in her panicked eyes how she regrets the decision, but she can’t undo it because I’m standing too close, not letting her back down. She’s fighting now, making an attempt to shove, to knee me away, to get her feet back on the ground, but it’s difficult because of her position. She hasn’t gained leverage but lost it instead, and so she screams, “Take it. If you want it that bad, take the fucking ring,” twisting it over her knuckle, hurling it to the bridge deck and then reaching back to hold tight to the rusty railing just behind her. In anger and in spite, she says, “No wonder your husband didn’t love you.”
I blanch at the hateful words. Why is she doing this? What have I done to her? I think of everything I told her about Ben, all those intimate confessions. She violated, preyed upon, exploited me. She pretended to be my friend, to need me, just to take advantage of and steal from me.
