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That night, she spent time thinking about Heath, and everything he represented. And in her mind, quoted herself, from the lasttime she’d spoken to Davenport:“He should be dead... These criminals understand one thing: if you murder people, you die. That’s clear. Specific. A lot of these thugs think spending time in prison is like a badge of honor.”
She wasn’t quite asleep when the dreams came, like bad actors edging onstage, Alex and Blaine and Arthur and Heath, all mixed up, and she began running in bed, her knees churning, and Chelsea began to cry and she woke up... she sat hunched over the edge of her bed and didn’t sleep. Feared the sleep.
She finally got up, wandered into the bathroom, and looked at her ruined face. Everyone who saw it, Melton, the doctors, even Fatima, said it looked fine. Better every day. But it didn’t. Her face was ruined, she’d never act again. She couldn’t bear to look at herself...
She was sick, but...
Then she cured herself.
The cure came to her as she sat watching Chelsea in her crib waving her hands and feet and gurgling and pooping, like a baby prodded to follow a movie script.
And the light went on.
—
She sat atthe breakfast table each morning for the next two weeks and wrote a script, complete with the necessary characters and plot points. When she was done with it, and satisfied, and well rehearsed, she called Melton.
They agreed to meet at a café in Minneapolis for lunch. She left Chelsea with Fatima and drove over, mouthing her lines and mentally rehearsing her actions. Her smile was professionally perfect when she saw Melton scrunched in a far corner of the café.
And she gave the other woman an ever-broader smile as she walked between tables to Melton’s booth. There, she leaned over and gave Melton a lingering kiss on the lips, noted without rancor by the other patrons of the restaurant, the audience.
“You look different. Like something happened,” Melton said.
Cooper agreed. “I turned a corner,” she said, right on script. “I’ve been talking to Tom, and we’re going to meet tomorrow and hit some tennis balls. I’ve asked the U to give me the next quarter off, and they’ve agreed. I’m going to run out to LA, to Malibu, to look at a house.”
Cooper didn’t give a rat’s ass about the tennis practice or the time off.
Melton reached across the table and gripped her wrist: “This is wonderful. How’s your leg? You said you were still limping last week.”
“Ah, it’s fine. Probably have an odd scar that you’d see in a bathing suit. I mean, it couldn’t be anything but a bullet wound. Maybe I’ll have Weather look at it. I know she does scar revisions.”
“I bet she can fix it so nobody would ever know...”
They talked for an hour, Melton getting more excited as they ate the meal.
Finally Cooper said, “Listen, I know you have to work, you’re a working lawyer with a big practice. Do you think you could get away to Malibu with me? Look at this house. We could run out a week from Friday, stay the weekend, and be back on Monday... Go first class all the way.”
They talked about schedules and favored airlines and Melton took out her computer and they looked up the listing for the Malibu house, and Meltonooh’dandaah’dand talked about learning to surf...
The talk about real estate pinged at the back of Cooper’s damaged mind.
Heath claimed she’d ruined him. Both Lucas and Virgil were positive that he’d murdered his employees, but as far as she could tell from Daisy Jones’s interview, he seemed much more concerned about his reputation as it involved the charities than the question of whether he’d committed murder.
On the way home, she drove past his Summit Avenue mansion; nothing moving. No “For Sale” sign. Maybe he was going to try to gut it out in the Cities.
Then at home, she’d had a cup of coffee with Fatima and helped feed the baby, though Fatima, she had to admit, was better with Chelsea than she was. When they were done with that, she went up to her office and called up the Zillow real estate site... and there it was.
Heath’s house was for sale for $1.4 million. He was getting ready to skip. She thought about it, got her phone, and called Virgil.
Virgil wasn’t polite: “Yes?”
“Virgil, I’m sorry,” she said, injecting a note of regret into her well-trained voice.
There was a moment of silence, but Virgil came back with a softer tone. “It’s been rough,” he said. “You’re allowed the anger.”
“Well,” she said. Then, “I saw Noah Heath on the Daisy Jones show. He seems to think everything is okay.”
“Not okay, people are digging. There’s not much to go on. We’ve got that dirt from his shovel, but there’s a question of whether we’re going to be allowed to use it. When we searched his house, we never found that rain hoodie that the man in the van was wearing at the airport... So...”
