Page 13 of The End of Her

Patrick is anxious and unfocused, unable to concentrate on anything but his immediate problem. He needs to check on his family. Suddenly the urge to see them, to know that they’re all right, is overwhelming. He walks quickly to the lot where he parks his Audi.

I really think your wife and I could be friends. The idea makes his blood run cold. She was sitting within feet of Stephanie and the twins when she texted him to call her. She’d guessed that he might refuse to pay her, and she was applying pressure. She could lie to Stephanie, tell her that they’d been having sex in a hotel room somewhere. Erica is toying with him. Showing him that she could blow his world apart if she chose to.

He reminds himself that Erica just wants money. She’s not going to harm his family.

He drives out of the parking lot and towards home as fast as he dares. Suddenly his phone pings. He glances at it and sees it’s another text from Erica. His hands immediately begin to get clammy on the wheel. He pulls over at the first opportunity, into a gas station, and parks the car. He sits for a moment, breathing deeply, before he opens the message. Now, he’s a little more afraid of her. Of what she might say or do. He’ll tell her to go to hell. He’ll tell her he’s going to go to the police.

He reads the message.

Let’s meet. Now.

He hates her peremptory tone. He wants to tell her to go fuck herself. He responds,

I can’t. I’m busy.

She immediately answers.

I’ll be at the park at the foot of the Skyway Bridge in twenty minutes.

This is fucked up. Completely fucked up. He smashes his hands against the steering wheel, feels the pain radiate up his forearms. What does he do now? He’s never been blackmailed before. What are his options? He could go to the police and tell them Erica is threatening him and stalking him and his wife. He could call them right now. The police could meet her at the park. But what happens then?

His phone pings again.

There’s something you need to know.

As soon as he reads the message, he knows he’s going to meet her.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ERICA PUTS HER phone down and looks at herself in the rearview mirror. She’s pretty sure Patrick will show up, and she wants to look her best. She takes her hair out of the ponytail and brushes it. She puts on fresh lipstick. She looks a lot better than his current wife does. It’s not Stephanie’s fault – she’s postpartum and it takes a while to get back to looking good after you’ve had a baby. She’s sure Stephanie is an attractive woman, just not right now.

She thinks about how she went to see her son before she left Denver to move to Newburgh. She hadn’t seen him in years – not since he was born. But she needed to get a current photo. So she’d watched the house and then followed the family from a distance one evening when they went to the park. Fortunately he looks a lot like his dad. She got a nice shot of him, had it printed and put it in her wallet.

She drives closer to the Skyway Bridge, parks her car and walks towards the river and sits down on a bench where she can easily be seen. She knows exactly what she’s going to say.

Patrick drives around for a few minutes, killing time. He doesn’t want to go back to the office and park the car and leave again on foot. Niall might wonder what he’s up to. He’ll drive to the bridge and leave the car somewhere nearby.

Patrick parks on a side street and walks down to the river. His body is tight with tension. There’s a small park at the foot of the Skyway pedestrian bridge that spans the Hudson to the Catskills on the other side. Sometimes he and Stephanie sit on the benches here and enjoy the view, with an ice cream. This will spoil it for him.

When he enters the park, he sees her immediately. She’s sitting on a bench, looking out at the river. She’s not watching for him; it’s like she knows he’ll sit down right beside her, like a good dog. It makes his blood boil. He’s told her he won’t pay her. What happens now?

Like an automaton, he walks over to her and sits down next to her on the bench. He can’t bear to face her. Instead, he looks out at the river too. It’s like they’re two spies, pretending they don’t know each other, he thinks, about to conduct business. It’s all too surreal.

‘I’m glad you could make it,’ she says.

Finally he turns to her. She looks so innocent – with her fine skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes, her serene smile. Almost angelic. He knows better. A flash of something carnal arises from his memory, flits through his head. He musters up his courage and says, ‘I don’t know how to get this through your thick head. I’m not afraid of you. We’re not going to pay you anything. This is the last time I’m going to meet you.’ She just smiles at him. ‘If you don’t drop this, I’m going to the police. They’ll arrest you for attempted blackmail.’

‘I don’t think so. Not when you hear what I have to say.’

He turns on her then. He hisses, ‘What is it you think you have? What makes you think you can get them to take another look at a perfectly open-and-shut case? It was an accident! Everybody knows that. You can’t change that, no matter how much you may want to. There was never any question that it was anything else.’

‘But they don’t know everything,’ she says. ‘They don’t know that you had a motive to kill your wife.’

‘Motive! What motive? You can’t be serious!’

‘Oh, I am deadly serious,’ she says, in a lowered voice.

His heart is pounding furiously. She means to go on with this – he can’t believe it. ‘You can’t honestly think that because I had meaningless sex with you, that I deliberately murdered my wife! No one will believe you.’ His voice is low but he can hear the desperation in it; he knows he needs to calm down. He shouldn’t let her see how riled up he is.

‘Perhaps it wasn’t as meaningless as you say,’ she says slyly.

He feels a chill down his spine. She’s going to make it out to be more than it was. ‘You lying bitch,’ he says venomously. ‘It’s your word against mine.’

She reaches into her handbag, takes out her wallet and withdraws a small photograph. ‘What you don’t know is that I had a baby. It’s yours.’ She holds out the photo of a newborn in a blue crocheted hat. He looks down at it in horror, then back at her, stunned. ‘What?’ He can’t process it. This must be another lie. ‘That’s impossible.’

‘Why is it impossible? We had sex.’ She leans in closer to him now and says, ‘And if you remember, it was very, very good.’

He recoils from her. ‘You’re lying. There was no baby.’

‘How would you know? You got the hell out of Colorado as fast as you could. But yes, about eight months I gave birth to a bouncing baby boy.’

‘It’s not mine.’

‘I know he is.’

‘You can’t prove it,’ he says, and then immediately realizes, stupidly, that he’s wrong. Of course she can prove it – she can force him to do a paternity test. His fear grows, threatening to overwhelm him.

‘He’s almost nine years old now.’ She takes the photo of the infant and returns it to her wallet, and pulls another one out. She hands it to him.

Patrick takes it from her reluctantly. It’s a picture of a boy with dark eyes and hair and a crooked grin. A cute kid. His anxiety spikes. The boy looks remarkably like he did at that age.

He draws away from her, shaken. This is terrible news, the worst news. He might have a son. A nine-year-old son. With her – a lying, manipulative bitch. If it’s his. But he knows it’s quite possible that it is. The timing is right. The photo is convincing, but what if there is no baby, and this is just another lie? ‘Why didn’t you tell me back then?’

She looks out at the river. ‘I was afraid to. After Lindsey died, I thought – I still think – that you killed her on purpose. So that we could be together. We talked about it, remember?’

‘No,’ he says, shaking his head in disbelief. They had never talked about that. It was just sex between them. ‘What utter horseshit.’

‘We talked about being together,’ she amends, ‘not about you killing her. I thought you meant divorce.’

There’s a funny buzzing in his head. He feels like he’s having trouble breathing. ‘No. We didn’t,’ he says, appalled. ‘You’re making it all up!’

She looks at him through narrowed eyes. ‘Of course, you say that now.’

His heart is pounding furiously; he’s afraid.

‘I thought you’d killed her to be with me,’ she says again. ‘It did something to me. It really messed me up. And I’d just lost a close friend. I couldn’t bear to look at myself and I couldn’t bear to look at you. I was sick with guilt at what you’d done.’

She looks so convincing, he thinks, staring back at her in horror. Anyone would believe her. A jury would believe her. He’s absolutely terrified now. He swallows, his throat dry, and says, ‘I didn’t kill her at all – it was an accident and you know it! You’re making all this up; you’ve never felt guilty about anything.’

She turns wide eyes on him, smiles and says coyly, ‘But I don’t believe you, you see. And it’s been bothering me all this time.’

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