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Stephanie stares at him, her eyes large. Finally she asks, her voice a harsh whisper, ‘Did you push her down the stairs?’
He looks at her in dismay. ‘No! No, how can you think that? I loved her!’ He says, his voice breaking, ‘I’m sorry, Stephanie. I’m so, so sorry, for everything I put you through. I promise, I will spend the rest of my life making it up to you.’
He watches her, his eyes pleading. So much depends on what happens next.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
STEPHANIE LOOKS INTO the eyes of her husband and asks herself if she is looking into the eyes of a killer. His words seem meaningless to her. He keeps telling her he’s told her everything – he’s said that all along – but there’s always more. What more can there be after this? Will he stand over her with a knife in his hand some night and say, just before he slits her throat, Oh yes, one more thing, I stuffed that exhaust pipe full of snow myself, and waited for her to die?
She feels a shudder go through her body. She grips the edge of the sofa to ground herself. She finds herself unable to speak.
‘Stephanie, say something, please,’ he begs, his voice breaking.
‘I don’t know,’ she says finally, woodenly. ‘I don’t know what to say.’ But she’s thinking about how easy it is for him to lie. He lied to her, he lied on the stand – he committed perjury, and even that doesn’t seem to have made much of an impression on him. She looks up at him. ‘You’ve been lying to me all along,’ she says finally, her voice becoming more animated. ‘Why should I believe you now? How do you expect me to feel?’
That actually seems to surprise him. Why should it surprise him? Did he think she would believe him? Just because Erica has been shown to be a liar, it doesn’t make him any less of a liar. They’re like two peas in a pod, Stephanie thinks. Two of a kind. Maybe they deserve each other. Maybe they were meant to be together.
‘You have every right to be upset,’ Patrick says.
‘Upset!’ she cries. Then she lowers her voice. ‘I’m a little more than upset, Patrick.’ She wonders how far she can push him, this possibly murdering husband of hers. Wonders how far she dare go, to test him. To find out for sure. To see how angry he can get. Will he push her down the stairs? Maybe she should find out, she thinks recklessly. It’s so important for her to know. To know what really happened all those years ago in the snow. She feels closer now to Lindsey than to anyone else – closer to his dead first wife than to her own husband. She’s been manipulated by both of them – Patrick and Erica – all along.
‘Is there more going on here than I’m getting, Patrick?’ she asks suddenly.
‘What?’ he asks. ‘What are you talking about?’
She feels physically and emotionally exhausted, too confused to think clearly. Everyone is after money. Her money. Are they after her money together? Her thoughts fall over one another in paranoid succession. Are Patrick and Erica still in love? Or maybe they’re incapable of real love, capable only of self-interest, two psychopaths, in this together. No – they can’t be working together. The idea is insane. She must pull herself together, stop this. She must deal with what’s right in front of her, not imagine the unimaginable.
‘What’s wrong?’ Patrick says urgently.
‘Nothing. Everything.’
He sits down beside her again, cautiously pulls her to him. ‘It’s going to be okay, Stephanie.’
She lets him pull her into his chest, wrap his arms around her. He holds her for a long time. She can feel his heart beating. She can feel his lips kissing the top of her head. He probably thinks that she’ll forgive him. But she’s not going to forgive him. She’s trying to find a way out.
The next morning Stephanie is in the kitchen with Patrick and the twins, having breakfast, pretending that everything is normal even though it isn’t, not for her. She can’t imagine things ever being normal again. Patrick seems to think they might be. Stephanie is pouring herself another cup of coffee when the doorbell rings. She looks up from the coffee maker, looks through the vestibule to the front door and sees the distorted shape through the rippled glass. She thinks it might be Erica. Her heart skips a beat.
‘I’ll get it,’ Patrick says, and pushes his chair back. She fights a spell of dizziness, as the twins babble in their high chairs, oblivious.
Stephanie watches the door open, fighting panic, then sees Hanna’s familiar face, gaping now in shock.
‘Patrick!’ Hanna says.
Stephanie recovers and hurries to the doorway. ‘Hi, Hanna,’ she says quickly. Hanna must guess that she won’t necessarily be happy about Patrick’s return.
‘You’re back,’ Hanna says to Patrick, trying to recover her footing.
Stephanie detects something in Hanna’s voice besides the obvious surprise – nervousness, maybe, or dismay.
‘Yes,’ Patrick says smoothly. ‘They dropped the charges yesterday. I came home last night. I’ve been completely cleared,’ he says, ‘just as we expected.’
Stephanie’s stomach clenches a little, at how he explains it. I’ve been completely cleared. That’s what he will be telling everybody. But that’s not really true, is it? They just won’t ever be able to prove he did it. Hanna glances at her, standing behind him, as if to silently get her take on it. Stephanie steps forward. ‘Do you want to come in for coffee?’
Hanna shakes her head. ‘No, I don’t have time. Ben is watching Teddy for a minute before he goes to work. I just popped over to invite you and the girls for a playdate this morning. Maybe ten-ish? I’m going to make muffins.’
‘Sure, I’d love to,’ Stephanie says, summoning a smile. She’s eager to get out of the house. Away from Patrick, if only for a couple of hours. She can’t think straight around him. She feels she must be constantly watching, evaluating. It’s exhausting to have no downtime. She has to act normal, but she doesn’t even know what that is any more. There is no normal, not here. She needs to be with someone she can relax around, even for a short time.
She and Patrick had spent last night in the marital bed, her back to him, his body curved around her, his arm draped over her. She’d hated it. He’d quickly fallen asleep, but she’d remained awake for a long time. As soon as he started to snore, she removed his arm from around her waist, and inched further away from him on her side of the bed.
Erica finds out the way she seems to find out everything – from her news feed. She’s having a late breakfast in her apartment when she sees the story on her phone. The charges against Patrick have been dropped. No explanation is given.
She calls the Sheriff’s Office in Creemore. It’s barely 8 a.m. in Colorado. She’s in luck; the sheriff is in. She waits impatiently to be patched through.
Finally, he comes on the line. ‘I was wondering if I was going to hear from you,’ Sheriff Bastedo says.
He explains that they don’t have sufficient evidence to proceed. Then her blood runs cold as he tells her that they’ve uncovered her past as a small-time drug dealer. She thought that was dead and buried. That nobody knew.
‘None of that is true,’ she protests.
‘Right.’
She hangs up the phone without another word. Then she storms around her apartment, furious at the turn of events. She grabs the cushions from the sofa and throws them across the room. She’s so enraged that she overturns her coffee table and everything on it. Books, magazines, a dish of sweets go flying. Then she collapses onto the sofa, tries to calm down.
It doesn’t really matter whether Patrick goes to trial or not. It would have been nice to see him squirm. But financially speaking, it makes no difference. The Mannings still won’t want her hanging around their son, telling him the truth. They’ll still pay her. And keep paying her.
Stephanie is on her way out to Hanna’s place with the twins when Patrick stops her in the doorway for a goodbye kiss. She lets him kiss her on the mouth, even though his touch is distasteful to her. She can’t help it – she thinks of him kissing Erica. She tries not to show her revulsion. She doesn’t want to let him know how she feels, what she’s been thinking. She needs more time.
Just because Erica is a liar doesn’t necessarily mean she’s lying about Patrick. And she’s not satisfied by his explanation about the polygraph. She does now know, however, that he fucked Erica many, many times and lied to her about it. And that he perjured himself.
If she left him, she doesn’t know how he’d react. He’s seemed more possessive since he came home, always trying to touch her. Maybe she didn’t notice it before because it didn’t bother her. Maybe it’s just that he missed her in jail. Or maybe he can sense that she’s pulling away from him. If she tried to leave him, how would it end?
Would he be violent?
He would certainly be angry. She doesn’t know what he would do. If she left him and tried to take the twins – and her money – with her … She doesn’t really know what he’s capable of.
