I knew enough.
The next line hits like a blow.
I stepped around the trees and saw them.
I don’t breathe.
He had her pinned against the trunk of a palm, one hand at her throat, the other?—
I stop reading for a fraction of a second.
Then force myself forward.
I moved closer, ready to swing, to do anything?—
A pause.
A shift.
Everything changes.
And then I saw his face.
My stomach drops.
It wasn’t a stranger.
The world narrows.
It was Stephen.
Chapter Sixteen
“Who the fuck is that?” I murmur at Bennett’s side, keeping my voice low enough that it doesn’t carry beyond us.
His gaze moves slowly over the small gathering in our backyard, taking in the women clustered near the bougainvillea hedge—Julia, Tara, Stephanie, Caroline, and a few other wives from the neighborhood, all of them balancing cocktails and grief with the same practiced elegance they bring to everything else. I know every face here because I invited every face here. The point of keeping this memorial small had been to make it feel intimate, controlled, contained.
Everyone is accounted for.
Everyone except her.
“Not sure,” Bennett says, his eyes narrowing as they settle on Phillip near the pool. Standing beside him is a young blonde woman in a bright, clingy sundress, her smile polite and uncertain, her whole presence jarring against the mood of the afternoon. “Maybe someone from work?”
“Really?” I turn to him, incredulous. “He’s the one who told me to keep it small. Ten people, that’s what he said. So how doeshe show up with a woman I’ve never seen in my life to Whitney’s memorial? I know everyone Whitney knew.”
Bennett glances down at me. “Everyone?”
“Everyone,” I say without hesitation.
He gives me a look that suggests he finds that unlikely, but I don’t care. Whitney and I told each other everything. Or at least I believed we did. There were no mystery women floating around the edges of her life. No young blondes in sundresses who somehow warranted a place at her memorial.
“Maybe she’s a cousin,” he says. “Or?—”
“Or maybe she’s his mistress.”
Bennett’s brows lift. “I wouldn’t say that too loudly.”
“Why not? You know it’s probably true.” I keep my eyes on Phillip as I say it, watching the way he stands too close to the woman, the way his posture has already shifted around her—less bereaved husband, more man trying to maintain control of a situation that’s beginning to fray. “That’s why he’s so detached. Whitney thought something was off. She said he wasn’t the man she married.”
