“Is he?” I ask quietly.
He shrugs, like there’s no point chasing the question to its end. “How does surf and turf sound for dinner? I picked up ribeyes and prawns on the way home.”
“That sounds perfect.” I smile as he pushes himself up from the lounger and heads toward the outdoor kitchen.
Bennett loves to cook, and he moves around a kitchen with a natural confidence I’ve always envied. It is one of the many things I love about him, the way nurturing comes so easily to him when it never did to the people who raised me. He makes me feel cherished in a way I never understood as a child, when I watched other mothers fuss over scraped knees and celebrate honor roll certificates while my own barely seemed to notice when I won equestrian awards or graduated valedictorian.
Kathy Williams might have taken me to some polished waterfront restaurant to mark an achievement if it fit neatly into her schedule, but more often than not I ate with the maid and put myself to bed. Hugs and kisses and I love you were never part of the Williams vocabulary. When I was younger, I used towonder why they had adopted me at all if love was never going to enter the arrangement. By the time I hit my teens, though, I had stopped asking that question. I was simply grateful I hadn’t been raised on the reservation, grateful for the education, the safety, the future they placed within reach. In hindsight, maybe that was why they took me to meet my biological family when I was twelve. Maybe it was their way of teaching me gratitude by comparison. It worked, in its own way. It just didn’t make me love them more.
“McCullough!”
I hear Chrissy before I see her.
“Hey,” I call back, pasting on a warm smile as she appears through the hedge between our houses. I feel a brief, guilty recoil at the sight of her stepping out of Whitney’s yard, because some stubborn part of me still resists the reality that anyone else occupies that space now. But if I’m going to make Chrissy trust me, I need to believe in the performance of our friendship just as much as she does.
“Phillip is in a rage,” she says as she drops onto the lounger Bennett just vacated.
“Why?” I ask, and the question comes out more casually than I feel. Whitney never once described him that way. Irritated, dismissive, controlling, yes. But rage suggests something more volatile, something less polished.
“He’s been dealing with investigators from the insurance company all day, and they’re being ruthless.” She shakes her head, eyes wide with indignation on his behalf. “They won’t approve his claim because they think there may have been foul play.”
“Really?” I keep my face carefully measured, though I can feel something electric spark beneath my skin. “I thought the fire chief said it was spontaneous combustion from a pile of rags.”
“They did say that, but I guess that’s not enough for the insurance people. They think Phillip may have had something to do with it.” She lowers her voice, as if sharing something intimate. “And then the life insurance company is giving him hell too. They want to go through the whole thing step by step. A house visit, then the marina, then a full walkthrough of what happened.”
“How is he supposed to do that without the yacht?”
“The sheriff seized what’s left of it.” She rolls her eyes. “It’s sitting at the county marina all chained up, half destroyed. It’s awful.”
I study her while she talks. She is so willing to believe what she’s told that part of me almost envies it. She accepts each new explanation without resistance, folds it into place, and moves on. It is probably one of the reasons Phillip likes her so much. She’s easy.
“What’s he going to do?” I ask.
“Whatever they ask, I guess. He got off the phone earlier and threw it across the room. Put a hole in the wall above the fireplace.” She lowers her voice. “He’s been kind of unhinged lately. I’ve never seen him like this. But I guess he’s never lost a wife before.”
Or murdered one, I think.
“The boat claim is frozen because the cause of the explosion looks suspicious,” she continues. “The life insurance won’t approve anything because there’s no body, and the coroner won’t sign a death certificate without proof that she died. The captain is dead, Phillip’s lucky to be alive, and they still don’t know where Whitney even was on the boat.” She pauses. “The last time she was seen was on the marina CCTV footage. She boarded with Phillip and the captain.”
There’s a sharp shift inside me at that. “There’s CCTV footage?”
Chrissy nods. “Yeah. She was wearing that huge sunhat she always wore. Giant black sunglasses, a caftan, the whole thing. I mean, from the pictures I’ve seen, that seems very her.”
The mention of the hat hits me harder than it should. Whitney loved that ridiculous oversized Gucci hat, and I used to tease her that she looked like she belonged on some yacht in Ibiza with Jennifer Lopez. It was exactly the kind of over-the-top detail that made her Whitney, extravagant and self-aware and impossible not to love.
Emotion rises quickly, hot and unwelcome. I blink hard and force it down.
“God, I’m sorry,” Chrissy says, misreading my silence. “This must be really hard for you. I keep forgetting you two were close.”
“Not that close,” I say too quickly.
I need her comfortable. I need her to believe I have no real loyalty here, that whatever existed between Whitney and me was shallow enough not to threaten her.
Chrissy offers me a sympathetic smile. “Phillip isn’t sleeping. He’s been so angry during the day, and we’ve been fighting more. I just moved in, and already it feels like he hates me. Sometimes it feels like we’ve been married for twenty years.”
A frown flickers across my face before I can stop it, and she catches it instantly. Her eyes slip away from mine and she goes quiet.
“I guess there’s no right way to grieve,” I say finally, repeating some hollow thing I must have read online in the middle of the night.
