I wish like hell that part of me wasn’t actually considering the offer. I mean, who, exactly, is in my corner right now? Let’s take stock.
My husband: dead, thank God.
My sister: dead,notthank God.
My cousin Dani: well-meaning, but definitely out-gunned by a long shot.
My partner-in-murder, my Blue-Eyed Bastard, the man who promised me the world: gone. Bailed out and vanished. Not so much as asee ya lateron his way out the door.
So in a really sick way, there’s an argument that this is my best-case scenario. Fifteen years… The baby would be in middle school by then. Awkward and gangly and with many questions, I’m sure—butalive.Alive and free. Raised by Dani, maybe, in a tidy walk-up in Astoria with a fireman uncle who’d teach her how to throw a baseball and be kind to others.
It’s an option. A grimy, awful, fifteen-years-of-hell option.
But still. An option.
Which is how I should’ve known there would be a catch.
DeMaris does a small, sympathetic click of his tongue, as if he can hear me getting tempted. “Now, there is one small unfortunate wrinkle.” He almost sounds genuinely regretful. “The pregnancy, I fear, isn’t going to make it. These things happen, especially under the kind of stress incarceration imposes on a woman in her first trimester. There’ll be some bleeding, a trip to the infirmary, and a visit from the warden to pass along his condolences. Some women find that comforting.”
I keep myself plastered to the cinderblock wall behind me, because if I don’t, I’m going to slide down the wall like wet paint. The maroon coverlet looks suddenly nauseating, the color of old blood.
“Could you repeat that bit, please?”
DeMaris tilts his head to the side. “I know it’s a lot, dear. I’m just outlining what’s medically plausible in a facility like this. So many tough things about the penitentiary system: stress, malnutrition… a little something slipped into the morning meds… Nature takes its course. Nobody looks twice at a miscarriage in lockup.”
My bean, my blueberry, my precious little poppy seed…Hello, little thing…just… gone?
“You’re going to kill my baby,” I state.
“I’m going to make itpossible,” he corrects, “for you to make a sensible choice.”
I bite the inside of my cheek until I taste blood, because if I cry now, I’m done for.
Keep your mask on, girl,I beg myself.You’re not beaten just yet.
“I really am sorry,” he says. “All good things come at a price. Believe me: The alternative was much messier, and I do hate mess. I lost an old friend to mess last week. Two old friends, if we’re counting Suze, which I do.”
“Are you talking about Bill and Susan?”
He nods and gazes wistfully into the distance while fiddling with his cufflink. “Bill was the best of us, in his way. A sentimentalist. He keptrecords, Cassandra. Can you imagine? Inthisbusiness?Like a little stash of love letters from his friends and colleagues. If it weren’t so damned stupid, it would almost make you fond of the man.”
“Oh” is the most I can muster up.
“Your husband is a tough loss as well. Raymond was useful to me for a long time,” he goes on. I don’t know who he’s talking to now, but it isn’t me, not really. I get the feeling he’s simply talking to hear himself speak. “He was my front of house, you see. Good-looking man. People liked him. He took the meetings I couldn’t take, signed the papers I couldn’t sign, and the firm laundered exactly as much money as I asked it to, no more and no less. For a while, at least. Then Raymond got it into his head that he was the chef and not the busboy. He started skimming. And we can’t have that. No, no, dear me, no.”
He clucks his tongue again as he shakes his head.
“So Raymond had to go. That was already decided, well before any of this. The Caymans trip was meant to handle it cleanly. But then Raymond started panicking, and panicking men do panicky things. One of those things was leaning on Bill to find a way out together.” He shakes his head sadly. “I couldn’t have that. If Bill broke, everything broke. So Bill’s hotel room had to have a little problem. Susan, bless her, was tougher than she looked. She held on long enough that I had to make another call I didn’t want to make. That one hurt me. IlikedSuze. We summered together in the Hamptons for thirty years.”
My breath is trickling in and out of my lungs, just enough to keep me conscious and upright but not nearly enough to stave off the feelings of my world caving in all around me.
“Now, we come to you.” His eyes settle on me. There’s nothing kind in them anymore, no matter how soft his voice stays. “You were never the plan, Cassandra. You were theframe. A pretty face on a courtroom sketch. The boys downtown were going to do their work — Mr. Satyrin in particular was going to dohis—and you were going to wake up next to a corpse. Which, frankly, would have been a kinder fate than this one.” He gestures lazily around the depressing room. we’re in “But, ah…men. It’s not just women—we menfolk get sentimental, too. Mr. Satyrin took a long look at you and lost sight of his mission.”
My stomach kicks at that. I shove it down. The baby doesn’t need to hear any of this.
“So we improvised,” he concludes. “And here we are.”
There’s a long pause. He’s giving me the floor.Your turn, sweetheart. Dance for me. Make it pretty.
