Instead of answering, he had made love to her, right there on the workbench in the gallery basement.
But as time went on, he felt how tense she had gotten, how worried about their future. At the very beginning, when they’d first found out she was pregnant, she had said she didn’t expect him to leave his wife, that she understood Beth and Sam were his family, and that she and their baby would be fine. She was an independent woman, a grown-up. She had gotten into this with her eyes wide open.
And she had been amazing, self-sufficient, and accomplished, a winner of academic prizes, the author of an important and widely circulated monograph on Benjamin Morrison. Someone Pete would have been proud to be with.
But midway through the pregnancy, everything changed. She had become needy, even nagging. Whispering “I want to wake up next to you every day” had given way to constant tears and whining, “When, when, when?”
By the time she gave birth, he had watched her confidence drain away, witnessed this gorgeous, brilliant woman transform into someone who couldn’t completely lose the baby weight, who smelled like Tyler’s spit-up, who would rather read parenting magazines than keep up with trends in curation and advances in her work as a conservator.
The seduction had been lovely, but the pressures were ruining his life. All he had ever wanted was to do justice to the sacrifices his mom had made for him to get ahead. He wanted to make people, especially her, proud of him. Beth had given him so much. She represented stability, prestige, the life he had worked for. They had a wonderful daughter together. They were known and respected in the art world.
But once he fell in love with Nicola, she was all he could think about. Before her, he’d had a hard time really understanding love—it had felt more like an ambition, a responsibility, than an all-consuming feeling. He was all set to leave Beth for her until his lovely, crafty wife outsmarted him: right after Tyler was born, Beth gave him the news.
Thatshewas going to have a baby too.
To Pete, the pregnancies were a one-two punch.
The sick irony was, Beth no longer wanted him; even though she was pregnant, she had asked for the separation. He had never seen her like this, the way she had been in the months before her death. She had become almost brash, standing up for herself, even when it was at his expense—like when she’d called his mother and told her everything.
Back when they’d first met, he had sensed her vulnerability—she was only twenty-two, a recent college graduate, running the family gallery, dealing with the horrible way she had lost her mother. She needed a man who would be everything to her—to heal her pain, to be her family, to make up for what her father had done. Pete’s instincts about Beth, about women, had been dead on.
He thanked his mother for that.
His mom was a saint—there was no other way to look at it. Pete remembered how the kitchen light would be on past midnight, his mother studying at the Formica table. Pete had to find a way to make her life easier.
She had not been able to afford a new computer on her own, but even though Pete was only in eighth grade, he had saved from his after-school job cleaning up at a downtown gym, given her money to help buy it. His brothers and sisters could not be bothered, and his mother had rewarded him for it. “Here comes my jewel,” she’d say when he’d go into the kitchen for his nightly glass of milk. Nothing had made him feel better than the sound of her fingers clicking on the keyboard, doing her schoolwork.
And now, thanks to Beth, his mother knew about Nicola and Tyler. He had never wanted to disappoint his mother, a devout Catholic who despised anyone who committed adultery, never mind getting divorced. This woman who had given the best years of her life so Pete could succeed.
It was a struggle. Nicola had wanted a future for them. Beth had tired of him. She had not been able to hide it, and he hadn’t been able to keep pretending that their lives had been great—that what had gone on between them privately matched up to how they had looked from the outside: the perfect Black Hall couple with the elegant art gallery and big house and lovely, brilliant daughter.
He’d made a fucking mess of everything. And now he couldn’t go back and fix it, not at all. It was too late.
He couldn’t stop thinking of his and Beth’s last minutes together. He had hugged and kissed her, told her how much he loved her. He had told her he was worried about her health, wondering if he should leave on the sailing trip at all. He had begged her to rest, to stay cool and out of the sun, not worry about the garden, keep her feet elevated, stay in bed as much as she could while he was gone. He ran through these thoughts over and over, until he could feel them happening again.Hugged, kissed, I love you, worried, you need to rest, Beth, keep your feet up, stay in bed ...
“Oh, Beth,” he said out loud now. Almost as if she could still hear him.
And he felt pierced by guilt because her death had made everything so much easier. Even though his love for Nicola was draining away, at least he didn’t have to deal with two demanding women.
One was really enough.
Sometimes he wondered, though, whether the wrong woman had died.
Finally, the phone rang—“Green, Green, and Wolcott Attorneys-at-Law” popped up on the screen.
“Mac!” he said in his most jovial way. “Finally, we speak.”
“Sorry, Pete, I was in court all morning. What’s up?”
“I really need to know when you’re scheduling my polygraph.”
Silence on the line, then Mac’s low voice. “We discussed that. I strongly advise against it.”
“Right, you don’t like your clients taking them. But guess what, Mac? I don’t know about your other clients, but I’m innocent. I need to prove that as soon as possible so Reid and the rest of them start looking for the actual murderer.”
“Pete,” Mac began.
“I have to insist on this,” Pete said. “If you don’t want to represent me anymore, fine. I’ll do it on my own.”
