He pushes his hands through his hair. “I don’t know! I was drunk, but I wasn’t there when she died.”
“Ballpark it. How long before Gemma turned up dead did she get blood all over your clothes?”
“Hours. Maybe minutes. I don’t fucking know.”
I cover my eyes with both hands for a second. Everything is red. I squeeze my eyelids tighter, trying to make the view black again, trying to tap into my intuition.
Can I believe him?
Ordinarily, the answer would be yes. Unequivocally. But he washed his suit the night Gemma was murdered. And his clothes were stained with her blood.
“Este, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I was going to and then she fuckingdied,and I knew it would sound worse than it actually was. I didn’t want you to be upset,” he insists.
“What was she upset about?”
He starts to answer, but nothing comes out.
I take him in, looking for the cracks, looking for some kind of proof that he didn’t do this. Worse, I listen for some sinister signal from my intuition to tell me that he did.
Beau traps the lizards that get stuck in our house to set them free. He wouldn’t hurt Gemma.
“She was angry about something from years ago. Before we moved—before we were even married,” Beau says, casting his eyes down to the pocket square.
“Then why bring it up now?”
“I don’t know.” He’s off his stool now, animated, and he looks…guilty.
He’s lying.
My mind starts racing to poke holes, searching for the weakness. “If this thing she was upset about was so old, why can’t you just tell me about it? Why was she still bringing it up? And why hand her a silk pocket square when there were bar towels everywhere?”
He doesn’t have a response, but I watch him try to gather one. The knots in my stomach are so tight it’s hard to breathe.
“Este, why didn’t you tell me you found this?” he asks, pointing to the silk square.
“Would it have mattered?” I fire back. “You’re not telling me everything now. Would you have told me the truth then?”
His jaw flexes. “You think Istrangledher.”
Strangled.The blunt force of the word lands in my chest like a fist. My body rejects it before my brain catches up. “No,” I insist. “But I think there’s something you’re not saying.”
We stare each other down for a moment, dread thick in the air between us. And I don’t recognize who we are right now.
Feeling distant from him is like being lost at sea. He’s the person I’ve come to count on. The most reassuring presence I can imagine.
And he’s lying.
“You’ve always been the one person I never had to doubt. But—” My voice catches, and I choke the sadness down.
I want him to fight for me. To fight for us by telling me whatever he’s holding back. But he’s folding, and whatever he’s keeping from me feels like betrayal.
“Why won’t you tell me what she was angry about?”
He runs his hands through his hair. “Because it doesn’t matter. Not now. Not anymore.”
He stands there, waiting for me to soften. As if we could find a way to laugh this off or I could say anything that would make it less horrible. But I don’t. I can’t.
So he turns toward the hall, opening his mouth for a second like he might speak, but then he doesn’t. He starts walking away.He usually moves like he has nowhere to be—the coolest of cool guy lopes—but now, his movement is clipped, like he’s walking off a sucker punch.
