Page 132 of Cruel Lies

"She understood?"

"Yeah. She put it together fast. I couldn't… I—Ro, I couldn't lie to her. I just told her to talk to you. And that I was sorry."

"You told her you were sorry?"

I'm asking dumb questions, but my head feels like it's full of shower steam. Thoughts won't connect. I just feel numb and delirious.

"What the hell was I supposed to say, man?" There's an edge in him now, defensive, but underneath it, he sounds sick. "She was breathing like she'd been shot. So I just told her to talk to you and I hung up because there was nothing else I could do that wouldn't make it worse."

I open my eyes.

The napkin is still on the bedspread. I force myself to look down at it. Such a cheap, fragile thing. I only kept it in the first place because it was hers. I kept it in my desk for a week before I brought it to her door, and I told her the truth then:It's just designed to show you I was paying attention.

Iwaspaying attention.

But not in the ways she thought I was.

I was paying so much attention because I was building a cage out of everything I learned. The invoice. The power of attorney. The filing I blamed on Todd. The full access to her corporate books. Every door I held open, every fire I put out, every time I told her,Trust me, I'll handle it, don't move, don't leave—I was measuring her for this.

Navi warned me it would come to pass like this. He stood in my office and told me flat out,Don't be surprised when she can't tell the difference between you and Todd. Because from where she'll be standing, there won't be one.

He was right.

There isn't one.

That's what kills me most of all as I stand here in a towel in a room that suddenly feels like a hotel I've never lived in. From where she's standing right now, there's no difference at all. A man who smiled to her face and did his damage behind her back. She has a word for that man. She built an entire machine to catch him. She stood in a conference room and took him apart slide by slide and never raised her voice.

This time, that man is me.

"Ronan," Navi says in my ear. "You still there?"

"Yeah."

"What do you want me to do?"

I don't answer right away. Instead, I walk to the window. Central Park is a black mass below, the city lit up all around it, forty stories of steel and concrete separating me from the ground. I can see my own reflection in the glass, hollow-eyed and gaunt.

I wonder what Cali would see if she saw her own reflection right now.

"Ronan," Navi says again. "What do you want to do?"

I look at the reflection in the glass. At the man my father made. At the man I swore, on my mother's grave, I would never become.

The napkin was a promise that I'd walk away.

But now that she's handed it to me… can I really go that easily?

35

CALI

The Uber ride home is a blur of streetlights and my own reflection in the window, though I refuse to glance at it for long. There's no point—I know what I look like.

I look like a woman who fell for the cruelest lies of all.

Again.

By the time I let myself into the brownstone, I've stopped crying. Mostly. The house is dark and quiet without the kids. I stand in the foyer with their little rainboots lined up against the wall and breathe.