Page 7 of Cruel Lies

Perfume.

Floral and warm and a little powdery, with something sweet at the bottom of it, like vanilla or spun sugar. It's pretty. Truly lovely.

And it is soaked into the pillow on my husband's side of my marital bed… but it is definitely not mine.

Just like that, the picture is complete. The laughing blonde, petite and delicate like Thumbelina, raking French-tipped nails down my husband's back as they tumble post-coitally across this pillow, in this bed, the exact same place where Todd held my hand the night before each of our children was born and told me I was the strongest person he'd ever known.

The scale wasn't broken.

The scale was the only honest thing in this entire house.

Because the woman ruining my life weighs 142 pounds. She stood barefoot on my bathroom scale at three in the morning, and somewhere in a distant server farm, a piece of software that I bought to track my own slow, stubborn, post-baby pounds saw that incoming data and decided I'd reached my goal.

Congratulations, Cali. You did it.

I wish I could cry. I want to. I keep waiting for it to come, the way it always comes at the end of sad movies, at the kids' birthdays, at the part in the wedding where the dad walks the bride down the aisle. I'm a crier. I cry at insurance commercials.

But not now. There's just this cold, clear, flat thing where the panic used to be.

Because the gremlin in my chest has finally, mercifully, shut up. I'm not crazy. I never was. Todd has been telling me I'm crazy for months—you need a therapist, Cal, you should look into some anxiety meds, you're really losing it lately—but the whole time, the wholeentirefucking time, I was right.

The question that remains is…

What am I going to do about it?

3

RONAN

There's a certain kind of man I can spot the second he walks into my office.

Todd Bradshaw is one of them.

It's my name embossed on the skyscraper—THE AKOV FIRMin gilded, eight-foot-tall sans serif—and yet he saunters in likeheowns the place. Big shoulders, big handshake, big watch. The watch is the tell. It's the kind of thing a guy buys when he wants you to know he's done well for himself, but he doesn't actually know enough about watches to buy the right one. He just walked into a store and pointed at the most expensive thing in the case.

"Mr. Akov," he says. "Thanks for seeing me on short notice."

I never take meetings like this. My time is far too valuable to be spent dealing with the petty squabbles of arrogant strangers. But apparently, one of the other firm partners has done some consulting work for Todd's investment bank, so Todd called in a favor and weaseled his way onto my appointment books. I make a mental note to send that partner on a business development trip to Siberia in the near future as punishment for his sins.

But as it stands now, I'm stuck dealing with this bullshit.

Under other circumstances, I would've told my secretary to politely escort Mr. Bradshaw to the door. But it turns out that Todd here is as lucky as he is irritating, because I have a few minutes to kill. I've got a call coming in this morning at ten on the dot. Not on my office phone and not on my personal phone, but on a third device, one that few people have the number to and even fewer have the balls to dial.

It's a call that could change fuckingeverything.

Therefore, I've made sure my morning remained clear. And as a result, I've got time to kill. Todd Bradshaw walked in at the right moment, looking like a man who's about to entertain me until I decide I've had enough of playing with my food and I send him screaming for the hills.

"Take a seat," I say, gesturing toward one of the two hyper-modern chairs in front of my desk. They look great, but they're intentionally torture devices for the human spine. I prefer any and all visitors to my office spend their time in discomfort, so they leave as soon as possible. "What can I do for you, Mr. Bradshaw?"

"Todd's fine." He settles down and crosses one ankle over the opposite knee, twiddling his thumbs, looking far too at ease for my liking.

"Very well then. What can I do for you, Todd?"

He glances around. "Nice place you got here. Swanky as fuck."

I cast an eye around the room. Objectively speaking, he isn't wrong. It's a nice office. Thick, leather-bound legal tomes on the hand-carved bookshelves, a wall of windows behind me lookingout over the whole city, the glass so clean you'd think there was nothing there at all.

The desk I sit behind is a single slab of black walnut, big enough to lay a man flat on and carve his heart out of his chest without spilling a drop of blood on the white carpet below. The only art in the place is a single oil painting done by a man who never painted again after I took this from him. It's a hunting scene, rendered in harsh, angular shapes and violently dark tints. Dogs, faceless men with guns, a stag run down to its last breath.