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“Right, I do have a file on you, though I’m not sure how it ended up here instead of the office. I asked my PR department to put it together once we got engaged, partly out of pride but also so I’d sound halfway decent if I was asked in interviews about your work.”
Fair enough, she thinks, but the file is merely the tip of the iceberg. “Not just that, Tom. Scott said you heard me speak in New York, and there’s a program in there for a panel I was on a month after Miami. Your handwriting is in the margins.”
“What? No, that can’t be mine.”
“So it just dropped out of the sky and into a file with my initials on it?”
He throws up his hands, looking baffled. “Can you show me so that maybe I can make some sense of it?”
The two of them mount the back stairs and enter his office together, something they haven’t done since she was helping him set up the space. Tom watches as Emma tugs open the correct drawer and withdraws the file with her initials on the tab. As she does so, she feels a sudden swell of embarrassment. After a few seconds, she locates the program and passes it to Tom.
“Thanks,” he mutters. His eyes race down the page until eventually he raises his head so his eyes meet hers.
“It does look like my handwriting, but it’s not, Emma,” he says. “I didn’t attend this event.”
“Okay, so what’s it doing in the file?”
He tosses the program onto the top of the cabinet and rakes a hand through his hair again. “Let me talk to the PR folks and see where they found this. Someone on staff might have gone, saved the program for some reason, and passed it along for the file.”
Could it have been Halliday’s former number two, Stacey Manning? Maybe, as Emma had hoped, Stacey had attendedwithoutTom. Emma wants so desperately to believe him, to have her life back. But even if she accepts what he’s telling her about the program, there’s another big unanswered question.
“Where were you the night of Derrick’s murder, Tom?”
“WherewasI?” He narrows his eyes, confused. “In Stowe, like I told you.”
“Are you sure?”
“Wait,” he says, reeling back. “Are you asking if ImurderedDerrick?”
“Did you?”
“Mygod, Emma, how can you possibly think that?”
“I know you were MIA that night, Tom. You weren’t at the client dinner with everyone else.”
He studies her for a second, then flicks his gaze away.
“You’re right,” he says, looking back. “I wasn’t.”
Fear ripples through her. Is she in danger, she wonders—in danger from her own husband?
He seems ready to speak but lets out a long sigh instead and slides his phone from the pocket of his slacks. His fingers move quickly, tapping at first and then scrolling, before he thrusts the phone toward her. When she takes it from him, she sees an email from an address that’s unfamiliar to her, and she draws in a breath as she spots the date: the Sunday after Derrick’s murder.
Tom, Debra and I want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for everything you did for Jack. He’s going to be okay—except for a nasty concussion and shattered femur—but how awful if he’d been on his own, trying to navigate the hospital when he couldn’t even think straight. Your kindness means the world to us.
For a few seconds she doesn’t even breathe.
“Who’s Jack?” she manages to ask.
“A seventeen-year-old snowboarder who hit a tree up ahead of me during my last run of the day. I alerted ski patrol and stayed with him till they got there. He was completely out of it, and since his friends were just kids, too, I decided to meet the ambulance at the hospital and I stayed there until his parents arrived around midnight from Upstate New York.”
After all this worry, here’s the proof that he couldn’t have driven into Manhattan that night.
“Tom, I’m so sorry,” Emma says, pressing her hands to her temples. “I’ve just had all these crazy thoughts ricocheting around my head. I—”
“Emma, don’t worry,” he says, stepping forward and wrapping an arm around her. “Everythingis crazy right now. But I want things between us to be okay again.”
“Me, too.”
As she stands there, Emma feels the tension melt from her body. Tom didn’t kill Taylor. And he didn’t kill Derrick. And from what she can tell, he’s not going to let the suspicions she’s had undo their marriage. Maybe things really will be okay.
They have dinner together at the kitchen table, just the two of them, because when Brittany arrives home right after six, she says she ate in town. Tom presses her to sit with them for a minute, but she insists on going straight upstairs. To Emma, she still looks shell-shocked.
There’s a pall over their meal because of Taylor’s death, and yet she feels an incredible sense of relief, knowing thatat least things with Tom have returned to normal. Though he has to take a quick call from Dan and another from his PR director, he’s mostly engaged in their conversation and focused on her. As they’re loading the dishwasher after dinner, he pulls her into his arms and presses his lips against her forehead.It isokay, she thinks, it really is.
But as she’s lying in bed later, after they’ve made love for the first time in almost a week, Emma senses her fears edging back, trying to gain a stronghold. There are still questions she has no answers to. Who left her the notes on her car and in the studio, and had that person been trying to warn her about Tom? What about the bracelet Tom had given her, by a designer she’d worn in another life? When she and Tom hashed things out earlier, she’d forgotten to bring that up. And if it’s not Tom’s handwriting on the program, which she’s willing to accept, whose is it and why did the file end up in the house?
There are still loose ends, and each time she stuffs one in a box, another springs out, refusing to be contained. It’s as if the universe is trying to warn her about something, and she’s not paying attention at all.
