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“What’s a bitch?” Sasha asked.
Help me.“It’s not a very nice word, sweetie.”
“Like ‘shit’ and ‘fuck,’ ” her four-year-old said knowingly.
“Yes,” Chloe agreed, too stunned to say anything else.
“You said a bad word!” Sasha shouted up the stairs at her brother, then burst into tears of her own.
“Oh, please don’t cry, baby.” Chloe wrapped her daughter in a tight embrace. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
Was it? she wondered now. How could everything be okay when her husband was calling her a bitch in front of her children?
The phone on the kitchen counter rang again.
Chloe pushed herself away from the table and answered it. “Hello? Hello?” she repeated when there was no response. “Shit,” she said, hanging up, listening as it rang again seconds later. “Okay, listen,” she said into the receiver. “You obviously have the wrong number…”
“Is this Chloe?” an unfamiliar male voice asked.
“Yes. Who’s this?”
“You don’t know?”
“Should I?” Chloe raced through her memory to place the voice.
“Come on, Chloe. Don’t play dumb. I hate women who play dumb.”
A sliver of fear wormed its way beneath her skin. “Whoisthis?”
“You know what I like to do to women who play dumb?” the voice continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. “I like to fuck them in the ass until they bleed and beg for mercy…”
Chloe slammed the receiver down with such force, it jumped back into the air, like a serpent poised to strike, then fell toward the floor, dangling from the end of its coiled black cord. “Shit.” What the hell was that about?
She retrieved the receiver and quickly pressed *69, knowing even before she heard the recorded voice that the caller had blocked his number.
“Shit,” she said again. “What the hell is going on?” Then, “Okay, calm down.” It was just an obscene call. A pathetic, old-fashioned obscene call. People got them all the time. They were entirely random. There was no reason to be concerned. She could have been anyone.
Except the caller knew her name.
“Come on, Chloe. Don’t play dumb. I hate women who play dumb.”
Chloe tried again to place the voice, but it remained a mystery.
“You know what I like to do to women who play dumb?”
Chloe sank back into her chair at the kitchen table, burying her head inside her hands, trying to conjure up a face to match the angry voice, but nothing materialized.
Her first thought, of course, was that it was Matt. But Matt’s voice had an entirely different timbre to it. And after all their years together, she knew its every nuance and inflection. There was no way he could have disguised it so totally that she wouldn’t recognize it.
Her cellphone rang.
She glanced at it warily, letting it ring a second time before answering. “Hello?”
“You remember what happened to poor little Tiffany Sleight, don’t you?” the voice said menacingly. “First, I fucked her till she bled and begged for mercy…”
The cellphone dropped from Chloe’s hands, its face shattering upon contact with the tile floor. Seconds later, both children came running down the stairs into the kitchen.
“Mommy!” yelled Sasha, rushing to her side. “Mommy!”
