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“It’s not.” He leans a hip against a kitchen island, taking a sip of his water. “I don’t usually do irrational splurges. This is a rare indulgence, and I’m hoping after we’re done with each other, I’ll find it easier to terminate the lease.”
His words hit me somewhere deep, because a lot of the time, I wish I could hate Paul too. It’d be the easiest way to get over him.
Approaching Arsène, I grab the small water bottle he handed me and unscrew it. “And when do you expect us to be done with each other?”
“That depends on your cooperation, Bumpkin.”
“Stop calling me Bumpkin.”
“Stop being offended by it,” he fires back. “You shouldn’t care what anyone thinks of you. It never does a person any good. And, at any rate, people’s opinion of you is a reflection of themselves. Not you.”
“I always feel like you’re expecting me to be embarrassed about where I come from.”
“And what if I do?” He lingers on this point. “Why should you succumb to other people’s wants and expectations? You have free agency and an admirable mind. Keep shutting me down. Fight back. Never be ashamed of where you come from. A person has no future without first owning up to their past.”
“And you?” I tilt my head sideways. “Have you owned up to your past yet?”
His eyes meet mine. He looks pensive. “Next question.”
I grin. I got him there. It’s a small win, but a win, nonetheless. “You’re hiding something.”
“We’re all hiding something.” He rolls his eyes. “Some of us are just better at keeping secrets.”
He has a point.
“So . . . where should we start?” I look around us.
“Her bedroom.” Arsène pushes himself off the island and advances toward the hallway. “Where they probably spent most of their time together. The bastards.”
Not that it should surprise me, but I do find things that place Paul and Grace at the scene of the crime together.
There’s a stainless steel watch with a mother-of-pearl pink dial, identical to the one he gifted me for Christmas, in Grace’s jewelry box. Both watches are engraved, and with the same font. There is also a hoodie Paul used to wear that mysteriously disappeared on one of his business trips neatly tucked inside her closet, and a jar of a very particular type of moon cakes in her kitchen, which Paul was obsessed with, and I’d had to find for him even when it wasn’t Lunar New Year.
His DNA is all over this place. And they hadn’t even been here often. Arsène had keys to this apartment, which means Grace could only host Paul here when he was out of town.
“You know what? I actually expected to find more,” I murmur when Arsène and I both collapse on Grace’s couch. “Seeing as they’d had an affair for at least nine months.”
“But consider this,” he counters. “She knew I let myself in here whenever I pleased. The cookies are telling, Bumpkin. They show a level of intimacy. If this was a passing fling, they wouldn’t know each other’s culinary preferences.”
I fling my head against the couch, closing my eyes.
“Why didn’t they leave us?” I croak, opening my eyes. I find Arsène looking at me in a funny way. Something between annoyance and surprise.
“Well.” He smiles wryly. “Because I was too rich, and you were too good a catch to give up. I don’t think Paul and Grace planned to leave us for one another. They simply wanted to stick it to us. For Grace, it was about not belonging to me. This was her way of assuring herself she hadn’t given in to me completely. With Paul . . .” He trails off, giving me a sidelong glance. “Hmm, now I wonder. What did you do to piss him off? Burned your famous apple pie?”
If only . . .
I know exactly where I fell short for Paul.
Of course, I’d rather die than share this with Arsène.
“You don’t have to say.” He pats my knee. “The answer’s plain on your face. Poor Winnifred.”
I feel myself turning crimson, and I’m about to lash out at him, give him a piece of my mind. Then something occurs to me.
“You know, I think Paul was mad about who I was. I mean, I think he liked me as an idea, not a person. The wholesome little blonde wife with the cute accent who made cookies and volunteered in hospitals and knew how to throw an axe. But then he saw how his colleagues looked at me—Chip and Pablo and even Grace—and he was . . . I don’t know, disappointed.”
“Disappointed how?”
“They didn’t really see me as their equal. A worthy opponent. Oh.” I wave my hand, laughing through the pain. “It’s not that they didn’t like me. They did. But kind of how you like your pet dog. They saw me as adorable and disposable. And then after the plane crashed, when I called Chip and Pablo over and over again, asking, begging for answers, for them to shed some light on why Paul and Grace were together, neither of them took my calls. At first they were apologetic about it, but then soon I stopped even getting their awkward text messages and started getting their PAs’.”
