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My hand sank into her ass on my way past, giving her a smirk over my shoulder.
That was our life for the next week – keeping up appearances while the staff was around, then having our nights to ourselves, both of us dreaming about what it might be like not to have to sneak around so much.
She met with the lawyer on the fourth day in his office where she was informed that – as expected given the circumstances – she got everything. The cars, the house, the stock options in the company though she clearly didn’t take over his place as the CEO.
Oh, and she got the apartment.
The apartment she didn’t even know about.
The apartment he likely used to fuck around on her.
She’d kept it together in the office. I expected her to break down in the car after.
When all she did was stare out the window, I reached over to squeeze her thigh. “You okay?”
I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t for her to send me a humorless smile. “It’s not like I didn’t know he cheated on me,” she told me, shrugging. “In a way, I’m glad. It meant he reached for me less.”
I felt myself cringe a bit at that, at something I hadn’t exactly thought of. I’d known about the beatings, about his psychological warfare. I hadn’t really considered sexual abuse. Maybe I simply didn’t want to. It wasn’t like me per se. I knew all about the atrocities that happened to women from right here in the U. S. of A to everywhere I had ever seen abroad. Girls traded like sacks of grain. Held down in public squares where no one came to the sounds of their screams.
It happened everywhere.
It happened within the walls in many homes in our country.
Of course, it happened here where a man broke her fucking jaw, her eye socket, her ribs.
Of course, he’d held her down, forced himself on her.
The thought made my stomach twist, my spit burn like battery acid.
Not for the first time, I wished the bastard was alive so I could kill him myself. Even if it was all the more just that his victim ended up the one doing him in.
“You want to go home?”
“I want to go to the apartment,” she corrected, opening the folder that her lawyer had handed to her, pulling out the deed.
“Are you sure that is…”
“Yes,” she cut me off, reminding me that she hated anyone – especially me – telling her what she could or couldn’t handle.
Chastened, I checked the address for a place overlooking the river, then drove us there.
“I know you don’t think this is healthy, but I needed to do this,” she told me after fishing out the key to open the door to a goddamn penthouse apartment.
“I get that,” I agreed, knowing I would never be able to sleep until I saw it either.
“It’s nicer than the one we shared before we were married,” she declared as we moved into a space – all white, clean to the point of sterile and wholly un-homey with all its sharp lines and glass. “Do you think Maritza cleans this place too? Walking around my house knowing about his bachelor pad?” she asked, not really wanting answers as she moved through the house, opening the kitchen cabinets, finding them bare save for some liquor and glasses to pour it into. “Eight-hundred thousand,” she said, shaking her head at the extravagance of it.
“Are you going to sell it?”
“Yes,” she answered without pausing as she moved through to the bedroom, sitting down on the side of the bed that Teddy likely slept on, pulling open the nightstand drawer. “I knew it,” she said, the victory a hollow sound as she reached into a drawer to pull out a plastic bag loaded with pills.
I moved forward, taking it from her, looking at the pills. “Christ. He’s got a pharmacy. Percs, vics, some Adderall. And this, this is fucking Fentanyl,” I told her, pointing out the pills in question. “Eighty times more potent than morphine. No wonder you thought he was up and down all the time. There’s no way his father didn’t know about this,” I mused.
“He said something about another scandal,” she said, going through the other drawers, finding some bottles prescribed to him and some dime bags full of powder.
“Yeah,” I agreed, nodding, taking the powder from her, guessing heroin or cocaine, taking it into the bathroom to flush. “This is an expensive as fuck habit too. And he had access to company accounts.”
She went through the bathroom cabinets, tossing everything into the bin before going to clear the rest of the contents out of the nightstand.
“Do you think you have someone who could crack into this?” she asked when I came back out to find her holding a laptop she’d found in a closet. “He’s kept so much from me. I want to know that this was it. I’m done being blind.”
