Yeah? Maybe if you stayed with me, acted like my goddamn husband, I’d be flirting with you.
But that was a long time ago. “I would, buddy” he said, mocking Keane’s use of the word. “I would let it go. Except your fiancée keeps calling me.”
There was a silence on the other end of the line and Grady felt a rush of satisfaction. “All the shiny and new rubbing off? Underneath just the same old thing?”
Sean didn’t give him the benefit of a reaction, but Grady heard his voice tighten when the other man spoke again.
“Give it up, Crowe. The wedding’s in a week.”
“Yeah. And a year from now, you’re going to find yourself on another bar stool bitching about Clara the way you bitched about Angie.” He let a beat pass. “Hey, how’s that boy of yours? Missing his daddy?”
The line went dead and Grady enjoyed a moment of self-righteous glee. He was the injured party, the one who’d kept his vows-he liked lording that over them. It comforted him. Clara and Sean hurt a lot of people to be together; he hoped they lost a little sleep over it.
But after a moment, the rush of pleasure passed and he felt lower than he had before, which was pretty low. Now Clara would be upset with him for betraying her to Sean. If she called again, it would be in anger and disappointment. She’d phoned him in a vulnerable moment and he used it to hurt her. He wished he could take it back, what he’d said. He wished he’d protected her instead of offering her up to get his licks in with Keane.
One of Clara’s more memorable cuts came back to him: You’re not even adult enough to be someone’s husband. What kind of father would you be?
“Shit.” He almost hit the dash, but his fist still ached from the last miserable phone call. “Shit.”
By the time he’d cooled down and was entering the precinct, Jez was exiting.
“Don’t bother,” she said. “The lawyer is already here. What took you so long, anyway?”
“I was looking for parking,” he said lamely.
She seemed skeptical but stopped short of giving him a hard time again. Instead she patted him on the back to get him moving.
“Well, let’s roll,” she said. “When’s the last time you went dancing?”
“So long ago, I don’t even remember what it feels like.”
She gave a little grunt. “Join the club.”
18
I had this nervous tick of using my thumbnail to tug at the back of my wedding ring. Of course, every time I tried to do this, I was reminded that the ring was gone.
I never had a traditional wedding band, always hated the idea of that for some reason-as though it was some kind of bond to the normal, the common idea of marriage. The ring Marcus gave me at our engagement, a ruby set in a platinum band, was the only jewelry I wore. I loved its glinting red fire, the simple beauty of a single gem, something pure mined from the earth. Not flashy but stately. Not for show, for real. Of course, it was all flash, all show, none of it real. And the ring, like everything else, was gone.
“It’s all I have from my mother, from my past. I don’t know how she came to have this. But my aunt gave it to me when I left for the states. I had it set for you. It’s yours.”
I wanted to know more about the gem, about his mother. But his memories, he said, were fuzzy. He remembered a smiling face framed in curls, a wafting scent of lemon verbena. That was all. Of his father, there was nothing at all. It was terribly unsatisfying for a fiction writer, to be deprived of the texture and details of my husband’s history. I imagined that the ruby had been given to his mother by a man she loved, maybe not Marcus’s father, maybe a gypsy from Romania, and that she’d kept it hidden, maybe sewn inside a coat. She never looked at it, but took great comfort in thinking of its flame, that passionate blood red. It reminded her of love. I imagined that somewhere she was pleased to know the ruby was out in the light, on the hand of a woman her son loved and married. I kept these fantasies to myself. He didn’t like to talk about the past, grew stiff and cold. I used to think it was because it caused him too much pain, but more likely it was because it was too much effort to keep all the lies straight.
“What are you thinking about?” Jack walked on my left, the park yawning to the right.
“My ring. It’s gone. Someone took it.”
“I’m sorry. I noticed. I thought maybe you took it off.” There were running footfalls behind us and both of us startled, turned only to be passed quickly by a rail-thin young woman wearing headphones and breathing too hard. We started walking again.
“How could this have happened?” I asked.
He didn’t answer, just gave a slow shake of his head. We were moving fast, both of us nervous, unsure what we were heading into, or why, or what we were going to do when we got there.
“You didn’t like him. Neither did Linda. Okay. But this? Did you imagine this?”
“Linda didn’t like him?” He seemed pleased.
“Jack,” I snapped. “Answer me.”
“No. Not this. Of course not. Who could imagine this?” He took a few long strides so that he was in front of me, then turned around, stopping me. The Children’s Gate was just two blocks away now. He held out a hand.
“Give me the gun,” he said, sounding practical, assured. He was the man, he should be holding the gun. That simple.
“No,” I said, pushing past him. He grabbed my arm and didn’t let go even when I struggled.
“Jack,” I said, feeling anger, too much anger, rise in my chest, a kind of free fall in my belly. “Let go of me.”
I tried to wrest my arm from him, but he held fast.
“I mean it,” I said. “Let go.”
“Calm down, Isabel,” he said gently. “Look. It’s me.”
I looked at his face and my anger burned out. Just the eye contact calmed me, and I was aware of how rigid my body was, stiff at the shoulders, arm muscles tensed.
“We need a plan, a course of action.”
“Impossible.”
“Why?”
“We have no frame of reference. Nothing like this has ever happened to either one of us.”
We were moving again, Jack still holding tight to my arm as though he thought I might try to bolt. “We need to decide what to say at least,” he said reasonably.
And then it was too late. We both saw him, standing against the low stone wall. Just the look of him, furtive, anxious, told me that he was the one waiting for Camilla Novak. I was sure of it.
Jack and I separated. He kept so close behind me, I could feel him at my back. I look back at this moment now and think how foolish we were. New Yorkers think we own the world, that our proximity to reported crime-even if we are as pampered and sheltered as children in a nursery-makes us savvy and street smart. We believe our own international reputation as tough, rude, no-nonsense. We think we can grab a gun and confront some nameless thug on the street.
I walked right up to the stranger, who raised his eyes from the concrete to look at me. He was short, balding. His face was pockmarked and ruddy from the cold. His eyes had a kind of lazy menance, a dim nastiness.
“Camilla Novak is dead,” I said simply. My hand was on the gun in my pocket. “Now I have what you want.”
He looked at me blankly, pushed himself off the wall. His eyes darted toward Jack, back at the bulge in my pocket. He was making a threat assessment.
“I have some questions,” I went on arrogantly. “If you answer them, I’ll give you the files.”
Clumsy? Yes. Short-sighted? Sure. Of all the scenarios that had played out in my mind-a struggle, some kind of slick conversation in which I got what I wanted, even though I had no idea what that was, my actually firing the weapon, him cowering in fear, him attacking me-what happened next was a surprise. There was a beat, a pause between us where I felt Jack stiffen, start to pull me back.