“Whenyouwant me to, you let me know,” he says. He could say this coldly, but he doesn’t. He could let the sting of rejection cause him to storm out, or give up on her, or lash out, or a variety of other very human reactions to her constant difficult behavior, but he never does. He goes to her, kisses the top of her head, and lets himself out.
She feels sick. She wishes she could change how she feels. She trades her coffee for a glass of wine and sits in the front window seat with Christopher, who makes six circles before he lies down on the pillow at her feet. All she can think about is Finn, and it’s not fair to Grant, it’s not fair to anyone—this obsession that nobody would understand. She hates Cora being a victim of this, but she feels like she can’t stop what’s started.
The next day, she walks around the house nervously tidying up, thinking about how to best pull off what she plans to do. She can’t get caught, so she’ll need some backup stories to weasel out of the situation if she does. She really can’t think of one single explanation, so she can’t get caught.
She decides that the wig from her Marilyn Monroe Halloween costume would be a decent disguise: the opposite of her long dark hair, and she’ll wear her reading glasses and some dark lipstick. Nobody would recognize her if they looked on a security camera or even ran into her. She finds these items and stuffs them into a messenger bag and goes.
His lunch meeting is from one to two o’clock, and she hates waiting around all day. It was fine when she slept the day away for all those months. Now, though, she has a renewed purpose, and she wants to just get moving. She stops at City Blooms for a mixed bouquet of mostly lilies and baby’s breath, and then she drives to his office building and looks for his car in the parking lot. The lunch is at Grimaldi’s, so he’ll have to drive there. It’s a few miles away. She parks in the back of the lot and waits. When she sees him come out of the revolving front door, he’s with Charlotte. They don’t touch one another. She’s on her phone, and he’s slipping his suit coat on.
So that’s his lunch meeting. She should change plans and follow him, ruin the lunch, walk right in as if it’s a coincidence and sit at the table next to them to see how he fumbles his way out of it. But her work here is more important. She watches them get into Charlotte’s car. Thank God she was watching the door and not just his car. She hadn’t considered he wouldn’t drive. When he gets in the passenger side of Charlotte’s Tahoe (which is far too large for her itty-bitty frame), Paige notices him glance around. Hmm. She watches a moment longer and sees Charlotte kiss him. This goes on for some time until they part, her giggling, it looks like. Both of them looking around the lot for one more check that nobody is out there. Paige ducks farther down in her car. Then Charlotte buckles her seat belt, and they pull away.
So you think I’m just gonna let that happen, huh?Paige thinks. Then she picks up the large bouquet she purchased with a glittery helium balloon (last-minute buy) wrapped around the pretty foil paper and bouncing behind her as she walks up to the building.
On the fourth floor, she finds the name of his company in fancy stencil across two glass doors. She sees the receptionist through the glass and knows that the young woman with a bouncy bob and oversize false eyelashes will tell her to leave the flowers with her and she’ll make sure he gets them, but she can’t do that. In the outside hall, there are two leather chairs with a low table in front and a spread of popular magazines lying across them. She has to wait until Eyelash Girl leaves the desk. It’s the only way. She does her cell-phone move and holds it up to her ear, pretending to be engaged in a conversation so she doesn’t look suspicious just standing there nervously. Instead she looks like someone who got interrupted and will continue her business in a moment. She passes the door and sits in one of the chairs, just out of sight, and waits.
It takes forty-five godforsaken minutes before the receptionist leaves her desk. Paige doubts Finn will return from his so-called lunch meeting in an hour, but she hurries anyway. She walks right past the desk and scans the row of office doors for his name. There are a few people in a meeting at a table in the center of the office—a modern, open-concept arrangement. One of them smiles and lights up upon seeing her—assuming all the romance and surprise that must be attached to the gift, no doubt. If someone let Paige back here, it must be okay, so nobody seems to bat an eye. She spots his door and slips inside. His laptop sits open and plugged in, but the screen has timed out and is dark. No matter—that’s what his list of passwords are for. She pulls the power cord from the wall, slips that along with the laptop into her messenger bag and zips it closed, then she leaves the flowers where the computer used to be and walks out.
“Hey!” a voice calls. She walks faster. “Hey, ma’am.” It’s the receptionist, walking toward her, holding five reams of printer paper and headed back to the front desk. “You can’t be back here.”
“Oh, sorry. I’m just—I was delivering flowers. They told me to go on back,” I say authoritatively.
“Who? I would be the only one to do that, and I didn’t,” she says, probably making a scene to cover her ass so everyone knows this was not her oversight.
“Someone did. Otherwise I would have left them up front, wouldn’t I? This is wasting my time for my next delivery, so...” and then she walks out the front doors, not waiting for any further response.
She glances around as she walks swiftly to get to her car to make sure she doesn’t pass Finn on his way in. She takes great pleasure imagining him reading the card. She wasn’t going to leave one, originally. She was just going to use the flowers to get in. Then, the more she thought of how delicious it would be to confuse him and maybe expedite a breakup, the more certain she was that it was the right thing to do.
Finn, I bet you thought these were from Charlotte, but they’re not. I’m on to you, it reads. She thought that was just enough for him to question her about them and become the right amount of paranoid and miserable.
Before she gets in her car, she thinks of another opportunity she hadn’t anticipated because she assumed he’d be driving to his lunch meeting. She clicks her car key out of its plastic fob, holds it in her fist, and ever so subtly runs it down the length of his precious Range Rover as she walks past, gets in her own car, and drives home.
17
CORA
When I get my Amazon package in the mail, I’m practically giddy as I rip open the bubble envelope and pull out my very tiny spy camera. It’s not marketed as a spy camera, but from the size of it, what else would it be for? Now, I know the only place I can safely put this is on their tree in the backyard. When Lucas is at work, Georgia is often out front. Now that it’s gotten cold, that might change, though. Hmm. Still, I can’t do it at night when he’s home. It could backfire in a big way.
Their house backs onto a small park. I’ll just stroll through the park, walk close to their fence, and clip it to a tree branch. It looks like an old iPod Nano with a tiny clip in back. Easy, though I know it’s not the best place to put it because what will I see in the backyard? But there are sliding glass doors off the deck into the kitchen, and maybe they don’t keep their blinds closed all the time. But even if it produces nothing, it’s a good test. I can familiarize myself with the phone app and at least it’s a start. Maybe I can make a bolder move if this tester works.
I shakily shove the camera back into its packaging when I hear the garage door open. Finn is home hours early. I hide the package in the cabinet under the sink and pretend I didn’t almost get caught plotting to commit a criminal offense, but he can always tell when I’m hiding something. Damn it. If he did see it, he’d think I was spying on him, no doubt. What is he doing home? When he walks through the garage door into the kitchen, I can tell something’s wrong.
“Hey, you’re home early,” I say, peering into the garage behind him. “Got the window fixed? Good. I was worried about you freezing to death this morning.”
“Just cut the shit, okay,” he says, and I feel my heart speed up and a tingling heat spread across my chest. I can feel the blotchy red anger rash materialize without even looking.
“Excuse me?” I say, steadying myself against the counter so I don’t scream. So I don’t pull out my hair and scream at the top of my lungs,What the fuck did I do now? I thought things were finally so good!
“A blonde woman showed up at my office today,” he says, nostrils flared. He pulls a fifth of bourbon from the cabinet and takes a glass from the dry bar next to the fridge.
“Okay,” I say, impatiently.
“My colleagues gave me a description that sounded a lot like you,” he says, pouring his drink and turning to me.
“Why would I be at your work?” I ask, genuinely confused. I didn’t do anything. How is this possible? How are we having this same, tired conversation when I didn’t actually do anything this time? He just shrugs in an exaggerated gesture.
“Well, it wasn’t me! What did they say? They describedme?” I’m already yelling.
“They said a blonde with a sort of bob haircut came in and dropped off flowers.” He looks at me with his eyes bugged out and an exasperated expression, like that’s the whole story, like I should confess.
