And as I start walking home, I know only one thing for certain: my life started going off its rails the moment Taylor walked into my house. Mom and I would have been fine together if she’d let us. But Taylor doesn’t get to win. She doesn’t get to walk away in one piece. In fact, I’m going to make sure she doesn’t get in my way ever again.
Chapter 35
Thérèse
Now
Her husband’s body is not in the ground yet, but Cassie is out here kissing her ex-boyfriend like nothing happened. When I saw them in the car two streets back, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Was Cassie really driving around town with him for anyone to see? I tried to tell myself that it didn’t mean anything. To my knowledge, Darren hasn’t come by the house since news of Olivier’s death spread around town, but it’s possible I missed him. All of this could be explained away. Until the kiss. The kiss tells me everything I need to know. It answers all of my questions.
The kiss is the end.
I drive home slowly, staying back from Cassie, who’s walking along the sidewalk, her head down. Every now and then, she wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, like she’s drying tears. But she won’t fool me anymore. I wait until she’s inside the house to pull into the driveway.
A sense of calm overwhelms me as I go up to the door. It’s over. She killed him. I know it and there’s nothing she can do to stop me. No tricks she can pull on me.
“Cassie?” I say when I walk in.
Her strangled voice comes from the living room. “Here.”
For a few seconds we stare at each other. Her eyes are puffy, her lips swollen.
“He loved me,” I say. The evenness of my voice startles us both. I keep going. “He fell in love with me. I know it’s completely unfathomable to you, but he did.”
“Not now, Taylor,” she says, starting to turn away.
“Yes, now, Cassie. You don’t get to boss me around anymore. You don’t have anything. You’re going to jail.”
She chuckles dryly. “No, I’m not. Nice voicemail you left my husband, by the way. It almost moved me to tears.” She must see the shock in my eyes, because she adds. “Oh yes, I know about that. Actually, I think it helped my case a lot. Because the police thinkIsaid that. I left my husband and then I regretted it. I couldn’t have done anything to him if I called him the next day to say I was in love with him and wanted to get back together.”
I can’t breathe. “I’ll call them now. I’ll tell them everything.”
“Sure you will,” Cassie says, walking closer to me. I flinch. The look in her eyes, it’s deadly. “And you’ll tell them you were in Paris, too.” She pulls something out of the pocket of her dress, a black plastic rectangle. “You’ll explain to them why I found the key card to my hotel suite inyourjeans. That’s right, Taylor, I know you were there.”
“I—You—” No other words come to me.
She shakes the key card in front of my face. “Oh yes, sure. Maybe I can’t prove it myself. But what if I called the detectives and told them to check your passport? Or maybe they could look up if there was a passenger with the name of Taylor Quinn on a flight to Paris recently?”
She grabs her phone, pretends to go through her contacts. Or maybe she really does. “Shall I call them?”
“You killed him.”
“See, Taylor. I kind of think that you did. You slept with my husband. You followed us to Paris in secret. I knew your voice sounded weird on the phone, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. Now I know. Maybe youplanned this all along. Somebody stole my wallet, the wallet in which I kept the key card to my suite. And, that same night, I was drugged and left for dead in a bathtub.”
“I didn’t drug you,” is all I can say back.
Her eyes go wide with shock, and for a moment neither of us speaks. She wasn’t sure until now, but I confirmed it all.
“Even if you didn’t”—she says at last, voice a whisper—“do you really want the police to know all that?”
I start pulling my own phone out of my pocket. “I want them to know you killed him.”
She lunges at me, flicking the phone out of my hand. It lands on the floor with a thump, at equal distance from each of us.
“I have money now,” she says. “More money than you can ever dream of. But of course you already know that. You stole that from me, too.”
I let out a laugh. “Didn’t you use to say that Mom should never store money in the cookie jar? That it was the first place anyone would look?”
Cassie’s jaw clenches. “She wasn’t your mother.”
