“Come on, Cora,” he says. “Talk to me.”
I hike up my chin. “Talk to my lawyer.”
I’m glaring at the fire, so I don’t see his expression, I only hear the long silence. Then he raises the stick a little closer to my hand. “Last one,” he says.
I don’t move.
He waits. The marshmallow slides. It’s going to fall on the ground and get wasted.
I reach out and slip it free. It doesn’t taste as good as thefirst two, but it’s still gooey. While I chew, Adrian shifts his hand ever so subtly to thread a strand of my hair through his fingers. I pretend I don’t notice.
Eventually, he gets up to make Pearl her s’more. I tuck a sleeping Winnie back in her carrier. We sit around the fire, Pearl coating herself in melted chocolate and marshmallow, Adrian crouched beside the fire, poking the embers with his stick. After Pearl eats her fill, I clean her up the best I can with a baby wipe.
I expect Adrian to bail, but he offers to push Pearl on the swings, and when she asks to feed the ducks the leftover graham crackers, he agrees. We walk along the river to the boathouse, stalked by ducks, and when Pearl begins to whine, he carries her back to the house for her nap.
Once both girls are settled, he takes his time seeing himself out of the nursery, examining various toys and then lingering in the doorway.
“Thank you for spending time with me today,” he says. It’s a smooth line, but it comes out brusque and awkward. His sincerity feels like lemon on a hangnail. It would’ve been worth something before. Now it’s so inadequate, it’s an insult.
I kneel and start returning toys to their bins to avoid looking at him. “You know, you can’t change your tune and be sorry now. It’s too late.”
“You don’t make the rules,” he answers, knocks once on the door frame, and disappears down the hall.
10
ADRIAN
Farhadi finally callsme back when I’m on my way to Scarsdale. I left a message with his answering service over twenty-four hours ago. He’s slipping.
I stayed close to the house yesterday and didn’t plan to leave Cora today before I spoke to him. She took the children to an all-day playdate, though. There was no sense in hanging around the house since I couldn’t watch her on the cameras and stare at numbers blurring together on my laptop, which is all I do now.
Martinez and Johnson are with her. They’re pulling a lot of overtime since I axed Schmidt, Tiller, and that Pence woman. She really thought to ingratiate herself with me by reporting that Cora was meeting with a divorce lawyer. If she’d sell out her own protectee to garner favor with me, she has a price, and a kidnapper could figure that out, too.
“Maddox,” I accept the call, raising the Scorpion’s hard top so I can hear him on speaker.
“Mr. Maddox. I must apologize. I was up at Sugarloaf, and the service there is terrible. Dr. Ghosh said you didn’t call her?”
“I needed to speak to you personally.”
“Of course. Again, my apologies. What can I do for you?”
I’ve been chafing at the bit to talk to him since the incident with Cora and the garbage disposal, but now, I’m suddenly reluctant to broach the topic. He’s not stupid. He wouldn’t work for me if he was. He’ll read between the lines, and he’ll figure out that my house is out of order.
There’s no help for it, though. I’m out of my depth, and I’m not letting things go even further to hell. I plunge ahead. “I have questions. Theoretical questions, you understand?”
“Yes, of course.”
“A woman, five months postpartum and, uh, under stress . . . what are the signs . . . what exactly would be of immediate concern in terms of, uh, say a nervous breakdown, or, uh, similar?”
Farhadi is a consummate professional. He takes less than three seconds to process the question, as inelegantly stated as it was. “By immediate concern do you mean cause for immediate intervention?”
“Yes.”
“I would seek emergency care if there were any indication—verbal or nonverbal—that the mother might hurt her children or herself.”
“When you say nonverbal indication . . . would you consider, uh,vandalismto rise to that level of concern?”
“Can you be specific?”
