“What was it?”
He pulls out his phone and opens the photos to show me. The word is small. Discreet, even. But unmistakable.
Whore.
“Mitch,” I say now. “Do you really think I would do this? After four years? And that word—I would never use that word. Not even about her.”
He looks to the sky, hands on hips, frustration written across his face. “No, Elise. I know you didn’t do this. Not intentionally.”
“You think it’s him?”
“Who else?”
“You think he did this to her so she would call you and you would go to her and I would find out?”
Now he throws his hands in the air. “Yes. That’s what I think.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
His face reflects the questions back, as if I should know the answer. As if it’s obvious. “I told Rowan,” he says. “He spoke to her, looked at the car. Checked for prints and asked her some questions. He agreed with me, Elise, that you didn’t need this right now. On top of everything else.”
I can’t speak. I don’t have the words. What should they be, I wonder? Where should I begin? He told Rowan and not me. Rowan then hid the truth, this new piece of evidence. But it really wasn’t evidence of anything we didn’t already know. Wade wanted to infiltrate my life. Use the forensics road map I’d created to destroy it. And I’d kept things from Rowan and Mitch. A circle of lies now exposing the fault lines in each relationship.
“When did this happen?” I ask.
Mitch tells me it was before the video of the girls. Right when all of this started. “I haven’t seen her again, if you’re thinking what I suspect you are.”
“I wasn’t thinking anything,” I tell him. But this is a lie.
He knows what I thought when I learned he’d seen her, what he might be capable of. I know what he thought when Briana showed him her car, what I might be capable of. He knows what he felt when he went to her rescue. And I know what I felt when I thought he had been with her again and I could finally have an answer to the question I’ve been asking myself for four years.
Knowledge may be power, but it’s not always working on the side of good.
Mitch looks up, and we stand there, both silent.
Wade set off a bomb, and now the pieces were falling around us. He’s coming at me from all sides and every angle. Physically and emotionally. This whole exercise, vandalizing Briana’s car so he could create doubt, remind me not only of what Mitch did, but what I did. It wasn’t enough to use words. He made us relive it. Trigger the wounds of the past. It was all one carefully planned mindfuck.
I have to be smarter than this. Stronger than this.
“I have to go,” I tell my husband. “I have to get the girls.”
But first, I have a camera to retrieve.
Chapter Nineteen
It isn’t easy to get away, and nearly two days pass after I retrieve the camera from the Ridgeway Shopping Center. Everyone is watching me. Everyone is worried. Mitch is with me in the mornings and evenings. Rowan is with me on the job.
When I’m done at the office, I go straight to the school to pick up the girls. Unless there’s ballet or soccer or a play date, I don’t leave the house once we get home because where would I be going? It would confuse the detail, who wouldn’t know whether to follow me or stay with them. And besides that, Mitch and I agreed to tag team, to be with them at all times when they aren’t at school.
When Mitch gets home, it’s game over. He watches all of us like an eagle tracking field mice. We never leave his sight. Even me. Even after all that’s happened.
I can’t stand not knowing. But I’m patient and I wait until the weekend when I can lie to Mitch about going to the office and lie to Rowan about being at home and when the detail is off duty until after dark.
The texts have been short and carefully planned. He’s gotten control of himself. He sends them only to the burner phone because he knows, somehow, that I haven’t told anyone.
You’re such a naughty girl, keeping secrets...
The camera I hid under the seat of the bike caught him. The car was a Ford Focus—a smalltwo-door. He barely fit inside. It was white with Connecticut plates, blending in with all the other cars that day that circled the lot, making thatone-wayturn around the median to cross in front of the stores, including the Ridgeway Diner.
