The parties could’ve stopped when the world opened back up, except the kids that came alongafterthe pandemic seemed a touch deadened too, like POWs returning home from some willfully forgotten conflict. By then Mack had a rep to protect: these new tutor groups had heard rumors about how he was the tutor everyone wanted, the one who really cared about them, and who was he to let them down? So Mack continued the gatherings in the old tradition, and in his heyday there were dinner parties too. Even Hailey had come to some of those, though she’d stayed on the periphery, always at arm’s length, until she could disappear upstairs to work on a brief or some kind of motion to dismiss something. It was always clear that she’d been indulging him, that she thought all his fun and camaraderie was a terrible thing, even when it wasn’t technically illegal. She must have been over the moon when they’d moved to Bratenahl, when the parties had stopped because he couldn’t bear to bring his students to this temple of yuppie mundanity.
“How were the dinners inappropriate? What exactly are they saying?”
“That I served alcohol. That I was too close to one of the students. That some of them smoked weed.”
“Which student?”
Of course Hailey would know the exact spot to dig in, but Mack was beyond caring. He felt as raw as their floorboards.
“Mackenzie. That freshman from last year. You met her.”
Mack waited for her to start interrogating him. He braced himself for the crash of her stool on the floor as she jumped to her feet, for accusation and storming out of the room. It caught him off guard when she simply hung her head and slumped her shoulders forward over the counter. She put her face in her hands and, after what felt like an eternity passed while Mack stared at his wife’s scalp, Hailey mumbled to him through her fingers.
“How did this happen to us?”
It was a bottomless question that Mack wanted nothing to do with. “Listen, you have to believe me: I never laid a finger on Mackenzie Ewing.”
And that, even though he knew that Hailey certainly didnothave to believe him and probably wouldn’t, was God’s honest truth. Mackenzie Ewing was a kid, and Mack was not some kind of pervert. Besides, he loved his wife—even right in that moment, when he felt more afraid of her than ever before.
18.
Hailey
There was an envelope peeking out from under the doormat; Hailey noticed it as she came down the stairs the next morning, after she took in the fact that the pee-damaged patches in the floor had been covered over with doll blankets and little mountains of toys. Mabel’s or Gigi’s solution to yesterday’s catastrophe brought a lump to Hailey’s throat, and she stepped carefully around their efforts as she reached for the dropped piece of mail. The specific brown shade of the envelope brought a flash flood of perspiration to her skin.
When she tore it open, Hailey found that there was not a check inside. Itwasfrom Sunshine Enterprises, but this time it was a sort of invoice. It gave the dates and the amounts of all of the checks they had received—four grand, then five, then six, then seven, then twenty-five—in a neat column. Forty-seven thousand dollars paid out, the paper shouted at her, though a lot of that—more than half—could only just have hit their bank account. They could still pay most of it back. All of it, if they scraped into their overdraft. (Private school wassodamn expensive!)
Mack was in the kitchen making the girls pancakes on a weekday, trying to prove he was Father of the Year instead of a useless, soon-to-be-unemployed lech. Hailey kissed the top of Gigi’s head as she handed him the document.
She watched his eyes run down the length of the paper, then dart back to the top. He set the spatula down in the frying pan.
“I don’t get it. It looks like a bill, but for what? What is this minus forty-seven thousand?”
“Uh, maybe because we took forty-seven thousand?” This was worth abandoning the silent treatment for, Hailey decided. After she’d gotten over the initial shock of her husband’s stupidity and betrayal, she’d boarded up her mouth like the derelict houses that peppered the not-distant-enough streets that surrounded Bratenahl. Last night she hadn’t trusted herself to speak as she put clean sheets on the bed in the guest room; she had been too afraid of matching Mack strike-for-strike. The impact of David Rainier would plow over his glorified teenage groupie, would destroy what was left of their marriage in a single nuclear explosion.
“Forty-seven thousand whats?” Mabel wanted to know.
“Eat your pancake,” Mack told her.
“We didn’ttakeit,” he said to Hailey. “It was paid out to us. That’s what this is saying. Look, right here. It says, ‘Statement of your Account.’ ”
“The account is negative. They obviously want the money back.”
“You don’t know that. We don’t even know whotheyare. We don’t evenhavean account.” Mack turned the document over, just as Hailey had done two minutes earlier. “There’s no address, no bank details.” Hailey already knew this; there was only the familiar logo in orange and yellow ink, of a sun rising (or setting?) over the horizon, above the date. “I mean, how would we even be supposed to pay it?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think this could get any weirder.” Hailey watched Gigi dump half a bottle of syrup onto her plate. Then she reached over Mack and took the spatula out of the frying pan; there was a black mark where it had melted onto the nonstick surface. “I’m late. I’m taking this with me.” Hailey grabbed the paper from his hand. “I’m going to see if one of our researchers can find this company.” She left the kitchen so fast that she was in the car before she realized that she hadn’t said goodbye to her daughters.
* * *
Though it wasn’t even October yet and it was almost sixty degrees outside, there was a woman in a garish mink coat getting out of a Mercedes across from Hailey’s parking space. Hailey had one foot out of her own car before she realized that this woman was Rebekah Rainier.
“Now that’s what I call perfect timing.” Something in Rebekah’s voice was off; it grated even more than usual.
“Good morning, Rebekah.” This was just about the last thing Hailey needed; she had to force civility into her syllables. “Do we have a meeting? Come on up to the office, and you’ll have to give me a minute. I haven’t really looked at my schedule because I’ve been away—”
“Away fucking my husband?”
It felt like a semi had been driven straight through Hailey’s chest.
