I expected better. Not much but a little. They’d had years to refine and assess. Surely Hanna was smarter than this. Stella had all that fancy education. Marni claimed to be a teacher.
So disappointing.
They were looking in the wrong place. Getting their facts wrong. Missing the obvious. Stepping over hints. Talking to the wrong people.
I’d hoped with enough pressure they’d lead me where I needed to go. No such luck. If they had the answers they had them buried so deep, under layers of delusions and deceptions, miles of commissions and omissions, we’d never dig them out again.
After all those years of waiting and planning, studying them—learning who they were with their masks on and the lies fully entrenched—I was not one step closer to getting the assist I needed. Like with every other minute of my life, the burden fell on me. I couldn’t depend on any of them to exercise a single second of rational thinking.
The big reveal would happen. With or without them. Then they would know why it had to unravel this way and be happy that I stopped at only upending their lives instead of taking them.
Except for one. One person would be destroyed... once I verified who it should be.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Hanna
I sat with Daniela, willing her to wake up. The doctors said it could happen at any time. She was breathing on her own. She’d opened her eyes once, then drifted off again.
Relief soared through her family at the good news. Everyone involved with her care relaxed and enjoyed a bit of lightness. For me, it was a case of relief tempered with guilt. She’d been in peril because she worked for me. Because I’d been a crap boss and friend ever since we buried Xavier. The weight of so many secrets and so much danger pushed down on me.
The other reason I needed her to be okay, to be awake and talking, was Jeremy. She might be the one person who could tell us where he was and what happened to him.
Her family understood my panic. They’d taken a break to find decent coffee and give me a few minutes to breathe. I sat with her, exhausted from the lack of sleep and dearth of answers. Facts ran through my head, tumbling over each other as I searched for connections.
The uncomfortable chair made my back ache as I mentally walked through what I knew. The way Aubrey kept popping up at the “right” time. The odd conversation about house keys or not needing them, or whatever she’d said when she showed up at the house, ticked off a memory. One I’d been fighting and ignoring because it featured Xavier at his most frightening and combative, with his gaslighting and deception on full display. His words floated to the surface now.
I can see everything. Be everywhere.
The night started with the surprise pregnancy news, then veered off in ways I never saw coming. Xavier turned my nightmare into gloating. He ignored my panic and joked about how Patrick had made a pass at me the day before. True, Patrick unexpectedly had been handsy. The whole scene had been a fumbled, unwanted mess but private. Xavier hadn’t been there when I smacked Patrick down. No one had.
Do you really think I wouldn’t know he touched you? That he wouldn’t come running to me, insisting he’d beaten me? But I’d seen it all before he said a word. I knew the truth. I’d already won.
The damn bet about which one of them would sleep with me first. Xavier hid the sick wager until I talked about possibly ending the pregnancy. Gone was the attentive, charming man I knew. Replaced with the man the public feared. He outlined his elaborate, monthslong scheme to continue his bloodline with a handpicked mother for his precious heir. A better heir than Patrick.
Xavier had chosen me and trapped me. He wanted the pregnancy. He planned it even as I planned for it not to happen. Thatdamn trip to Maine. Six days. The caddy with my birth control pills. The tampering that connected us together forever.
But the tumultuous end started earlier than that. A week before everything fell apart I’d found the file filled with old articles and clippings about Dea’s murder, including information about a man I’d never heard of. A guy who’d gotten in trouble a year before the murder for stealing from houses he was hired to paint.
Xavier shared that the man in the articles was the man he said killed Dea. It made sense that he’d be researching potential suspects. I felt sick for all he’d lost and guilty that I copied the file. I couldn’t explain why. Something tugged at me to do it.
I bought his excuse for collecting information on the potential suspect until I studied the pages. I saw the dates, including the pages he’d printed off about the man’s past. Xavier was a smart businessman, but not hugely tech savvy outside of the usual word processing and Excel skills. He signed papers. He didn’t usually print them off or make files. That might be why he missed the date stamp from the printer on a page about one of the supposed killer’s previous thefts.
In the heat of the pregnancy battle, Xavier proposed. He didn’t mean it and I didn’t want it, so I said no. Then I dared to list our other options, and he lost it. That’s when I reminded him about the file and asked how he knew to print off information about the man who he thought killed his wifebeforeanything ever happened to Dea.
Everything changed. The man the whole town talked about appeared. The threats started.
If you think I killed my beloved wife, then imagine what I could do to you.
Xavier’s most sinister lie unmasked by a combination of hubris, rage, and an overabundance of his precious bourbon. He spoke in hypotheticals, but even then waited until after he threw me on the bed and ran his hands over me, accusing me of recording him.
He talked about a man so powerful, so above the law, that he forced his sad wife to their island home, then paid a man to murder her. In a final act, he set up a meeting during a visit to the island and ran the killer down. A much younger Xavier, still vibrant and fueled by his overactive ego, dumped the man’s body in the water. Job done.
If I had doneitI’d make sure there was no one left to talk. Of course, I’d regret not being clearer about killing my wife outright without additional unnecessary violence, but that would have been a small, almost insignificant mistake in an otherwise grand plan to stop her threats about ruining my reputation and taking the estate. See, this is the sort of risk that comes with earning a fortune after you’ve already been married. No prenuptial agreement.
I hid those copies in a place at school where he’d never think to look. He hadn’t counted on that. I also lied and insisted my relationship with him wasn’t a secret because I’d bragged to people. People he didn’t know. Fellow students. People who would raise questions if a second woman intimately connected with Xavier died a horrible death.
I had leverage but in Xavier’s twisted world my holding the secret of his role in his wife’s murder started an intoxicating game.He talked about my ingenuity. He also insisted my knowledge of what he was capable of increased his power. He kept me from bludgeoning him with the truth by playing on my fear of being next.
