It’s not fine. I realize just how not fine it is when I stop outside the park gate and they turn in unison. Erin scowls. Ines purses her lips like the easily disappointed executive she once was. It’s Claire’s face thatwrecks me, though—the hurt, the heartbreak. I should just leave, find a new playground for Jasper, a new set of moms, a new nanny, a new best friend. I could take or leave the playground, the other mothers, but I don’t want a new best friend. So I unbuckle Jasper and prepare to grovel for Claire’s forgiveness.
Jasper explodes onto the playground, racing toward that familiar structure, as I take my time walking toward their circle. Erin and Ines tighten around Claire. Up close, I notice that her face is blotchy. She shakes her head no at me, subtly, almost imperceptibly.
“Claire, if I can explain,” I start.
Erin steps in front of her. She’s small but scrappy. For a moment I think she might grab me by the bicep and toss me out of the park like a bouncer evicting me from a club. “What could you possibly explain?”
“What’s the matter with you?” Ines snipes. “What kind of person calls the cops on their friend?”
“I thought he was hurting you.” I want to tell her about my mistake with the earrings, the audition. It all rests on a damning, irrevocable truth. I thought her husband was capable of murder. At some level, I still do, even if he didn’t kill Regina.
“Why were you even watching?” Erin asks. “What kind of freak spies on her neighbors?”
As Claire and I study each other, her lip quivers. That’s what hurts her the most, I realize. I’ve exposed something I was supposed to pretend not to see. I’ve broken the code of life along the canals, mortifying my best friend along the way.
“I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t change anything, but I’m so sorry.” I walk away before Erin and Ines can say anything cutting in return. “Jasp.” I wave to my son. “Time to go.”
He protests. Before he can melt into a full-on tantrum, I say, “I think there’s a bowl of strawberry ice cream waiting at home,” loud enough for the other mothers to hear. Let them judge. Let them have opinions about the fact that I’m feeding my son ice cream at nine in the morning.
Jasper stands upright at the sound ofstrawberry ice creamand trots over to his stroller, saying “Cream. Cream.”
On the short walk home, I stop on the pathway outside our house and gaze at the spot in the basin where they found Regina. I squint, as if that might reveal the indentation of her body. There’s no trace of her, just a foot and a half of stagnant water that smells so putrid, it’s nauseating.
What am I doing? I’ve lost my best friend over this. I’ve been keeping secrets from my husband, something I vowed never to do. I’ve been exploiting my son and squandering these last days before my daughter arrives. For what? I don’t know why Jasper called to Regina, but every sign points to an accident. She was drunk. She stumbled into the canals and drowned.
“Cream. Cream,” Jasper shouts. It takes me a moment to translate that he means the ice cream I’ve promised him, my bribe to get him to leave the park. I understand his garbled half speech, but I was wrong about Gigi. I don’t know why she had my couch, my lamps, my dishware. It may have been an innocent obsession, some sort of transference, a new addiction, as random as it was intense. And the earring may not have been mine at all. I’d only glanced at it briefly before I panicked. I didn’t even check the back for my maker’s mark. It could have been a knockoff or a similar design—an antique even, possibly costume. Now that I’m remembering, I’m pretty sure the stones didn’t refract light in a rainbow of color, like a diamond would, but in the orange-and-blue fire of a cubic zirconia. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t mine. I’d seen what I wanted to in the earring. I’d heard what I wanted to in Jasper’s cries for Gigi.
I bend down and brush the wispy curls from his forehead. “You didn’t know her, did you?”
Jasper frowns, and fleetingly I hope this is one of those preternatural moments where he’ll erupt into complete sentences to tell me to stop worrying—she was just a familiar face along the canals, like the woman who paints, the man who walks his Yorkies, the surfers next door. Maybe that’s why Jasper recognized her, becausehe saw her lurking. Maybe it’s all as simple as Gabe proposed.Gee-geeforgirl, notGigiforRegina.
“Cream. Cream,” he says more insistently.
“I did promise you ice cream, didn’t I?” I give his hair one final caress, then haul his stroller into our garden, glancing at the clock inside. I’m supposed to meet Barb in an hour.
Nothing I say will deter Barb from this mission. She needs it for closure, or maybe for an opening, to begin the process of grieving. I won’t try to stop her, but I can’t be a party to this anymore. It’s already cost me too much.
I’ll go to the pier. I’ll explain to Barb that Dan didn’t kill her daughter. We’ll say goodbye, and I’ll let her continue on this fruitless quest. I lift Jasper from his stroller and hug him to me, trusting my decision. This is Barb’s tragedy, not mine.
Chapter Twenty-One
Barb
I can’t believe I’m late. Tessa and I were supposed to meet at 9:45, and it’s 9:53 as I charge past the aquarium. The concierge had said it would take ten minutes to walk to the pier, so I gave myself fifteen. I don’t know if I should be flattered that he overestimated my ambulatory speed. It’s hardly a comfort when I’m late for quite possibly the most important meeting of my life.
The morning’s still gray and chilly, but the pier is buzzing with tourists, mostly families. I locate Tessa through the crowd, pushing Jasper’s stroller up and down a short stretch of wooden planks outside Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. I stop momentarily to observe her. She never finished telling me what happened to her mother. She said enough, though. We’re more connected than I realized.
“I know, I know,” I say as I hustle up to her. She peeks over at me with a tortured expression. “What’s the matter?”
“I was wrong,” she says. “My neighbor—he didn’t buy your daughter the earrings. I made a mistake. It wasn’t even my earring she had.”
The way she saysyour daughtermakes my stomach sink.
Except the story she confesses is something confusing about Dan Huntsman and his wife role-playing, something we don’t have time to discuss now.
“Tessa.” I cut her off, a little harsher than I intend. She flinches. “Can we talk about this later? We’re late.”
I start to walk toward the Ferris wheel, stopping when she doesn’t follow.
