My blood runs cold, and even though I can’t predict what Waylen is about to say, something deep within me already knows and is dreading it.
“There are things you don’t know about my wife,” Waylen goes on. “I’m not sure what she’s told you, but I do know that it’s all lies. She’s not just a pretty face and a delicious hourglass figure. She’s dangerous.”
How have I never noticed how soft Bertram’s facial features are? Standing over him now, in the dim light of my brother’s curtained kitchen, I see the gentle slope of his nose, the smooth corners of his eyes. I bet the world only sees the chiseled jaw and the muscled forearms. He presents himself as strong, confident. But in this moment, I see what I haven’t allowed myself to notice in our time together: a sensitive, empathetic layer just below the surface.
He looks at me now, as though Waylen’s words are breaking his heart. All this time I was thinking that he was a liar with an edge, like me, Bertram was thinking that we were the same for a completely different reason. He thought that I could be sweet, that I really wanted to help him.
How do I convince him that I was lying before, but I’m telling him the truth now?
“Hang up.” I mouth the words to him. But he doesn’t listen.
“I know it’s hard to believe. I fell for it, too,” Waylen is saying. “But I’ve slept beside that woman for more than a decade. I know her in a way that nobody else ever will. I know her more than she knows herself.”
I kneel before Bertram, my hands clasped in supplication. I am begging him to end the call, to trust me. But why should he?
“I know she’s with you,” Waylen goes on. Bertram hasn’t said a word. He doesn’t need to. “Did you know that she’s wanted for murder? The police can place her on the scene. She walked right out the front door with blood on her shoes. Look, she needs to turn herself in.”
My head perks up at that. If Collette was being coerced earlier, then Waylen is being coerced now. Turn myself in to the police? He would never suggest something so—straightforward. He knows I’m listening in, surely. He knows there’s nothing he could say that would make me approach the police to turn myself in. Whatever hereallywants me to do is going to be communicated in code.
Bertram still hasn’t said a word. He’s looking at me with that devastatingly scrutinizing gaze, and I can’t tell whether he believes a word that’s being said. He’s been lied to by everyone he’s met in his adult life. Success has brought him money and fame, but it hasn’t brought him a single soul he can trust.
Or maybe he’s thinking what I’m thinking, that anyonewho’s married to me and knows me as well as Waylen already knows I won’t go to the police.
“She isn’t with me,” Bertram says, cool as a cucumber. “But maybe I can get a message to her, I’m not sure. What should I say?”
Waylen laughs—a dry cackle he reserves for when he puts on his phony charm during one of my book clubs with the ladies from the PTA.
“You tell her that she knows where to go,” Waylen says.
In a flash like a bolt of lightning, I remember the night Waylen and I first made love, when he told me that the safest place to weather a storm is in a building full of wires and pipes. He wants me to meet him at the parking garage of the mall. We first scoped out the area years ago, but at least once a year we go by and note that the archaic surveillance cameras have never been updated. The lights still flicker; the security guards are still too understaffed to bother with it.
Mr. X has confirmed as much. He’s told me it’s a stupid place to ever go alone. But then, he’s never trusted Waylen.
Bertram doesn’t have to ask me if I know what place Waylen is referring to. He can see the color draining from my face as I try to work out what to do. Did Waylen go to the police? Will I be swarmed the second I enter the parking garage?
“Margaux, I love you. I just want you to be safe,” Waylen says. Then he hangs up.
It’s that word—safe—that lances through me. I play that one word over and over. Was he saying it with menace? In earnest? I hear it in a hundred different tones eachtime I try to remember, although it was only a few seconds ago.
Bertram takes me by my arms and gently pulls me to my feet. “What’s going on?” he asks me, with the precautionary tone one might use on a rabid dog.
“I’m not dangerous,” I tell him. “But I am a liar. Or—I can be. Sometimes. Not always.”
He puts a finger to my lips, halting me. “You said that you believe me,” he says. “I’d like to give you the same chance to tell me the truth.”
Twenty-One
I understand now why it meant so much to Bertram that I’d believe him about Annie. He’s used to being surrounded by yes-men who will nod along to whatever he’s saying, whether they care or not. Unlike them, I don’t want anything from him, except for the one thing I’m bad at giving myself: the truth.
I’ve taken for granted how easily everyone has always believed me in recent years. The teachers, the fellow yoga students in my Sunday class, my daughter. Speak with enough confidence and they’ll have no reason to doubt you. They’ll question themselves before they entertain the idea that you did anything untoward.
But that was before I was wanted for murder.
Here in the curtained house that belongs to my dying brother, I am the most vulnerable I’ve been since the fire—which I do not tell Bertram about. I keep that memory buried deep down as always, hoping it will stay put.
Instead, I tell Bertram about the operation that Mr. X has been running for the past fifteen years, and some of the cases I’ve secretly uncovered without claiming credit. I tell him that I was hired to prove he stole his winning app software from someone else. But since it’s so hard to prove plagiarism, I would be better off uncovering his role in the disappearance of his ex-girlfriend, Annie. Annie, whoisstill very much missing, and whose digital footprint is nonexistent. She is brilliant, I’m learning, in the worst kind of way.
I tell him about Waylen’s involvement in my dealings with Mr. X—how he left the life years ago to live in the suburbs, but how he never truly lost his edge.
