Nick came down the stairs, smelling like soap and shaving gel, his hair damp from the shower. He slowed on the bottom step when he spotted Steven.
Steven nodded and mustered a smile. “Hey, Nick. Good to see you.”
Nick nodded back. “I’m glad to see you, too.”
Steven bit his lip. “I guess I have the two of you to thank for that. So, thanks,” he said, sincere in his gratitude. “You didn’t have to help me. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you didn’t. But I’m grateful for everything you did to get me out of there. Joey, too. Tell him thanks for me.”
“I will,” Nick said. “I’ll let you two talk. I have to get to work.” He gave me a quick peck on the cheek and whispered, “I’ll see you tonight.”
Steven stepped aside to let Nick pass. I watched him go, already counting down the hours until he got back. “He seems like a really decent guy,” Steven said with a strained smile.
“He is.”
“That’s good. You deserve to be happy.”
“Thanks. I want that for you, too.” Steven didn’t deserve to be happy withme, but I hoped one day he’d be worthy of a chance at happiness with someone else.
“Speaking of that,” he said, brightening a little, “you know that redhead attorney you sent to help me—Parker? You wouldn’t happen to have her number, would you? Because I was thinking—”
“Goodbye, Steven,” I said through a dry laugh. I handed him his truck keys and pushed him toward the door. The kids called out their goodbyes from the playroom as I closed it after him.
When I turned, Mrs. Haggerty was coming down the stairs, her footsteps a little uneven and heavier than usual. She looked tired and sore as she limped into the kitchen. The last few days had definitely taken their toll on her. She filled a kettle and put it on the stove, waiting for it to boil as she prepared her tea.
“Thank you for what you did for Delia,” I said, leaning on my elbows beside her.
“Nonsense. I didn’t do it for Delia. I did it for you,” she said, her frankness surprising me. “Sometimes, you remind me of me,” she admitted. “I always wanted to write a book of my own, but Owen used to say writing stories was frivolous. And I didn’t have anyone like Vero to help me when my children were young. The closest thing I had to a friend was Penny, and she and I didn’t find each other until much later on. Honestly, I envied you. Never more than the day your husband moved out,” she said with a rueful smile. “Oh, how many times had I wished that for myself.”
“Is that why you did it?” I asked quietly.
“Did what?”
“You know…” I dragged a finger across my neck.
She laughed, surprising me with a full-throated chuckle I’d never heard from her before. “I didn’t kill Owen. Owen killed Owen, exactlylike I explained to Detective Tran. I told my husband for years he was going to end up in an early grave if he didn’t take better care of himself. That if his liver didn’t kill him, his blood pressure would. In the end, it was both.”
“But if Owen died of natural causes, why haven’t you cashed his insurance policy?” I could have understood holding on to it if she was afraid she might get caught using a forged death certificate, but that was an awful lot of money to continue paying every month to insure a man who had a legitimate one. “Why not collect the balance of the policy and stop paying?”
She sighed and shook her head. “Guilt, I suppose. My marriage to that man was far from perfect. There were plenty of angry, lonely nights when I laid awake and thought about smothering him with a pillow. For all his flaws, I know I never could have done it, but we weren’t happy together, and I wasn’t all toounhappyabout it when he died. I guess it didn’t feel right to collect a reward for it. But,” she said, holding up a finger, “that doesn’t mean I can’t understand how another woman might be driven to kill her husband and use that money to build herself a new life.”
“Is that why you started the book club?”
“I guess you could say I started the book club out of guilt, too,” she admitted. “It was gnawing at me. Not because I had helped put Gilford in the ground, but because I had convinced Penny to run away from her problem. If I had helped her deal with him, like we had talked about so many times, we could have been more careful. She wouldn’t have been forced to handle that nasty business all by herself. I felt so awful about the whole thing. I just wanted to fix it,” she said, pouring herself some hot water from the kettle. “I had been volunteering at the women’s advocacy center with Viola for several months before I finally confided in her. I danced around the details,but something told me she understood the things I wasn’t coming out and saying. She told me she had a family cabin in the woods, that if I had burdens I didn’t feel I could hold on to anymore, for myself or anyone else, that she would take them and she would keep my secrets safe. She explained that she understood the guilt I felt. That she had guilt, too, over all of the women she wanted to help but couldn’t. That’s how I knew we understood each other.
“I thought about asking her to take Gilford, but moving him seemed like a reckless idea. Months had passed and no one had come looking for him. Better, we thought, to let sleeping dogs lie. But,” Mrs. Haggerty said, tapping her temple, “Viola’s offer had opened the door to other ideas.
“The club grew one by one after that. Inevitably every new member wanted to pay it forward and help someone else. Viola found Lola. Lola found Destiny. Destiny found Elizabeth. Elizabeth found Kathy. Kathy found Gita. And Gita found Sally.” Mrs. Haggerty looked at me askance as she dropped a spoonful of sugar in her mug. “I stand by my opinion of your ex-husband, by the way. You know where to find me, if you ever change your mind.”
I laughed. “Thanks for the offer, but I think we’ll be fine.”
“Why don’t you go on upstairs and take a shower. You look like you need one,” she said, resuming her usual judgmental tone, though now I sensed a glimmer of genuine affection in her teasing. “I’ll watch the children for you,” she offered.
I only hesitated a moment before relenting. In spite of her veiled threats to Steven and Delia’s principal, Mrs. Haggerty wasn’t a terrible person after all. Vero was just upstairs doing the laundry, the kids were playing peacefully, and Zach was fully dressed and potty trained. What could possibly go wrong?
EPILOGUE
My joy was cut short when Vero came bursting into my bedroom not ten minutes later. She banged on the bathroom door. “You might want to get dressed and get downstairs,” she called through it.
I turned off the water and wrapped a towel around me. Vero tossed a pair of sweatpants in my arms when I came out dripping.
