“Unreasonable.” Add that to “stubborn,” “petty,” and “spiteful” as adjectives often used to describe women who merely had the audacity to stick up for themselves.
As I was stepping outside, he said, “You’re not as smart as you think you are. You sure let Trista play you like a secondhand fiddle.”
Chapter 35
“Excuse me?” I said, turning to face him.
“You heard me,” he said, now looking really pleased with himself. “I went to high school with her and her friend Jackie, the one who paid you to find a password. A few weeks ago, Trista hired me to do a little job for her. Figured out her husband was staying in the Bel Air Apartments.”
“How? Why?”
“Forgot about it until I came back to that stupid bar later that night we argued. I was going to give you a piece of my mind, but you weren’t there. Instead, I overheard your little friends thick as thieves talking about some kind of petty business. Really proud of themselves. The young one went out and got these flyers and started taping them up. I saw that bullshit about the patriarchy and karma, and I knew it had to be you. The older one mentioned me calling you petty and just cackled at the idea of it. So I called in a favor with Trista.”
So it wasn’t as good a business idea as Salcedo had thought? My stomach roiled. My body ran hot and cold at the same time, my face especially warm.
Of course your biggest client was fake, Stella. The whole idea was stupid, and you are a failure at everything you do. Almost forty, and what do you have to show for your life? You should’ve never let Havisham and Salcedo talk you into something so ridiculous.
Ken laughed. “I wish you could see your face. Little Miss Petty after taking a dose of her own medicine.”
Anger clawed its way past ... shame. Yeah, shame. Maybe a little humiliation. Definitely embarrassment. But naming the feelings took away some of their power, and I could thank Brené Brown—the author, not the cat—for that.
Kenwantedme to feel all those things but mostly hoped I’d be humiliated. It was a trick I now recognized, a tool he’d used before to keep me in line.
Rolling back my shoulders, I took a couple of deep breaths. Tried out a new mantra.
Slow inhale:Yes, you are embarrassed.
Slow exhale:But comedy is tragedy plus time.
“What are you doing?”
“Breathing.”
“I can see that. Are you going to be okay? Do I need to call the doctor?” Had there always been an edge of anger behind Ken’s conversations with me? A sneer behind faux concern?
Yes. So much for my vaunted bullshit detector. It hadn’t worked on Trista, either.
“But Trista seemed so genuine.” My words felt and sounded foreign.
“She may be, but she hired you because I asked her to. I wanted to keep an eye on you, see what you were doing. She thought it would be fun because she really does despise her husband. Probably despises you, too, since you’re banging him.”
Another flare of shame and anger all rolled into one, but I sent those feelings to the vault. They could be felt later. Better to be as rational as I could be, and Ken’s assumption was telling.
If I hadn’t seen Blake Malone and my Malone standing together in the same room, my imagination would’ve concocted a gnarly story of how Malone had betrayed me, but I knew the answer was far simpler than that: My ex simply wasn’t good at his job.
In fact, my ex was so inept that his attempt to humiliate me had instead sent me a paying client. He was so inept that when the time came to serve papers, that client had ditched him in favor of me.
I stood a little straighter with that knowledge. “I’m not sleeping with Blake Malone.”
He snorted. “No need to lie about it, honey. I have the pictures to prove it. Got one through your apartment’s vertical blinds last night. You getting railed on your dining room table. I had no idea you liked it like that. I mean, we have a table right over there. All you had to do was ask.”
Reflexively, I glanced at the antique dining room table that had been a gift from Ken’s grandmother. Nausea hit me in waves, the momentum of power swinging back to him. Not only was the thought of sex with Ken now utterly repulsive, but the feelings of violation took me by surprise. I squeezed my eyes shut. Was this how people felt when they saw the pictures I’d taken of them? Of course, the difference was that I hadn’t been doing anything wrong. My ex had, though.
“You had no right to do that,” I said through gritted teeth. “So help me, if you ever come near me again on anything akin to surveillance, I will have you arrested for harassment so fast you won’t know what hit you. Trespassing, too, if I can manage it.”
“You mean harassment like when you put all those flamingos in that poor guy’s yard?”
And Ken wasn’t as stupid as I had thought.
