When Annabelle left to pick up Wren at school, Hugh pulled on a pair of shorts and sat down at the computer. He logged in to their AT&T account, the family plan that included his phone and Annabelle’s. Her call history was password-protected, but he knew her password—Pepper, her childhood dog’s name. As the list of numbers scrolled onto the screen, he looked past her mother’s number and his work number and others he recognized. His eyes rested on the repeat calls to Branson, Missouri. The calls were lengthy—an hour at times. There were texts to that number, too.
Hugh wrote it down, put on a T-shirt and sneakers, and jogged five miles back to the police station. His secretary, Paula, glanced at him as he walked into his office, streaming with sweat. “Didn’t you just sneak out of here?”
“Can’t stay away from you,” he joked.
In criminal cases, Hugh could subpoena the phone company to release the name of a cellphone subscriber. He wrestled with the morality of using his power to check up on his wife, and lost. A day later he had a name: Cliff Wargeddon. He ran a DMV check and got the license plate number of a white Ford pickup truck and an address.
He arrived at nineP.M. The house was a small ranch on a cul-de-sac, with carefully tended gardens and little gnome statues and colorful pinwheels catching the wind. The white pickup was in the driveway. There was a doormat that said,THE PEOPLE INSIDE THIS HOME ARE BLESSED. On the stoop, two potted plants dripped with begonias.
When a woman in her seventies opened the front door and came out with a small dog on a leash, Hugh began to wonder if he’d made a mistake. She walked the dog around the block and then went back inside. Hugh was about to abandon his post when the door opened again and a young man walked out, shouting something into the house before he walked to the white pickup truck and got inside.
He was younger than Hugh. Maybe by ten years. Hell, he still lived with his mother. Hugh followed him to a bakery in Jackson. The man went through an employee entrance in the back. He didn’t emerge for another six hours, just as dawn was breaking, his arms and pants dusty with flour.
It took two more days of trailing him before Wargeddon parked his white pickup truck down the street from Hugh’s house, in the middle of the day, when Wren was at school and Hugh was at work.
It took him a while to work up the courage to follow Wargeddon inside.
The first thing he noticed was that Wargeddon had a tattoo on his right shoulder blade, a scorpion. The second thing he noticed was the music playing softly from the clock radio beside the bed. He looked at Annabelle. “Since when,” he said, “do you like Carrie Underwood?”
There had been times since Annabelle left that he wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t tracked down proof of her infidelity. Would he ever have known? Would she have tired of Cliff, instead of moving with the boy-man to Paris, where he studied the art of baguettes and she took up smoking and worked on a novel he never even knew she had wanted to write? Would Wren have been better having a flawed mother, rather than no mother at all?
Sometimes, in the broken breath of night, Hugh wondered if it was better to leave some things hidden.
He wondered if George Goddard had gone after his runaway wife.
He wondered if, against all odds, he had yet another thing in common with that man after all.
—
JANINE’S HEAD WAS THROBBING.SHEtried to sit up, but winced when she felt the sharp stab of pain in her jaw and temple. “Ssh,” she heard, a whisper like cotton batting. “Let me help you.”
She felt an arm slide beneath her shoulders to elevate her to a sitting position. Slowly, she cracked open one eye, then the other.
She was still in hell.
The shooter was pacing, muttering to himself. The nurse was re-dressing the bandage on the doctor’s thigh. She peeled back the soaked gauze from the wound, and Janine turned away so she wouldn’t have to see any more.
Her cheek fell into a cupped hand. Janine found herself staring at Joy.
Suddenly it all came flooding back—what she had said, what had happened. She looked at her wig, lying like roadkill a few feet away. She felt her face flame with embarrassment. “Why would you take care of me?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Joy replied.
They both knew the answer to that.
Janine scrutinized Joy. “You must hate me,” she murmured. “All of you. Oh my God.”
Joy gingerly touched a spot on Janine’s cheekbone. “You’re gonna have a hell of a bruise,” she said. She hesitated, and then looked Janine in the eye. “So you didn’t just say that stuff to get out of here? You’re really anti-choice?”
“Pro-life,” Janine automatically corrected. In this war, labels meant everything. She had heard so many on the other side take umbrage when they were called pro-abortion.It’s pro-choice,they always said, as if there was something wrong with being pro-abortion. And wasn’t that exactly the point?
Joy stared at her. “So…you didn’t evenhaveto be here.”
Janine met her gaze. “Neither did you.”
Joy didn’t move away from her, but Janine could feel the line between them solidify. “I came to get…evidence,” she explained. “Audio. Proof of people being forced into…you know.”
“I wasn’t forced,” Joy said. “It was necessary.”
