“In the bedroom.”
“Are you sure? In my experience, it's a lot more painful if we set up in the kitchen—”
“Don't make me repeat myself again.”
“Okay, okay, sheesh, you're touchy, aren't you? Do you need me to have my clothes on or off?”
“I need exactly what I paid for.”
“Naked then.”
She saunters away while I walk to the powder room and wash the blood off my hand in cold water. I watch the water run pink down the drain, but I avoid looking at the mirror. I have a feeling I'd start punching my own face again if I see my reflection.
My chest starts to tighten as I prepare myself.
I take off my jacket. My tie. The cufflinks come out of my cuffs and onto the marble counter, and the shirt comes off after them, and I do all of this in the methodical order of a man getting dressed, except in reverse, because there's no other way to do it that wouldn't undo me.
I look at my left hand.
The wedding band is still there. The metal hasn't had time to warm to my skin yet.
I take it off.
I set it on the bedside table where she'll see it. Where there's no way she won't see it. Because if she's going to see what I'm about to make her see, she's going to see all of it. The ring stays where I put it. The placing of it is the only honest thing in this room.
I start feeling sick again as I slip under the covers.
She rolls toward me immediately...but stops the moment she feels the cold of the barrel against her naked belly.
“Don't even think about it.”
She pouts. “You've already paid for it.”
I cock the gun.
“Jeez.” She flips onto her side. “You're so damn boring.”
“So boring.”
For her, obviously.
But for me, all of this just means the end of everything.
Five.
I remember seeing her for the first time, my Tuesday-afternoon-in-the-cemetery girl. Stone bench under a maple, V.C. Andrews open in her lap, a sweater the color of a sweater that has been washed too many times.I'm really not scared of you.And she'd pointed up at the CCTV camera I'd walked under without checking. I had walked away. It had cost me. I had not been a man who could afford anything that might cost him, that day, but she had cost me anyway.
Four.
I remember the second time we met. Six months later, a hotel conference room in Chicago, Mr. Coates apologizing for being two minutes late.Simons Holdings, LLC.My alias on the intake form. Francine pawing at my arm under the table. She'd been pawing at my arm for six months, for the cameras and thewitnesses and the men who needed to believe in Nate Simons. Juniper had walked in behind her boss with a notepad and a cardigan and the same sensible glasses, and her eyes had done the thing they had done to me at the cemetery, and I had looked away from her like she was nothing, because Francine was watching, and the rest of the room was watching, andSarahad been the lie I gave back to her in the parking garage after, when she chased me five flights down a stairwell I hadn't even told her existed.
Three.
I remember our first kiss.My name's Juniper,she'd said in the parking garage, with her shoe in her hand and her hair coming undone, and I had pretended not to know and she had not let me.Are you trying to make me jealous?I had snarled at her in the elevator three minutes later, when she'd told me she'd find another guy by the end of the day, and heryeshad been the last word she'd gotten to say before my mouth had been on hers and the rest of her sentence had died there.I didn't want it to be this way, Juniper.I had said it against her mouth. I had meant it. I had also not stopped.
Two.
I remember the way she started crying the moment she walked into the judge's chambers and saw her mother waiting. Five secret months of rehab. Weaning Ronna off her alcohol and off her addiction to bad guys, every dollar and every favor and every quiet flight to the facility I'd hidden under five layers of paper companies—all of it worth it, just for the way Juniper's whole face broke open in that doorway. Her mother stood up from the bench. Juniper stopped breathing. And then she turned to me with a teary smile, her eyes saying it all.