“So now you’re checking up on me?”
Aimee frowns. Scott is not usually defensive. “Of course not. The police asked me to look. They’re trying to solve a murder.”
“You know that you didn’t have to show them, right? Not without a warrant.”
Aimee is stunned. “I didn’t think we had anything to hide.” Tim begins to walk over to her truck. “I saw you walk out with Anton. Where were you going?”
“He was drunk. And bleeding from his head. He said he fell. He wasn’t making any sense. I took him home.”
“But you didn’t come back right away.” Aimee holds up a finger to Tim and then points to the phone. She needs an explanation before she can get off this call. “You were gone for more than an hour. Where did you go?”
“I can explain everything. But not on the phone.”
A knock on the window startles her, and she turns to see Tim standing there. Flustered, she flashes him a smile. “I have to get to work, but this isn’t over.”
Aimee hangs up, but is left with a heavy sensation in the pit of her stomach. She and Scott have never kept secrets from each other. They weren’t like those other couples, where the women hid their shopping habits and the men lied about weekends in Vegas.
But for the first time in their marriage, she gets the feeling that Scott ismanagingher. It’s the same feeling she gets when one of her employees has a too-elaborate explanation about why they didn’t show up for work.
It almost always means they’re lying.
9
NOW
Gwen awakens around noon, feeling groggy and hungover. The silence in the house is deafening. Without George’s and Rafi’s voices bouncing off the walls, or Anton’s narration as he moves through the house—guess I’ll get some more coffee noworwhere did I put that notebook?—the only sound is the clicking of Sababa’s nails on the wooden floor.
Gwen sits up, the morning’s events flooding her mind. Beside her sits a pad of paper with the list she started of things to be done.Contact the funeral home. Draft an email to send to Anton’s colleagues and work. Reach out to his father—best time to call France?
That’s as far as she got this morning after Aimee left until she felt a full-blown panic attack creep up on her. Her heart began to pound at an alarming rate and she couldn’t steady her breathing. She quickly took a Xanax and then wrapped her arms around her knees and rocked back and forth, moaning, waiting for it to kick in. When she didn’t feel better after a few minutes, she popped another.
Now it is two hours later, her head feels full of cobwebs, and she feels no less ready to tackle the list.
The thought of picking up Rafi and George from Lisa’s, bringing them home, and breaking the news to them fills her with dread. She has no idea where she will find the words to tell them their father is never coming home. Whatever marital problem she and Anton had, they always presented a unified front with the kids. She was the disciplinarian, the one who enforced rules. He was the one who would crack a joke to ease thetension or tickle a kid to make him laugh if the mood felt too heavy. But she will have to do this one without him. She’ll be doing it all without him from now on.
All of a sudden she longs for her boys. It’s a physical ache deep in her. She throws off the covers and gets up. Putting her hair in a messy bun, she tosses a sweater on and rushes downstairs. At the front door, she slips on some shoes and peers outside first. Her neighbor Paola, an older Argentinian woman who lives alone, is walking a geriatric poodle. Gwen waits for the woman to exit the cul-de-sac, hoping to avoid being cornered by her aimless conversation. The woman repeatedly confuses her with Aimee and asks for advice on her plants, a subject Gwen has no knowledge of or interest in.
At Lisa’s house, Marcus answers the door and gives her an enormous hug. She has to pull back before she starts weeping. He apologizes that Lisa is in the shower, but Gwen is grateful not to have to interact with her. She likes Lisa in small doses, and she can be really helpful, but Gwen knows that if it weren’t for Aimee she would never be friends with her.
“She’ll be sorry to have missed you,” Marcus says. He is wearing a bright-yellow pair of biking shorts and a half-zip top, clearly having just come back from a ride.
Gwen makes a noncommittal noise and then waits for Marcus to get the kids. On the walk home, Gwen thinks about the day she and Anton first stepped foot onto Nassau Court. They couldn’t believe that something so quiet and peaceful lay just a few minutes from the busiest parts of downtown Bethesda.
She could never have imagined that such a bucolic setting would be the scene of her husband’s death.
“And the high school is just a few blocks that way!” the Realtor enthused, so certain that they were a family looking for their forever home.
The Realtor could have no idea that this would be their third home in five years.
That Anton always did something to force them to move.
But three times was a charm. Gwen had really believed that.
A new start.
A fresh beginning. That’s what was so appealing to her about the D.C. area. Not just that no one here knew them, or about their past, but that the whole region was made of transplants. She had scoured mommy boards for different cities, and she kept coming back to D.C. and the complaints that it was too transient, because people moved in and out all the time for their jobs.
It sounded perfect to Gwen.