“Actually, can you stay? I don’t want the table. It’s you I want to talk to. You’re Jon Block, right?”
He freezes, halfway out of his chair. “Uhh, and who are you?”
Aimee pats the table. “Please, sit.” She knows that she must be coming across as mentally unbalanced, and maybe she is after everything that has happened in the past few days.
But he sits back down.
“I’m Aimee Stern. Scott Crowder’s wife.”
“Scott Crowder. I see.” He cocks his head to one side. “Does your husband know you’re here?”
“No, he doesn’t,” she says. “I happened to be walking by, and I saw you guys sitting here. How do you know my husband? It’s not from the gym, is it?”
He gives her a half smile. “Happened to be walking by, huh? You’re putting me in a tough spot here.”
“Were you with him last night at Villain & Saint?”
Block leans back. “Is that what he told you?”
Aimee flinches.What a strange response, she thinks. Block is cool and collected, almost as if he was expecting her.
“It’s what he told thepolice,” she says, hoping the mention of law enforcement might make him open up. “Please, can you just answer the question? How do you know Scott?”
He frowns. “Why don’t you just ask him this?”
The question hangs between them. This isn’t how she thought it would go. His confidence unnerves her. She feels like she’s on the defensive when he’s the one who is sneaking around meeting her husband in secret.
“Well?” he asks.
She doesn’t have an answer for why she didn’t ask Scott directly. And then it hits her.Because I’m terrified, she realizes,that we might not be as solid as I think.
“I’m asking you,” she says.
He stands up and pulls out a card, tossing it on the table. “You really need to talk to your husband.”
He starts to walk away, and she doesn’t try to stop him or go after him. Instead, she takes the card he left and turns it over. Above Jon Block’s name and contact information, written in small black letters, are the wordsCapital Investigators.
16
NOW
Gwen stands before her immense walk-in closet, unable to move. The Sunday afternoon is almost gone and she’s still in the same sweatpants and T-shirt she’s been wearing for more than twenty-four hours. Streaked with coffee, stained with tears.
Aimee texted her to come over, and when she didn’t respond, Lisa called.
“Come to Aimee’s around four, or we’re coming to get you.”
She knew Lisa wasn’t joking, and she didn’t want her neighbor to come over and find her like this. So Gwen forced herself to shower. To blow-dry her hair. Even to apply a little makeup—concealer to hide her circles, even darker than usual, some blush and highlighter to bring a little glow to her sallow skin.
She needs her friends. She can’t stand being in this house right now with the boys gone. Everywhere she looks, memories of Anton confront her. In the living room, it’s the leather club chair he sat in to read his students’ work. In the bedroom, his reading glasses perch atop his half-read copy ofCrime and Punishmenton the nightstand. And on so many surfaces, little scraps of paper with unintelligible scrawling. He owned dozens of small notebooks yet often found himself without one, so he would rip off corners of whatever was at hand—bills, the backs of receipts—and jot down flashes of inspiration. Snippets, he called them, but when Gwen read them, they never made any sense to her.
Golden fears
Boy wears blue shirt
Gwen stares at her neatly folded clothes on the shelves, the precisely hung garments. Everything in her custom closet is light in color—cream and oatmeal and beige. This is her signature look—it goes with her blond hair and the image she tries to project. Airy, neutral, sophisticated. It seems ridiculous now to put on these clothes. She wants something dark to match her mood, but she has no black or navy or gray. The best she comes up with is jeans and a taupe sweater that seems to accentuate the purple circles under her eyes that no amount of makeup could conceal.
The distance between her front door and Aimee’s is about forty feet, but it feels like miles. Out on the street she feels vulnerable, as if people are watching her from the safety of their homes. Everyone must know by now that Anton was murdered. A few neighbors dropped off flowers, or bags of ready-to-eat food from Balducci’s. But there must be talk. Gossip. Leaving the house feels like a mistake, and she hesitates at the bottom of Aimee’s walkway. She entertains the thought of turning around, sending a text, but the front door swings open and Aimee is standing there.