Aimee chews her lower lip for a second, measuring her words. “Is there anything else?”
“Yes, there’s more. I don’t feel like getting into it.” She puts the tissues down and looks straight at Aimee. Her friend, normally so pulled together, is almost unrecognizable. Her skin blotchy, her eyes red and swollen. “You believe me, right? I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
The oven lets out three short beeps. Aimee jumps up, grateful to have an excuse to avoid answering the question. “Stay here. I need to take out the chicken.”
Aimee takes the chicken out of the oven and lines it up on the counter, cafeteria-style, next to the potatoes and broccoli. She calls Benji and Max, oversees them washing their hands, picks off a little chicken for Sababa, and then sets the boys up in the family room in front of the TV.
She makes two more plates and carries them back to where Gwen is curled up on the sofa like a pill bug.
“Gwen, honey, I have dinner.” Aimee puts the two plates on the coffee table and kneels by her friend, stroking her hair.
“I’m not hungry,” Gwen mumbles.
“You have to eat. You have to keep your strength up. Where are the boys?”
“My mom’s over there. She’s watching them.”
Aimee sighs with relief. The boys are being looked after, at least.
After some prodding, she convinces Gwen to sit up and take a few small bites of chicken and potatoes. The bites are minuscule, not nearly enough for a grown woman to live on and no match for the alcohol she’s obviously been imbibing. She’s in much worse condition than Aimee realized. A wave of guilt hits her. It feels like watching a drowning friend from the safety of the shore. Only she can’t dive in and save her.
“Do you mind if I close my eyes for just a few minutes?” Gwen fluffs a pillow and places it under her head.
“Of course.” Aimee leaves her on the sofa and takes the opportunity to check on the half-dozen New England Asters that are in pots resting in a shady spot on the side of her house. She’s going to plant them at a client’s in a few days, but with the warm weather she needs to make sure they don’t dry out before then.
When she’s done watering the Asters, she comes inside the back just as the front door opens, and Noa yells, “Mom! I’m hungry!”
Aimee lets out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. Thank God Scott is back. He’s not going to believe what happened withGwen and Lisa in the street. “Dinner is in the kitchen,” Aimee calls out as she walks toward the foyer. “Wash hands.”
But as Aimee enters the foyer, the person walking through the front door is not Scott. It’s Cathy.
Aimee stops short. “Cathy. Hi. What are you doing here?”
“I’m so sorry to show up like this. I called.” Cathy looks sharp in a burgundy crushed velvet blazer and bright lipstick.
Aimee looks at her phone, and sure enough she has a missed call from ten minutes ago. “Oh, I was distracted with something, and I didn’t hear the phone.”
“I have dinner plans tonight. I hope you don’t mind my dropping Noa.” She smiles apologetically. “I couldn’t wait any longer or I’d be late.”
“I understand, of course. But what about Scott?”
Cathy’s eyes widen behind her thick black glasses. “Beats me. I waited and waited, but your husband never showed up.”
24
THIS PAST SPRING
Digging up dirt on Scott took a little work, but Lisa had always enjoyed a good project. It helped distract her from unpleasant thoughts, like how unsatisfying her home life had become. Sometime in the past few months, Kai seemed to have shifted his affection from her to Marcus. Where he was once a mama’s boy, now he would barely let her touch him, much less hug or kiss him. All he could talk about was sports, and all he seemed to want to do was hang out with his friends, or in his room with the door shut. She had heard this was a phase that boys went through, and that they came back around toward the end of high school, but it hurt. He used to want to tell her everything about his day, and now sometimes he could barely bring himself to grunt at her.
Her relationship with Marcus was no better. Having just made partner at his lobbying firm, he was riding a professional high, but it meant even less time for her. Sure, there was more money, more prestige, private boxes when they went to see the Nationals play baseball, that sort of thing. But she couldn’t help but feel his success diminished her. She was an appendage to him now, a vestigial one, at that. They hired people to clean, to tutor Kai in math, to tend the yard, to shop for their groceries. How essential was she?
To Anton, she was essential. He said he could barely function on the days when he didn’t see her. She didn’t love him, but she was addicted to the surreptitious nature of their affair, to the secrecy, the thrill of sneaking around. It injected a much-needed boost of adrenaline into her boring suburban days that seemedto meld into one another. She pondered how he might help her get even with Scott. Just remembering those cruel words of Scott’s, how casually he encouraged Aimee to pull back from their friendship, set her pulse racing.
The background check she paid for hadn’t offered much of interest upon her initial reading. But when she re-read it, a detail jumped out at her. The first time Scott’s social security number had ever been used was twenty-eight years ago, in a small town in Northern California. Her interest was piqued.
Because Scott said he grew up in New Mexico.
And according to her math, he would have been around eighteen when he used this social security number to get a job.