“You killed your good buddy Campbell, for one.”
I glare at Henry, waiting for him to take it back. I wait a long time.
“He’s dead?” I say in a dull voice.
“Very dead.”
I blink off some tears, then nod stoically. Okay, then. Well. I knew that. Didn’t I? “He was going to kill me.” I look to Henry for reassurance. Find none. “I had to do it,” I say, stressing the impossibility of my predicament.
“Didn’t stop you from enjoying it.”
“You think Ilikedkilling Campbell?”
Henry brushes that lush lower lip with his thumb. “I know what you look like when you enjoy something, Faye.”
I refuse to flinch. I refuse to, even though arousal is butchering my middle. Why—why—am I like this? “Before Ihadto kill Campbell, he made me sign in to my email.”
It takes Henry several seconds to remember to blink.
“He deleted a message from PT. How come?”
Henry settles back into the couch, cocky, comfortable, those tree-trunk thighs spread obnoxiously wide. “If you have to ask,” he says, bouncing a knee, “I’m assuming you have not yet read Emma King’s script? Poor thing poured her blood, sweat, and tears into that, you know.”
“Hadn’t even opened the attachment.”
“You are a very important woman,” Henry says viciously.
“That has nothing to do with it.”
Henry laughs because I don’t deny it.
“I am overwhelmed easily. I shut down. It’s depression. It’s how I was raised.”
“How were you raised exactly?”
“To focus on one thing and be good at it. Everything else falls by the wayside.”
“Not your looks,” Henry says with sudden despair. “You stay on top of that shit.”
I glance at myself in the reflection of the window. I should look like hell, after these last few days. “The day of the funeral,” I say. “When Emma got me alone, said that PT canceled his classes the day before he died, that he had Band-Aids all over his hands, that he emailed her to come over first thing that morning. She was telling the truth.”
Henry makes a circular motion with his finger, near his ear. Keep going.
“Whatever she wrote, you guys didn’t want me to read.”
“Close, Faye. So close.”
My mind passes the needle through the loop, completing the stitch. “Something you didn’t want PT to read either.”
Henry’s face turns somber, giving me my answer.
“What could this girl possibly have written that would make PT distressed enough to have a heart attack? That has culminated inthis?” I push my shins against whatever he has used to confine me to this chair, something rough and bristled that infuriates my skin. Dock lines, I realize, and he has stripped off my sodden clothes, leaving me in nothing but a flimsy old button-down with fraying lapels. He has put warm, clean socks on my feet and because I am bound to my knees, my thighs are spread at a porny angle. Henry has covered my lap with a blanket, a laughable attempt at a gentleman’s gesture, then sat here and waited me out.
Henry jiggles one wide-angled knee anxiously, considering how to answer. “Something bad.”
“How bad?”
“Oh.” Henry lifts a hand. How to possibly put this? “Goodbye, Campbell’s casual political aspirations bad. Bye, Wee Burn Country Club membership, Brunswick enrollment for the brats, the annualchartered couples’ trip in the Bermudas.” Henry pauses. “That sort of stuff doesn’t do it for me, but goodbye to everything that does.” His voice takes on a wistful note that sounds genuine, but I am in no position to trust anything I hear.