Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but I nod as if it’s a certainty.
Misha’s chin is in the air, her arms posed to the leanest lines. “Our new nanny is old and boring, which is who I should have hired in the first place. I’ll never let you make those kinds of decisions again,” she says to Alec. “Hot nannies are a plague with people like us,” she explains to me, though I don’t think I’m included in the “us.”
Likely she’s lumping herself in with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner types.
Is Misha trying to imply Alec and Belina were sleeping together? I begin again. “Why do people think you killed Belina?”
“The East Side is full of assholes.” Misha punctuates the point by taking a loud sip of coffee. “We’re moving to Newport the second I can get this dump market ready and—”
“I’m the only suspect,” Alec says in a rush, frustration in his voice. “My lawyer says they don’t have enough to arrest me. Yet.”
“What do you think happened?” I ask Alec.
“She was probably meeting some boyfriend at the cemetery who killed her,” Misha answers. “Men kill women like that.”
“Kill women like what?” I snap.
“You’ve always been such a feminazi, Devon,” Misha says coolly, blinking her artificial lashes at me a few times as if she knows me. As if she was at Georgetown with us. As if she was more than Alec’s Newport townie girlfriend whose parents came into money in time for her to lock him down.
You’re an even bigger fraud.
A townie is a step up from white trash.
“Can you explain what you mean, Misha?” I say as nicely as I can, feeling guilty for my razor-wire thoughts.
“Belina was flirty,” she says. “Attractive for a Portuguese girl. I mean, it’s exotic to rich men with skinny blonde wives—”
“Stop it,” Alec murmurs. “You didn’t know her. Even if she was raising our child.”
“Like hell she was,” Misha says, spitting each word.
“She’s dead,” he says to the marble countertop. “Have some decency.”
Misha’s eyebrows rise despite the Botox shine of her forehead. “That’s perfect. You worry about the reputation of the dead nanny. I’ll worry how we’re going to make the mortgage without you working. It’s not like we can draw unemployment—”
“Stop it,” he says, louder this time.
“What’s going on with work?” I ask him. I pressured Jack’s uncle Cal to help Alec get a grant a few years ago. I hoped it worked out but didn’t really check.
You knew he’d fail.
“Nothing is going on,” Misha says. “That’s the problem. Another worthless idea like all the others.”
I glare at her. “Misha, that’s awful—”
“It’s fine, Devon,” Alec says. “I’ll be in jail soon enough. She can finally run back to her parents.”
“Maybe so,” Misha says softly, her gaze cast toward Alec, but he doesn’t notice.
It’d be easy to dismiss Misha as vapid or superficial, but I’ve always seen through her posturing. Because like Belina and me, she also set her sights on being someone else. Or at least, having the lifestyle to fit her attitude.
You’re jealous she’s succeeded: good mother, hot wife, perfect life.
You’ll never see one of those.
I watch Misha fiddle with her hair, pulling too hard at where her split ends used to be before she could afford regular cuts and colors and blowouts. She grew up poor, like me. When we first met, she told me stories after too many glasses of chardonnay. But when she was at Rhode Island College, her parents made a pile on some family property along the new interstate, and suddenly she was wealthy and looking to climb. It took a few years for her to make it into Alec’s circles, but soon she had the life she’d dreamed of: East Side address.
I can’t imagine how difficult it is, staring down being a single parent with nothing but an incarcerated husband and a mortgage. Your whole life disintegrating into something worse than what you had before. Worse than you ever thought possible.
I lived with that kind of change as a girl. Saw how truth altered the faces of my parents each time they saw me, a reminder of my accusations. I harnessed my fear of that life to get away from it. Away from that awful town full of people who looked the other way at the sight of me. Fear was the key to razing my life to make way for something new.
But what Misha and Alec have here is different. Misha is afraid of losing this life, which very much includes Alec, chairing galas, and VIP access to wine tastings on expansive Newport mansion lawns. It’s a life worth saving because it’s what she built. And there’s Emmett, who would know the regret and shame. Of the life they will lose if Alec goes away and Misha starts over.
As if you could help.
“How many times have you been questioned?” I say to Alec. “Did the police search the house?”
“Searched everything,” Alec says. “They found Belina’s blood in the trunk of the car.”
“Jesus, Alec,” I whisper. “How?”
“The stroller,” Misha says too quickly. “There was blood on the stroller and the floor of the trunk. I’m sure she mentioned cutting her arm when she put it in there.”
Her voice goes up, the way it does when conversation turns to college classes, and she’s overcompensating for her two-year degree.
“Hi, Devie!”
I shift toward the boy’s voice behind me. “Emmett,” I say as he springs into the room. I loved seeing him regularly for the past six months Belina and I were friends. He’s a little taller, his hair freshly cut, the curls still unruly, which I appreciate as a fellow curly-haired redhead. He’s in khakis and a red polo half-zip sweater, a preppy male version of Annie. “How are you, bud?”
“Good,” he says. He’s a smart three, direct and always observing. “We’re going to the library. For story hour. Do you want to go? You love story hour!”
I went several times with him and Belina, and I swallow thickly before I can answer. “Maybe next time.”
“Okay,” he says, shifting from foot to foot and back again. “Belina won’t go. She’s gone.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, my voice shaking.
“Oh yeah. She’s in heaven. She has a new family.” Emmett pulls at the thick collar of his sweater. “And there’s angels, right, Dada? They have big wings.”
I keep smiling, though I’m slightly horrified that even in her afterlife she’s looking after other people’s children. “That means she can watch over you,” I say finally.
“And Dada?”
“No,” Misha says sternly from across the room. “She’s busy with the angel babies.”
“She loves babies,” Emmett says to me. “Is that your baby?”
“Yes, her name is Ester. She’s sleeping.”
That dead woman would want you far from Emmett.
She always knew you’d make a terrible mother.
Now you’re proving how right she was to everyone.
Alec comes over and picks up his son, hugging him tight.