Now he has his deepest desire. It doesn’t matter how. It only matters that he is a father, and she is not a mother. Maybe she can just get her tubes tied so she doesn’t have to go through the agony of hope anymore. She won’t tell him. She’ll just never get pregnant again, and they can go back to their lives before they became those people, the people she felt sorry for, the people she pitied. The statistics. The anomalies. The curiosities. Infertility is fascinating to those who seek to break its back. The doctors and the therapists who get rich at the expense of those desperate to procreate. Oh, they care. But they’re still rolling in it.
Stop. Stop. You’re not getting anywhere with this line of thinking.
She swipes on a little lip stain, then heads for the front door. Let Park deal with the police. She needs to get out of here.
The detectives’ Crown Vic sits at the curb like a great black buzzard hovering over a freshly dead deer. Her Jeep is in the driveway—since Park put a gym on her side of the garage, her car was nominated to sit outside in the weather. “It’s more rugged than mine,” he’d said at the time, dismissing the fact that hers was much more interesting to people who might want to break in. “Who wants to steal tile samples?” he scoffed, laughing at the very idea, so she’s been parking in the drive for the better part of two months. She is grateful for it now; she can slip away without raising the door and drawing everyone’s attention.
She leaves the car in Neutral and lets it roll backward out of the drive, then whips the Jeep around, heading toward Belmont. The Jones build will give her plenty of distraction today.
She feels only a little guilty about leaving him with the cops.
Work. Focus. Escape.
Between teardowns and new builds and the renovation boom, she has five houses currently underway and a wait list of ten more. Nashville is slammed with new construction right now. She can’t drive a block without seeing a construction site. The big boom downtown, multiple skyscrapers going up at once, gave the town the nickname Crane City, but now, with the influx of tech jobs and the vagaries of the COVID pandemic, the push is out of the city into HDH—high-density housing, also known as “tall and skinnies”—on the fringes of downtown, and the suburbs beyond. Add in new builds, renovations, additions—every craftsperson in Nashville is spoken for.
She is grateful she has her own crew who’ve been working with her for years, grateful she has the jobs lined up to keep them busy, because finding new and reliable tradesmen in this environment is like casting a line into the final hour of an end-of-season salmon spawn. Everyone is looking for people, and anyone worth their salt is committed for months.
Though there are plenty of craftsmen who will do whatever Olivia Bender wants, just to have a chance at the publicity. OHB Designs is regularly featured in all the magazines around town and many national publications. There’s even been talk of a television show, but she’s resisted. She hates the idea of losing her privacy, of having to conform to others’ ideals of what her life and work should look like. Anyway, trying to have a baby is a full-time job, as she’s told Park numerous times. I’d rather be a mom than have a show. How many times has she said it? Twice? Three times? At some point, she’s going to start believing it. Though now...police on the doorstep, the phone ringing, the neighbors staring. Murder, and scandal. A child, not of her blood. What of their privacy? Their lives are being upended, and it is only going to get worse.
Maybe now is the time to open negotiations. Maybe she should capitalize on this.
Olivia Hutton, you are a horrible person. Human, but horrible.
Stay the course. Do your work, your way. That’s what will get you through. It always has.
Olivia has a reputation for creating elegant, livable spaces that are at once homey, personal, as minimal or maximalist as her clients want, but always done with taste and restraint. She understands space and color, knows how to take down a wall and make the room come together, knows when an exposed beam or shiplap wall or quad-level crown molding or orange velvet barstool will do the trick. With her architectural design background, she is not just sought after, she is the crowning glory for anyone who gets her on their job.
She’s worked her ass off to get to this point, and she’s loved every minute. She has nurtured her talent to create livable spaces out of thin air, lives and breathes color and texture and mixed metals and raw wood and stone. Her perfect day involves hammers and nail guns and paintbrushes and rug placements and jovial shouts in colloquial Spanish and Romanians singing lullabies as they caulk bathtubs. Why would she ruin a good thing by having a kid?
This is why you keep losing the babies, Olivia. You don’t really want them.
A shudder runs through her. That isn’t true. Of course she wants them. She wants them so badly she can pretend to herself she doesn’t. Lying to yourself is the greatest lie of all, isn’t it?
She flips on the radio to drown out her thoughts, but they are breathlessly covering Beverly Cooke. It figures that brash woman was going to be a part of Olivia’s life forever. It’s always the ones you don’t want around who stay with you ad nauseam. Beverly wanted to be Olivia’s friend. She’d tried everything—texting invites to bunko nights, sending referrals, asking for advice. Olivia was just turned off by her from the very beginning. Yes, she was being judgmental, yes, she was being spiky and unfriendly. Who cares? It was not Olivia’s responsibility to make a stranger trying to force her way into her life feel better. Therapy has given her permission to take what she needs from life, from the people around her, and leave the rest. She is not going to apologize for simply not liking the woman.
But Beverly is dead, and Olivia feels bad about this, she truly does. As aggravating as the woman was, Olivia didn’t want her to die. Not really. Not like that. Raped, murdered, and submerged in the lake? It’s the stuff nightmares are made of.
If Park’s child has done this, what does that mean? What does that say about Park?
The arrow-to-the-heart thought leaves her breathless again. Will she ever not feel the betrayal at the words? Park has a child. A son. At least one son. Who knows, maybe there’s more.
Now there was a nightmarish thought.
And if her handsome, loving, giving husband could create a child who grew up to be a killer? She needs to rethink everything. She knows there’s a difference between nature and nurture, between passing on homicidal genes and creating monsters out of neglect and abuse, but plenty of kids are abused and don’t kill things. Don’t kill people. Maybe they’re all just seething like she is. Maybe they’re all just so sad. But they don’t go through with it. They don’t act on their whims.
Can she have children with a man who’s taken part in creating a monster?
Her cell rings, the caller ID popping up on the screen in the car. She expects it to be Park, but it’s Lindsey. Park’s little sister is his polar opposite and has been Olivia’s best friend since they were kids. She debates letting it go to voice mail in case Park has reached out to her, but no, there’s been no time. Park would call his wife first, not his sister.