These thoughts were usually accompanied by fantasies of full shopping carts in big-box stores. Fantasies where I let myself calculate how many economy-size packs of Huggies, Lean Cuisines, and baby wipes fifty thousand dollars could buy.
I pressed my forehead to the door of my home office, disgusted with myself. If I needed money, I should just write the damn book my agent and editor were waiting for.
With a sigh, I squeezed the plastic childproof cover and turned the knob. The added security measure was probably unnecessary; I hadn’t opened my office door in so long, I’m pretty sure my kids didn’t even know this room was here. The air inside was musty and stale. A layer of dust coated my desk and dulled the frame of the college diploma hanging above it—a four-year Bachelor of Arts in English from George Mason University that qualified me to do absolutely nothing.
I toggled on the power to my computer and waited, listening to the high-pitched whine as the screen came to life. It had been Steven’s computer in college, and then our home computer up until the divorce. Now, it was so old it would probably take all the child-free time I had left in the day just to boot the damn thing up.
The hard drive hummed, the hourglass flipping over and over on a discouragingly blank screen. Where would I even start? How was I supposed to write someone else’s heart-pounding romance when I’d completely failed at my own? It was already close to noon, and Steven was expecting me to pick up Zach in a few hours. Probably so he and Theresa could spend the rest of the day boning each other between a fancy late lunch and happy hour. If I worked every night after the kids went to sleep for the next six weeks, I might be able to finish a really horrible first draft. But why bother? Just so I could blow the remaining pennies of my advance on overdue bills? Judging by the size of the stack on my front stoop, the money would be gone in less than a week.
My home screen flickered to life. A search bar popped up. I typed the word how. As in, how do I write this damn book and fix my life?
The rest of the box auto-populated, fueled by a search history full of violent and salacious questions all beginning the same way: How long did it take dead bodies to decompose in a shallow grave in the winter in Virginia? How much damage would the bullet of a Colt 45 inflict on a large adult male with abnormally developed pecs? And how might a person eliminate the identifying features of his corpse?
I should have closed the search engine and opened a Word document instead. I had more than one good reason to get moving on this book. But I also had fifty thousand reasons to be curious about Harris Mickler.
Really, when it came down to it, what was one more search? Just a name to put a face to. Was there really any harm in a quick click through a few public records, just to get a feel for who Harris Mickler really was?
I eased back into my chair, feeling strange as I settled into its familiar dips and curves. Just as I lifted my hands to the keyboard, my phone vibrated on the desk beside it. A profile pic of my ex-husband flashed on the screen, and I swiped right just to make the image disappear. “Hey, Steven.”
“Is your power back on?”
“Yes. Thank you for handling it,” I said through a forced smile, hoping he could hear it. Zach squealed like an angry pig in the background. Steven grunted.
“Don’t thank me. Theresa took care of it. She has a client who works in billing at NOVEC. She pulled a few strings to reinstate your account. Then she and Amy went over to your place on their way to lunch and closed the garage. Speaking of that, Theresa said the service door to the kitchen was unlocked. You really ought to be more careful about that, since you and the kids are there alone so much.”
I bit my tongue before I could say something ungrateful and bitter. “I’ll take it under advisement. About this Amy person, who is she?” I seemed to have missed the memo.
“You know, Theresa’s best friend. Delia’s really smitten with Aunt Amy. She babysits the kids for a few hours on Saturdays so Theresa and I can have a break.”
A break? From his forty-eight hours with our children?
“Delia has an Aunt Georgia. She doesn’t need an Aunt Amy.”
“Great,” Steven deadpanned. “Let’s call Georgia and ask her to babysit.”
I gritted my teeth.
“Ouch! No, no, Zach! Come back here … Christ,” Steven muttered, a little winded. “Listen, Finn, I need you to come get Zach. Theresa had an appointment after lunch to show a house, so I took him to the farm with me. I’ve got a client coming in less than an hour for a meeting, and Zach is all over the place.”
“Of course he is.” I squeezed my eyes shut, envisioning the chaos playing out on the other end of the line. Steven’s sod farm was just a ginormous backyard without a fence. Acres of open space to run, and plenty of tractors and backhoes to climb. It was a toddler’s paradise, and unless you medaled in track and field, it was also a parent’s worst nightmare.
“Finn?” Between Zach’s shrieks, I could practically hear Steven’s sanity cracking. His farm was close to the West Virginia state line. It would take me at least forty minutes to get there. And I’d have to pick Delia up at preschool on the way.
“Fine.” I rummaged through my wallet and found the twenty dollars I hadn’t spent on lunch that morning. Enough for gas. “I’m coming. Give me a few minutes to use the bathroom and grab Delia.”
“An hour, Finn. Please.” He sounded desperate. And a little pissed off. He’d had only one of our children for less than three hours, and he thought he could handle full custody of both? I considered taking my time, showing up late, just to see how much hair he had left when I finally arrived. But then Zach started crying in the background, the kind of wails Steven had always been too impatient to learn to quiet. I got up from the desk, a layer of dust revealing itself where my hands had briefly skimmed its surface.
This was my life. A two-thousand-dollar contract for months of work, no sleep, and ten minutes in the bathroom alone.
“Tell Zach I’m on my way.” I hung up the phone, switched off the computer, and tried not to wonder about Harris Mickler anymore.
CHAPTER 4
Steven had bought his sod farm less than a month after we’d divorced. I’d taken the kids to see it once. I didn’t know much about the place, other than the fact that it covered three hundred acres, it produced various kinds of grass he then sold to homebuilders and real estate developers, and he’d been making a small fortune from it since. Mostly, I pictured him and Theresa frolicking naked in emerald fields of cash and fescue, which was probably why I’d never bothered going back.
I had a vague recollection of where it was. My GPS led me the rest of the way, to a huge billboard marking the entrance to a gravel road. ROLLING GREEN SOD AND TREE FARM, it read. The long dirt driveway was flanked on both sides by fields of baby Christmas trees, the next big cash crop Steven would undoubtedly use as Exhibit A in his custody case against me. Not only could he afford to keep my children clothed and fed, he could give them the perfect Norman Rockwell Christmas to boot.
Sitting tall in her booster to see out the window, Delia directed me to park in front of a small construction trailer at the rear of the tree lot. I freed Delia from her car seat and followed her to the sales office, knocking once before poking my head inside the trailer door. Delia scooted around my legs and rushed toward the desk, beaming up at the pretty young blonde seated behind it. The receptionist couldn’t have been much older than nineteen or twenty, with a sweet smile and perky boobs. Just like Steven liked them. The poor thing. Theresa probably had no idea, and I almost felt sorry for her, too.