Three hundred acres. I couldn’t even finish three hundred pages. Couldn’t keep one little girl’s hair cut as neatly as Steven kept up all these fields.
I left exactly the way Steven wanted me to, out the back where no one would see me, past the fallow field at the end of his farm, the last few acres of dirt he hadn’t yet gotten around to covering over with something new.
CHAPTER 5
I wedged Steven’s key in the lock with one hand while Zach whimpered on my hip. Delia trailed in after me, slipped off her sneakers, and headed straight for her room. Theresa’s house was a no-shoes zone. The wide plank wood floors and pristine white carpets smelled strongly of lemon Lysol, as if Theresa had drenched the entire house in it after my kids had left that morning.
I kept my sneakers on, trailing in some of the sod farm with me as I climbed the stairs to the children’s rooms. Zach’s was sterile and bland—white carpets, white blinds, and stark pricey furniture with sharp angles and clean lines. Zach’s blanket, covered with brightly colored stains and faded puppies, was draped over the changing table beside his chewed-up paci. Zach jammed it into his mouth. He tucked the pilled flannel under his chin, his head resting against my shoulder as he made contented soft sucking sounds. I called for Delia as I descended the stairs but, as usual, she was reluctant to come. This house was still new to her, novel and different with frilly new princess bedding and shiny new Barbie playthings. She never played with Barbies at home. And she didn’t much care for princesses. But this was her daddy’s world, and she was perfectly content to play dress-up in it.
I stood in Steven’s foyer, amid the countless posed portraits of Steven and Theresa that ran from the landing all the way to the front door. Their bedroom was probably covered in them, too. Every inch of his place was a reminder of why he was here and who he was attached to, lest he forget, like he did before with me when Theresa came along.
When Steven and I had lived together, less than a handful of framed photos of the two of us had dotted the walls—a candid from our college formal taken by friends we hadn’t talked to since the divorce, our engagement photo with my parents, and one of us stuffing cake in each other’s faces at our wedding were the only ones I could recall. Maybe that was where I’d gone wrong. Maybe I hadn’t memorialized us enough. Maybe I’d failed to remind him of what we had, or what he stood to lose. Or maybe none of that would have made a difference at all. He wasn’t exactly Old Faithful; just because Bree-from-the-sod-farm wasn’t caught in the frame of any of Theresa’s pictures didn’t mean she wasn’t in the background somewhere.
My shirt was wet under Zach’s round cheeks. His nose was running, and I resisted the temptation to slide a finger under it and wipe a booger under one of the glass-covered portraits, right under Theresa’s nose. But that would be petty. A booger wouldn’t go unnoticed in Theresa’s perfect world for long, and, with any luck, neither would Bree.
Calling Delia’s name again, I pulled a tissue from a box in the kitchen. Theresa’s laptop sat open on the breakfast bar beside it, the Windows logo bouncing from one end of the screen to the other while it slept. Curiosity got the better of me, and I tapped the space bar. The laptop came to life without prompting me for a password, revealing the home screen—a search engine. A cursor blinked in the empty search field.
I peeped around the corner into the hall. Delia’s conversation with her Barbies trailed down the stairs from her room. Zach wriggled as I shifted him to my other shoulder, his eyes drifting closed again as he sucked softly on his pacifier.
With my free hand, I henpecked Harris Mickler’s name.
Social media accounts and photos flooded the screen. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter. I clicked open his Facebook profile. An attractive forty-something man smiled back at me. Harris Mickler, age forty-two, married to Patricia Mickler, and vice president of customer relations for some up-and-coming financial services firm.
Patricia … It felt strange to put such an innocuous name to the face of the woman who’d offered me fifty thousand dollars to kill her husband. Sifting through his online albums, I managed to find only one picture of them together—a single token anniversary photo taken five years ago. The wide-eyed surprise captured by the flash of the camera was the same expression she’d worn when I’d caught her staring at me in Panera.
Delia’s make-believe princess voice tinkled quietly upstairs. Zach’s paci fell limp between his lips as he slept. I clicked on Patricia’s profile. I don’t know what I’d hoped to find—a duck-face selfie attention-seeker? One of those annoying social media friends who vaguebooks between posting online quizzes and political memes?—but Patricia was none of those things. Her posts were spare and thoughtful, and she rarely included photos of herself. According to her profile, she was an investment banker, which you’d think would make her an entitled, rich asshole. Instead, as far as I could tell, she was equally unpretentious with her money. She volunteered frequently at her local animal shelter, made donations to crowdsourced fundraisers for friends who were down on their luck, and seemed most comfortable in faded denim and sweatshirts. The only ostentatious thing about her was her wedding ring, crusted in diamonds and boasting a grossly large center stone. It seemed disproportionately extravagant, given the little I knew of Patricia. And yet, it featured prominently in every photo of her.
Curious, I zoomed in on one. Patricia cuddled a shelter cat in her arms, the ring on full display. Everything else about her was casual and plain: unadorned jeans, well-worn sneakers, a shelter T-shirt covered by a simple blue hoodie … I tipped my head, angling to look more closely. A black band peeked out from the sleeve of her sweatshirt, looping around her hand and circling her lower thumb—a wrist brace. I clicked backward through her photos, pausing on one taken three months earlier—a bandage on her forehead. Then another before that—a splint on her finger.
I can’t tell him I know. That would be … very, very bad.
I clicked back through her photos again, searching for bruises in the dark rings under her eyes, for a telltale knot in the aquiline shape of her nose, or the bulge of a cast under a baggy sweatshirt, liking Harris Mickler less and less with every blemish on Patricia’s body that may or may not have been a scar. I clicked back to his Facebook profile, even though I knew I shouldn’t. He was a member of dozens of social networking groups, as far east as Annapolis and as far south as Richmond.
And just like Patricia had said, he was confirmed to attend an event tonight at a trendy bar in Reston. The Lush was only a few miles from here …
I tried to brush off the errant thought, but it stuck. I could go. Just to see. I could have a cocktail and watch him from a discreet corner of the bar. Just out of concern for Patricia.
I closed the browser and cleared the search history. This was ridiculous. I didn’t even have anything to wear.
From upstairs came the soft chime of Delia’s voice as she played. I laid Zach on the sofa with his blanket and his paci and crept back up the steps, pausing in front of Steven’s bedroom. Theresa had been inside my house just that morning. She’d told Steven my door was unlocked, a fact she would only have known by testing it. At least I had been given a key.