When Sean saw me walk into the restaurant, you’d think he was seeing a dead woman walking. Who did he think had texted him? My ghost?
He rose, as if to embrace me.
“Don’t get up,” I said.
I sat down. I was glad that the volcanic flower arrangement half hid my view of my husband. I couldn’t look at him. I wanted to stab him with a steak knife. I had killed the wrong person. I told myself: Be patient. Hear him out. You don’t know what he’s thinking.
“I thought you were dead,” he said. “I really thought you were dead.”
“Apparently, you were wrong,” I said coldly. “What part of my telling you not to believe that I was dead did you not understand?”
“But the body,” Sean said. “The ring.”
“You don’t need to know the details,” I said. “You’re better off not knowing. You’d probably just tell Stephanie.”
I heard the fury in my voice. That was a mistake. I needed to stay calm—seem calm.
“I’ve been reading her blog,” I said. “She’s been blogging about your happy home. You idiot.”
“Stephanie means nothing to me.” Did he hear himself? Did he know that sounded like a line in the cheesiest afternoon soap?
“Prove it,” I said.
“How?” he said, looking even more alarmed than he had when he first saw me.
“Break her heart. Torture her. Kill her.” I wasn’t suggesting that he kill Stephanie. I hated her, but murdering her wouldn’t help. I just wanted to see how he reacted.
He said, “Come on, Emily. Be sensible. She’s been good to Nicky. She’s been helpful. Nicky likes having her around the house. And you were right. She’s the perfect nanny. We’ll dump her as soon as the money comes through.”
He was telling me to be sensible?
Wanting to see him had been a huge mistake. I needed to leave, and yet I said, “We should eat.” I was hungry. After this, I had to drive back to Danbury.
Sean ordered a veal chop, well done. I couldn’t help giving his charred crematorium-smelling chop a dirty look. Stephanie cooked his food the way he liked it. I felt sick with rage and disgust.
I ordered pasta, something soft. I couldn’t trust myself with a knife.
“Come on, Em,” said Sean. He never called me Em. I’d told him never to call me that. It was Evelyn’s name for me. And now my sister was dead. And this idiot—my husband—didn’t even know that I’d had a sister. Stephanie knew, but I was pretty sure I’d scared her into keeping Evelyn a secret.
He said, “Our plan is working . . . it could still work . . . we’ll get the money before too long.” Even as he said it, I knew I didn’t want the money if it meant spending the rest of my life with Sean. It wasn’t worth it.
I said, “Your fucking Stephanie was never part of our plan.”
“I’ll tell her to leave. I’ll tell her it’s not working. You and I will get back together, and it’ll be like it was, you and me and Nicky—”
“It can never be like it was,” I said. “You made sure of that.”
“But we were so happy,” Sean said.
“Were we?” My sister was dead. And though I knew, logically, that Evelyn’s death wasn’t Sean’s fault, I couldn’t stop feeling that Sean was to blame.
I said, “I’ll never forgive you for this. You’ll be very sorry.”
“Is that a threat?” Sean said.
“Possibly,” I said. “Speaking of which, don’t you dare tell Stephanie that I am alive, that you saw me. The last thing I want is the two of you talking about me and trying to second-guess my intentions. You and Stephanie put together aren’t smart enough.”
I got up and walked out.
I hated him more than I hated Stephanie. Despite all the pride she took in her dark secrets, and in her stupid blog, Stephanie was such a simple creature that I couldn’t blame her for what happened. She reminded me of a spaniel swimming against the current. Or a not very bright child just wanting to make friends and have people like her.
Sean was different. He was the only person except my twin I’d ever let get even slightly close to me. The only person I’d trusted. Except Nicky.
Sean had betrayed me. I meant it when I said that he would be sorry.
Part Three
34
Sean
I was afraid of my wife. It wasn’t something that a man in my business, a guy in any business—or any man—should admit. I knew that Emily was trouble. It was part of her appeal. What do you do when on the third date a woman invites you to watch Peeping Tom? What are you to think when after five years of marriage she has never once let you meet her mother? When you’ve never seen one picture of her when she was little, when she refuses to tell you one thing about her childhood except that her mother drank and used to say she was stupid?
You give in; you give up. You surrender something. You lose your power, and you don’t get it back. Samson and Delilah, David and Bathsheba. The Bible is full of such stories. What they don’t say in the Bible is that the sex was great.
I fell in love with Emily and married her without knowing much about her. I had my illusions about who she was. She’d cried in front of the crowd at the Dennis Nylon benefit. It was hard to believe that the person who wept at the thought of women without clean water was the same person who stole my mother’s ring. Much later, Emily confessed that she hadn’t been crying for the poor women but because she’d had to deal with so many disasters at the charity gala and was facing another of Dennis’s inevitable shit fits. The beautiful woman who’d wept out of sympathy and compassion—that woman never existed.
I should have left her as soon as the plane from the UK landed. It was so early in the marriage; we were returning from our honeymoon. We could have had the marriage annulled. I should have acted on what I saw when I told her we’d have to give the ring back to Mum and Emily threatened to ruin my life. I should have told her I’d made a mistake. Instead we had sex in the airplane bathroom—and that sealed the deal. I was hers. I loved her. I loved her wildness, her determination, her rebellious streak. It was part of what fascinated me, what I didn’t want to lose.
She would stop at nothing to get what she wanted. And I suppose I was addicted to the uneasy feeling I got whenever I gave in and agreed to do what she said.
When we learned that she was pregnant, I was delighted. But I couldn’t shake the superstitious fear that there might be something wrong—if not physically, then psychologically—with a baby conceived in the Virgin Atlantic upper-class loo.
Nicky was perfect. But Emily almost died having him. I don’t know if she even knew that. The doctors didn’t say as much, not directly. But I could tell from the looks on their faces when they came into the room where she was in labor, the room that was decorated like a comfy living room as if that would lessen her pain.
Something changed in her after that. She adored Nicky, but she grew more distant from me. It was as if she’d fallen in love with her child and fallen out of love (if she ever was in love) with her husband. I’d heard the guys at work complain about something similar; mostly they were grumbling about the lack of sex after their kids were born. But with Emily it was different. We still had sex, good sex. The missing element was something else: warmth, affection, respect.