I was always a little surprised to come home from work and find her still there. Maybe she only stayed with me because I was Nicky’s father. Not that I seemed to have had much genetic input. He looked like her; he had Emily’s beauty. But he did resemble me in one way: he was nicer than Emily, more like me. I loved him. The three of us were a family, a little family. I would have done anything to protect us, to make our lives better. Anything Emily wanted.
I told myself that I liked the fact that she wasn’t one of those women who blather on about their feelings and want to know all about yours. She let me have my private thoughts. But something about Emily was . . . too private, I’d say. Even on the really good days, when I wasn’t working and Emily and Nicky and I would be going to some fun place in the car, enjoying ourselves, I’d glance at her, and I’d see something in her eyes, something restless, something worse than restless: the panic of a bird trapped in a house. Which is not exactly the look you most want to see on your wife’s face.
When Emily and I met, I had gone from being with the cool kids at university to being with my colleagues on Wall Street, definitely not the cool kids, though they thought they were. They were idiot savants who could do one thing and one thing only. They knew how to make money. But being with Emily proved that I still had something cool about me. I was married to the prettiest, coolest girl. She was always daring me, taking risks, inviting me to be her partner in crime.
I was afraid to not join in, to resist Emily’s wild ideas. All leading up to the preposterous insurance-fraud scheme. I never thought it would work. I’m a practical person. I’m grounded in reality and have an important job on Wall Street. But I let her convince me because she would have thought that I was a coward if I pointed out the obvious flaws in her plan. I told her that two million dollars wasn’t worth it. I made plenty of money. I could ask for a raise. But she kept saying that it wasn’t about the money. It was about the danger, the risk. It was about feeling alive. And God knows I wanted my wife to feel alive.
It was supposed to be so simple. So brilliant. She’d fake her accidental death. I didn’t ask about this part, and she appreciated my not asking. I could sign up for spousal life insurance from my company, and after the big payout, Emily, Nicky, and I would reconvene in some European paradise with enough to live on for a few years. After that we’d see where we were.
I wanted to believe that our plan could work. But I didn’t. The one thing I did know was that our marriage wasn’t going to last if I refused. Emily was blackmailing me, though we would never have called it that. She had a maddening way of making blackmail seem like consensus.
She was never supposed to die. I was blindsided. I couldn’t understand how it happened. She’d told me not to believe she was dead, but the autopsy report—the DNA result—was convincing. Better-laid plans than ours went disastrously wrong.
The one thing she did say about herself was that she’d had a bit of a drug problem when she was very young. She told me that she’d gotten the tattoo on her wrist to remind herself of how bad things used to be when she was using. And she’d stopped using, early on.
I didn’t believe for a moment that Emily meant to kill herself. She would never have left Nicky without a mother. I was certain it was an accident. She’d gotten high, had a few drinks, gone for a swim—and drowned. She was wearing Mum’s ring. That item on the autopsy about liver damage and long-term drug use—that made no sense at all. They must have gotten that wrong. Doctors make mistakes all the time. They operate on the wrong patient, remove the wrong kidney.
I mourned Emily. I was numb with grief. Or, more accurately, I veered between numbness and excruciating pain. But I had to stay strong for Nicky even if I dreaded getting up every morning. At first I didn’t want to go on living. I blamed myself for having gone along with my wife’s greedy, impossible, illegal—stupid—game.
I believed—I truly believed—that my wife was dead. Maybe the autopsy report contained some mistakes, but I had to believe the evidence: my wife’s DNA, my mother’s ring.
That was the only reason why I let myself get close to Stephanie. I would never have done that if I’d thought Emily was alive.
Stephanie does everything I want, and for better or worse, she never scares me. Never challenges me. Stephanie plays the music I like. She cooks my dinner the way I like it, without Emily’s friendly teasing, which I knew was barely disguised contempt for the boring British carnivore preferring his hunks of meat well done.
I don’t love Stephanie. I never have and never will. But I don’t mind having her around. I always know she’s going to be there when I get home. She doesn’t ask too many questions; she never seems distant. She lives to please Miles and Nicky and me. She is as eager to please in bed as she is everywhere else.
Living with her has kept me calm as I’ve discovered the negatives of Emily’s plan: one, Nicky’s misery; two, being questioned by the police; three, Stephanie’s suspicions.
And of course the major negative: Emily’s death.
Stephanie is right to be suspicious. She’s what Emily said that poker players call “the fish.” Stephanie is always hinting about dark things in her past, saying she wants to be an extra good person to make up for what she did earlier in her life. An extra good person? What does that even mean? I feel disloyal to Emily for not rolling my eyes so obviously that Stephanie notices when she says things like that.
She has no idea I know that her brother is Miles’s father. And what if I do? What do I care? She imagines that her secret puts her at the dark center of the world. But she’s the only one who cares.
She and my wife are both insane. They might actually have become friends if Emily hadn’t been looking for a fish, if Emily was capable of friendship.
Not for one moment did I imagine that Stephanie and I would stay together. But she was comforting and obliging as I struggled to recover from the loss of my wife, who as it turned out, was never lost.
I was at my desk at work when the text came in: peeping tom.
I shut my eyes and opened them. The two words were still on the screen. Two words that seemed too dangerous—too explosive—to read in my office. I jammed my phone in my pocket and took the elevator down. The smokers from my office all stood—just as the sign instructed them—at least twenty-five feet from the door. I waved to them as I rushed around the corner. I needed privacy. I needed air. I checked my messages again.
The two words were still there. It wasn’t possible. It just wasn’t possible. Either my wife was alive, or someone had found her phone. Her real phone.
I texted back: peeping tom.
I waited.
A message came back: dinner?
I kept hitting the wrong keys as I typed in: where?
dorsoduro.
It was the restaurant where I’d proposed to Emily.
My wife was alive.
Dorsoduro was Emily’s choice.
I chose to see it as a statement. A romantic gesture. She still loved me. We were still together. Man and wife. Things could still work out.
The minute I saw her walking toward me across the restaurant, I knew that I would never love anyone else, not as long as I lived. She was so bright, so sleek, so elegant. So sexy. Everyone turned to watch her. She had that kind of energy. Something in the atmosphere changed when she walked into a room. Alone, or with any man lucky enough to be with her. Whereas—I couldn’t help thinking—when Stephanie walked into a room, you assumed that she must have come with some pitiful guy who was late or couldn’t find a parking space. Or maybe she was meeting a date who was going to stand her up.
I didn’t want to think about Stephanie. She was the last person I wanted to think about.
Seeing Emily again was like a dream, a beautiful happy dream, the dream that everyone most wants to have, the dream we so long to come true. The dream in which the dead beloved isn’t really dead.