I took it out of the zippered pocket in my purse where I’d put it for safekeeping.
“How did you know that Sean had it?” I said. “How did you know that I knew where it was?”
A silence fell. I held my breath.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “I hoped. I gave it to Evelyn before she died. I wanted her to have it. It was the only thing I had with me that I could give her that I thought might last. And I knew that it was important to Sean. He gave me the ring early in our courtship. It was his love gift to me. A memento of those happy early days. It had been his mother’s, and she had given it to him so he could give it to me.”
I braced myself against the pain I expected to feel when I heard about Emily’s happiness with Sean—another reminder that Sean would never love me as much as he loved her. But the fact was, I felt nothing. Being with my friend was so wonderful. I was over Sean already. Sean was history.
Emily slipped the ring on and spun it around her finger.
“Look,” she said. “It’s loose. I must have lost a little weight during my . . . time-out.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You look gorgeous.” And she did.
With the ring on her finger, it was like magic. Emily . . . transformed, is all I can say. She changed from a sad woman grieving for her sister into the force of nature she’d been when I knew her. Something—determination?—reanimated her features, or maybe it was just that she started moving her hands in front of her face, like the old Emily, and the jewels in the ring caught the light—what little light there was in the hotel bar.
Emily was back.
With tears streaming down her face, she finally told me the horrible truth: Sean had begun abusing her a few months after their marriage.
“He knew how to hit me without leaving a mark. But he only rarely did that. Mostly he threatened me. Whenever I made him mad, he told me how easy it would be to get his company mega-lawyers to do him a favor. The city’s sharkiest custody lawyers would prove that I was an unfit mother. They would demolish me in court, citing my history with alcohol and pills. They would use my working in the fashion business against me. They would make my job sound like I was doing PR for Sodom and Gomorrah.”
How terrified my friend must have been, to keep these things to herself, even after I’d confided so much and made it clear that she could trust me. We’d always assumed that I was the neurotic person in the friendship. But really, she was the paranoid one. Paranoid and skittish. Imagine recording my confession by the submarine ride in case she would ever have to use it against me! Why would she ever have had to use anything against me? Being friends meant that we were on the same side. How sad that she hadn’t trusted me. But I knew what it was like, having problems with trust.
Did Emily think that she was the only woman with an abusive husband? I knew that such illusions were often part of the pattern of abuse. The husband makes the wife feel as if she’s alone in the world. But Emily was never alone. She had Nicky. She had work. She had me.
I said, “The guy that’s been following you . . .”
“Right. In a minute.” Emily held up her hand. “There are some things I need to say first. Stephanie, I don’t blame you. You thought that I was dead. I don’t even blame Sean, but I can’t forgive him for the things he did that gave me no choice but to leave Nicky. And you. I couldn’t tell anyone, not even you. I’m only glad that he didn’t turn his rage against you.”
It was a lot to process at once. Sean had never seemed like an angry person. Even after Mr. Prager’s visit, I did not see signs of the fury that so frightened Emily. Sean had always just seemed sad. But according to Emily, he was a skillful actor—and an evil one. It’s amazing how convincingly we can pretend to be something we’re not.
Sitting in the hotel bar, she told me how she’d had to work through her shock and sorrow. She’d been forced to survive the loss of her sister without being able to see Nicky, who would have been so helpful, so comforting with his love and warmth and sweetness. But she’d had to leave Nicky behind and go into hiding because she was so afraid of Sean and of what he might do to her.
I wanted another gin and tonic, but I had to drive all the way back and pick up Nicky and Miles.
“Sean will say I abandoned Nicky. He’ll claim that everything was my idea. He’ll make you testify for him. What choice will you have? He’ll blame it all on me, when he was the one who came up with the insurance scam. He was the one failing at work. His company was only too glad to put him on half-time, especially when they knew that it wouldn’t be great PR to fire a guy whose wife was missing and who had a little son. He believed he was doing it for me, because I wanted to do it. But that was a lie he told himself. Two million dollars wasn’t a fortune, but it was an attractive golden parachute for a guy who might lose his job.
“There wasn’t a single day when I wasn’t afraid that Sean would turn on me and take Nicky and ruin my life. You have to believe me, Stephanie.”
Suddenly, everything made sense: why Emily vanished and why I was the only one she had the courage to reach out to, why she appeared to Nicky before she tried to contact me.
It explained why Sean had so stubbornly refused to consider my suggestion that Emily might be alive. He knew that she was alive, which is why he’d tried to convince me that it was all in my imagination. He knew she was pretending to be dead. He wanted her to disappear and me kept in the dark. It was all part of his evil plan.
How could Sean do that to Nicky? His own son. Even when I had doubts about Sean, I never doubted that he was a loving father. My God, I’d left Miles with him when I went to Detroit. It scared me to think about that now.
I understood why Emily hid the fact that she was a twin. How excruciating it must have been, losing and finding and losing a sister. And now she’d lost her forever, just as she’d feared she would.
I’d believed that Emily was my best friend, but I hadn’t known her at all. Now I had to help her. She still seemed so lost, so damaged. For once, I had to take charge.
“The man who’s been following you,” I said. “Let’s talk about him.”
“Right,” she said. “I confronted him. I agreed to meet with him. Today, actually.” She looked at her watch. “How perfect. Stephanie, would you come with me to talk to him? Would you be there for support? I guess I should have asked you before . . .”
I considered it for a minute. Maybe it was a good idea to see Mr. Prager again, this time as a friend of Emily’s, this time to demonstrate that I was the trusted friend of a decent, loving family that had been having problems. They weren’t criminals! I wouldn’t have been friends with people who could commit criminal fraud. I would insist that things were going to work out, that everything had a simple and innocent explanation, that Mr. Prager’s investigation would turn up nothing illegal or even shady.
“Exactly when are you meeting him?” I asked Emily.
She checked her watch again, even though she just did. She was obviously nervous.
“In half an hour.”
“Where?” I said.
“Out in the parking lot. Trust me. Let’s have another drink.”
“In the parking lot?”
“You need to trust me. Can you trust me, Stephanie?”
I couldn’t even trust myself to speak. I nodded.
With half an hour to kill until our meeting with Mr. Prager, we sat in the bar and strategized. What should we do about Sean? Emily had some ideas. Some sounded—well, I guess you could call them vengeful. But others seemed reasonable. Let the punishment fit the crime. We had to be careful. But should we rule out the shock element in dealing with a liar and a bully like Sean?