She made the promise, and she kept it, too. For all these years. Even between the two of us, we rarely spoke of it directly, although she made veiled references whenever a similar case arose in the media. Once, she even mentioned that what happened to me was part of why she was an advocate for women, her clientele almost exclusively female. She said she wished she had done more when she was younger.
I guess the bottom line was, I wish I had done more, too. Because I know that Zach Rutherford raped me. And although I truly believed that Finch hadn’t done anything nearly that horrible to Lyla, it was still terrible. Just like Zach, my son had taken advantage of an innocent girl who was in a vulnerable situation. He had exploited her. Used her. Treated her like trash.
In many ways, Finch was Zach, and I was Lyla. And I didn’t want Finch to haunt her the way Zach had haunted me.
So I stood up, slinging my purse full of cash over my shoulder, and walked back to my car in the setting spring sun. I wasn’t sure what I would do next. But it would be more than nothing, that was for sure.
I’ve always considered myself lucky that I could mostly earn a living by doing what I love, but a bonus has been the sheer escape that comes with woodworking. What do they call it? Being in the zone or the flow? Whatever the case, I did my best to push everything out of my head that afternoon in my workshop. As I measured, marked, and cut shelves for a spruce bookcase, I felt myself start to relax for the first time in days, my mind going blissfully blank.
Unfortunately, the shelves were too basic—I could have made them blindfolded. So before long, I found my thoughts returning to Nina Browning. I had almost been looking forward to hating her as much as I hated her husband and kid, and I couldn’t wait to throw that goddamn pile of money in her face. Yet for some odd reason, I couldn’t quite muster anything stronger than a mild, theoretical dislike for her, which was frustrating and disorienting. The fact that I felt like I’d met her before didn’t help matters. Unlike Nina, I felt like I was pretty good with faces. But the full truth was I was good with certain faces, the same way I could remember an exceptional piece of furniture. Nina had that sort of vivid, memorable look. Very pretty but not at all generic.
I glanced at the old-school clock mounted on the wall over my workbench and saw that it was nearly seven. Lyla had gotten a ride home from school with Grace, but I tried to make it a point to be home for dinner, even when I planned to return to my workshop or squeeze in a few late-night Uber trips. I texted her now and asked what she wanted to eat, knowing she’d say she didn’t care. Even when she wasn’t angry with me, she had trouble making decisions. A minute later the predictable reply came in. Don’t care. Not hungry.
As I swept up and put away my tools, my mind returned to Nina. Her face. Her legs, which I’d caught a glimpse of when she stood up to say hello. There was no denying she was attractive, which pissed me off almost as much as the fact that I didn’t hate her. I blew sawdust off my drill bit and told myself it didn’t matter. She was an asshole. I knew her type. Only an asshole married a guy like that, and only an asshole would raise a son who would do what hers did, especially when he had everything in the world going for him. Privilege, popularity, Princeton. She’d said it herself—she was his mother.
Women are just better at faking it if and when they need to, and clearly Nina Browning was either a good actress or just plain crafty. A regular con artist. She knew to ask about Lyla, feigning a little maternal compassion. Her ploy had very nearly worked on me, until she overplayed her hand. There was no chance she wanted me to pursue the Honor Council charges against her son, especially given that he’d just been accepted to Princeton. Zilch. Why would she risk that for a girl she’d never met? She wouldn’t, plain and simple. And to think I’d almost bought her reverse-psychology bullshit. I pictured her now, drinking a martini with her friends, feeling smug about how she’d manipulated another guy with her bullshit lines.
And that’s when it hit me. Where I had seen her before. It was about four years ago, maybe more, as I tended to underestimate the passage of time these days. She’d come to the home of a client who had hired me to redo cabinetry in what she called her “keeping room.” This woman, whose name I couldn’t recall for the life of me, was about the same age and profile as Nina—meaning she, too, lived in a Belle Meade mansion, though not as grand as Nina’s. I’d actually gotten the initial call from her contractor explaining that she was impossible to please, hadn’t been happy with the work of a former carpenter, and wanted to start over from scratch. She didn’t like his design, though she had signed off on the drawings, nor did she like the materials he’d used, though she’d also approved his choice of teak.
“I wouldn’t blame you for not touching this one,” the guy had said. “She’s a real pain in the ass.”
I very nearly heeded his warning, but I needed the money, as always, so I took the gig. When I went over to meet her, I actually tried to talk her out of the redo, explaining the flaws she perceived in the teak would likely disappear with a coat of paint and certainly two or three, and that, in my opinion, she’d be wasting her money. She was unconvinced and undeterred, or maybe she just wanted to waste money.
So I took the job, agreeing to use mahogany and a new, more detailed design with a lot of flourishes and scrollwork that she’d pulled from a design magazine and that I actually thought were a little too McMansion-y.
Suffice it to say—the contractor was right. It was a long three weeks with this woman, though not because she was hard to please. She was thrilled with my work. But she never left me alone, never shut up or shut down her monologue of complaints about her life, whether online ordering snafus (her house was like a FedEx depot) or tennis team drama. Every day at five o’clock sharp, she’d open a bottle of wine, which was my cue to try to leave, and her cue to offer me “overtime” and a glass of my own. I explained more than once that I didn’t drink on the job, at which point she’d assault me with peer pressure I hadn’t experienced since junior high. “Oh, come on, don’t be such a Goody Two-shoes,” she’d say. “One little glass.” A couple times I relented, taking a few sips just to shut her up while she polished off the rest of the bottle, often then delving into complaints about her husband. How he was never around, that he didn’t listen to her, that he bitched about her spending habits.
And that’s where Nina Browning came in, quite literally, showing up one evening for what looked to be a big night out. What’s Her Name wasn’t quite ready, so she handed her friend a glass of wine and told her she’d be back in a second. At least a half hour passed in which I continued to work and Nina typed away on her phone in the adjoining kitchen. Meanwhile, we each pretended the other wasn’t just a few feet away. At one point, she got a call, and I had the feeling it was from her husband or someone she was very close to. Because she started speaking in a hushed voice, complaining about how What’s Her Name was always late. When she hung up, she caught me looking at her, let out a little laugh, and said, “You didn’t hear that.”
I smiled and said something like “Oh, yeah, I did.”
“She’s a great friend, but never on time.”
“Maybe if she talked a little less….”
This made her laugh a real laugh, showing a lot of big white teeth and how pretty she was and, perhaps more noteworthy, how unlike her friend she seemed to be. More real, less insecure. She was interacting with me as an equal and not as the carpenter she could pay overtime to drink with her.