Sergeant Perez pats my arm like a friend. “Hey, don’t mention it.” He winks. “And if I were David, I wouldn’t be so nervous with you around. Your aim has really improved since class.”
I struggle to understand the joke. My aim? Did my last book have a detail about shooting that made it seem like I’d learned how to properly point a handgun?
The sergeant picks up on my confusion. “I saw you at the academy range the other day. Maybe a month ago.”
He must have seen someone who resembled me. I have long dark hair. Dark eyes. Olive skin. Pretty much any thin, medium-height Latina, Mediterranean, or Middle Eastern woman could pass for me from a distance.
“You hit the target straight in the heart.”
His chest swells as he smiles at me. It makes him proud to think that his one-week course turned a wordsmith that had never held a gun before into a marksman. He may even have agreed to help with Nick’s case because he believes I was a good student.
I thank him again, my face growing hot with my lie of omission. The truth is, I haven’t been to the range in a year.
Chapter 4
Her first name is Colleen. I mentally repeat it as I watch her exit a Chinatown dumpling shop and return to her unmarked police car. What you having for lunch, Officer Colleen? Not going to chase that speeder, Officer Colleen? Trying to make sure you get off early to see your boyfriend, Officer?
She is parked on the corner of Mulberry and Mosco, close to one of five massive basketball courts. To some of the five-hundred-dollar-sneaker-sporting players, the woman with a baby carriage pacing the narrow lawn between the blacktops must seem odd. But it’s Manhattan, so no one pays me any attention. This town encourages natives to leave eccentrics alone. Pay little mind to the woman shunning the relative quiet of the pedestrian path who, apparently, prefers that her baby nap to the sweet sounds of squeaking rubber soles, male grunting, and dropped f-bombs.
Officer Colleen hasn’t noticed me watching her despite the twenty minutes she’s spent in the car. She sits in her vehicle, alone, paper box on the dashboard, chopsticks in hand. A dumpling pops in her mouth. She taps the sticks against the container side as she chews, drumming out whatever happy beat is playing in her head. I ask the Universe to let the shumai stick in her airway.
It is not healthy watching her like this. Yet I have to. I need to understand what my husband sees in this woman. There’s the body, of course. So unlike mine. Petite and rectangular, whereas I am tall and pear-shaped. But Jake would need more than beauty to be swayed from my side. He’d need a brain. Would she be smart enough to do what I did to track her down? Could she guess that her husband’s e-mail and Facebook passwords were the same as the shared Amazon Prime login? Would she know to search both his e-mail and archived chats for conversations around the date of the case in which his lover had been a key witness and then zero in on the messages from the female cops? And after finding a seemingly innocent note from one of these officers revealing a personal e-mail address, would she then have the wherewithal to search for and read through all the deleted messages from that address? Would she note the increasing familiarity in her husband’s salutation—“Colleen,” then “Hi, Collie,” then “Col, I can’t get you out of my mind”—and trace the progression of their banter from flirty jokes to innuendo to outright sexting? Would she read the message sent this morning, the other woman lamenting her daily schedule and hinting at how happy she would be if a certain someone surprised her during her lunch break, and then go to that very locale?
I don’t think so. Though, obviously, I’m biased.
Officer Colleen is dumb enough to think that Jake will leave me. That’s clear in the way she gushes about how “precious” and “beautiful” Vicky is in their conversations, leaving out any mention of mommy. She’s implying with her selective effusiveness that she’d be a good stepmother. She’d love his daughter. He doesn’t need the wife-who-must-not-be-named.
But he does. He does. Jake—he is Jake, despite the infantile diminutives scattered throughout her messages (Jakey, DJ, Boo)—wants his pie and whipped cream. If he planned on trading me in, he wouldn’t have hired a babysitter for all those Saturday date nights after seeing her for a quickie Friday afternoon. He wouldn’t have gushed about how much he loves me hours after she’d been sending him racy photos. He wouldn’t have bought me a new dress after giving her a silk scarf. And he wouldn’t now be standing her up for lunch.
She eats her last dumpling and closes the container. Her car door opens. She saunters over to a garbage bin on the corner and tosses in the paper box. No recycling for that policewoman there. No. Rules don’t apply to her. Screw the planet and everyone else on it.
A cry comes from the carriage. Victoria stirs in her seat, mouth opening and closing for food. That’s my exit cue. Though I might be invisible now, everyone will notice me when I feed my child. I don’t have the baby carrier to block prying eyes from my exposed nipple.
I push the stroller away from the courts toward a manicured lawn surrounded by two-foot-high fences. There will be benches alongside the grass. I can nurse there and then play with my baby. The day is beautiful, despite the scenery. Warm, with enough clouds to provide scattered shade.
Before I get out of eyeshot, I cast one more hateful glance toward the police car. She’s checking her phone, probably texting the man who refused to take the hint. My husband.
I’ll see you soon, Officer Colleen.
LIZA
I pull up to the house’s gravel driveway before sunset, take a deep breath, and turn inside. My old Mercedes rumbles over the white pebbles that have hid in my sandals since I learned to walk, coming to a stop at the side door and the concrete step that my mom chipped with an iron garden shovel. The house never changes. It sits at the end of a narrow lane, tucked behind a hedge of cherry laurel bushes and flowering weigela. Even the grayed exterior is as it has always been, despite last year’s long-overdue siding repair. Montauk’s salt air soon weathers any exposed wood, so no new shingle bears cedar’s true color for long.
I’ve resisted all attempts to modernize this two-story bungalow, ignoring realtors’ promises that they could rent the property for a fortune if only I renovated the kitchen or tacked on an extra bath. Overseeing contractors has always seemed too daunting. Moreover, I have no desire to sift through the house’s contents, weighing what I should discard of my past, dredging up memories of my father’s alcoholism and my mom’s constant struggle with it, a battle that ultimately ended in his storming out and her body surrendering to cancer before my twenty-fifth birthday. I’m content to leave the house alone, a sentinel of my memories—especially those I’d rather forget.
I take two steps at a time, avoiding the chip in the stair, and key into the side door. My muscles tense as it opens. It’s disconcerting, returning to the well-preserved scene of my youth, knowing that it lives on without me, hinting at my secrets to strange summer guests. My old bedroom, painted lavender when I was eleven, now hosts the children of affluent visitors. The kitchen’s ancient white fridge, stocked with local vegetables when I was a kid, is typically bare now save for half-carved blocks of stinky cheeses. Occasionally, a recorked bottle of white wine chills in the door.