If there’s a syndrome that affects me today, it’s survivor’s guilt. I don’t cry for myself. I cry for the girl I shared that tiny room with for nearly two years. She died, and Spencer and I lived.
Colin had wanted to make sure I knew that I could leave. Of course I did. I was no prisoner. Like always, I was doing what made sense, both for me and my kid. I wasn’t going back to life on the East End without a fight. I’d deal with Jason once all this was past us.
By the time Jason returned the next night, I had already heated up leftovers for dinner alone. He saw the partially eaten last-day-of-school cake wrapped in plastic on the kitchen counter.
“Shit, I forgot. Is he upstairs?”
“No, I told him he could stay over at Kevin’s.”
“I’m sorry. I figured you guys could use a night without me, and then I spent most of the day at Olivia’s office. She was grilling me like I was already on trial. I thought maybe she was padding her bill, but Colin says she’s known for getting in the prosecution’s head. He seems to think she might be able to convince them not to charge me.”
That didn’t sound likely to me, but Susanna had said it was harder to get a conviction than most people realized.
“Spencer’s history teacher called me today. She said some of the kids go to this camp up near Connecticut. They hike and grow their own organic food. Sounded a little hippie-dippie, but he’d have a couple of friends there.”
“Like an away camp? You hate leaving him with a sitter for a long weekend.”
“Well, things have changed, haven’t they? He’ll be away from the city, and there’s no Internet there.”
“Is that really necessary? If Olivia gets this taken care of—”
“That’s a big if. And we don’t know how long it will take. I don’t want Spencer living like this. His teacher told me it was all the kids were talking about this week.”
“The camp?”
“No, Jason. You. You were what our son’s friends were talking about the last week of school.”
“How much is camp?”
“Three weeks, with the option to extend another three.”
“How much does it cost, Angela?”
“Are you fucking kidding me? After all the money you’ve been making—”
“Which goes to his school and to our mortgage and to taxes and to my agent and to running a business. Two clients have already dumped me. And I still have to pay the rent on our offices and paychecks for the staff. Do you know how much I had to give that defense attorney as a retainer?”
Of course I didn’t, because he hadn’t told me. But now he told me he’d taken $50,000 from our savings account—almost all of it—as a retainer. If the case went to trial, we’d need to open a line of credit against the house. Olivia estimated that it would be $300,000, plus any expert testimony they might need.
“How much is left?” I asked.
“I mean, it depends what you count. I’ve got almost a million in my retirement account, but I can’t touch it without paying massive penalties. And we have the equity in the house.”
I knew it had been a mistake to extend ourselves to buy this place. Who owns an actual house in Manhattan, let alone in Greenwich Village, let alone a carriage house with the ultimate luxury of a parking garage? We could have bought a nice apartment, with money left over to buy a decent house in East Hampton, instead of renting in the summer. But this place was on the National Register of Historic Whatevers. It was significant. It needed us, in Jason’s view. We had to lock it down, although it meant using his entire book advance as a down payment, with an enormous mortgage to fund the rest.
“How much do we have left in savings now?” I asked.
“About twenty.”
I would have guessed three times that. “The camp is only eighty-five hundred; five thousand for three weeks. I never ask for anything, Jason. If you can spend half a million dollars to prove your mistress is a liar, you can throw in a few more bucks to protect our son from the details. He’s going.”
I expected him to argue, but he simply nodded. “I’m probably not supposed to touch that cake, am I?”
I smiled involuntarily and handed him a plate from the cabinet, knowing that something in our relationship had changed. He needed me to stand by his side through this. He needed me, period.
The following morning, the news broke. A woman—unnamed, of course—had accused Jason Powell of rape. The NYPD had taken a DNA sample for comparison. A criminal law professor from Hofstra was quoted as saying, “The DNA will be make-or-break. But, let’s face it, with a high-profile suspect like this, why would they ask for a sample if they didn’t expect it to match?”
I was in the kitchen an hour later when I heard a knock at the door. I looked through the peephole. The woman was about my age, wearing a white cotton blouse and navy capri pants. Something about her looked familiar. Maybe she was a mom from school, or a neighbor collecting signatures to block that high-rise proposed three blocks down.
When I opened the door, she asked if Jason was home, then asked if I was his wife. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but a story posted on the Daily News’s website two hours later reported that “a woman who answered the door at Powell’s home, which he purchased for $7 million two years ago, said, ‘This is all lies,’ before retreating inside.”
Once it was dark, I went to the front porch with a screwdriver, removed the gargoyle doorknocker by myself, and threw it in the garbage at the corner. As I walked back home, I realized it was the start of Memorial Day weekend, exactly seven years since I first met Jason. This wasn’t a future I ever predicted for myself.
25
Ginny Mullen locked the front door of the house she had cleaned on Ocean Drive. She usually worked with her friend Lucy, but Lucy’s grandson was running a fever and couldn’t go to day care, and Lucy’s daughter had appointments at the hair salon, and her son-in-law, who was one of the best tree trimmers on the East End, still had his hands full thanks to the storm three weeks ago. So Lucy was the babysitter for the day, and Ginny had cleaned this five-thousand-square-foot home—the biggest house on her list of clients—on her own.
She had returned the key to the hidden outdoor lockbox when the owner, Amanda Hunter, pulled into the round gravel driveway in her black Range Rover. Amanda stepped out wearing a fitted tank top and yoga pants, her arms sinewy and still tanned from last month’s trip to St. Barths. She was probably forty years old, but worked hard at the gym and with Botox to look younger.
“Hey there, Ginny. I thought you’d be finished by now.”
She would have left three hours before if Lucy had been there to help. “Sorry—I’m working alone today, so it took a little longer.”
“No problem. Sorry, I’m a little bit sweaty. Pilates teacher kicked my butt.” She didn’t look the least bit mussed to Ginny. “Oh shoot, I forgot to leave you money, didn’t I?”
It was an ongoing problem with Amanda.
“That’s okay,” Ginny said. “I always know you’ll leave it next time.” She didn’t complete the rest of the sentence—you’ll leave it next time after I text you a reminder.
Amanda was rifling through her purse now, pulling out random bills. “I think I have it. Or most of it.”
“Really, it’s okay.”
Back into the purse went the bills. “I’ll write it down so I don’t forget. So, are you doing okay? With your son-in-law and this latest news? Oh, stupid me. I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s just, here he is, like the perfect catch, and now this.”
Ginny assured her that Angela was fine and that “things would be sorted out soon,” whatever that meant, then made her way to the Honda Pilot she had parked at the far end of the driveway.
“I like your new car, by the way,” Amanda called out as Ginny climbed into the front seat. Ginny threw a final wave as she drove away in the car that Jason’s money had helped her buy.