“Hey?” he says. “Are you okay?”
She’s not. His question gives her permission to not be, and she sobs again, louder.
“Hey”—he’s coming over—“hey, it’s okay”—and dropping to his knees, putting his arms around her. Now she can let herself go, and her whole body convulses.
“Shhh,” he says. “I’m okay, you’re okay.”
He’s right, she knows it. But she can’t stop crying.
“It’s all okay.”
John sits beside Ariel with both arms around her shoulders. He doesn’t say anything more. He just lets her cry until she’s all cried out, when she looks up at him, at his beaten face, and asks, “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m just so relieved to be free.”
Ariel wipes her tears away.
“So what happened?” he asks. “Why am I not dead?”
“I paid the ransom is what happened. Two million euros in cash.”
“Holy shit. Where in God’s name did you get that type of money?”
Ariel shakes her head slowly, then faster, then she drops her face back into her hands.
“No,” John says. “Not him. You didn’t.”
She’s crying again. “What else was I going to do?” Her voice is muffled through her hands, through her tears.
“Oh my God. I’m so, so sorry. Was it awful?”
“Yes.”
Ariel really has become a weepy sort these past days; she has gone years without crying, and now look. She straightens up, wipes her eyes again.
“Not only was he a complete asshole—of course—but for a while there I was worried that he wouldn’t give me any money at all. I couldn’t stop thinking that they’d kill you.”
John squeezes her tighter. “I’m so sorry.” He kisses the top of Ariel’s head. “Thank you. I’m astounded he agreed to it. I’m assuming it wasn’t just because you asked nicely?”
“No, of course not.”
“What did you do?”
“I threatened him.”
John pulls his face away to get a full look at his wife. “Threatened how?”
“How do you think? I told him that I’d release the recording of our last conversation. That I’d expose everything.”
“My God. Did you really?”
“What else could I do?”
“And how’d he react?”
“He went nuts. But he had no choice. He couldn’t risk it.”
“Christ.”
“I know.”
They sit for a few seconds in silence.
“Are you worried?” he asks.
“About what?”
“About what he’ll do next?”
“Not really. At this point in his life, he can’t do anything to me. Nothing as bad as what I can do to him.”
*
“Mr. Ambassador?” Saxby Barnes is both excited and terrified to have been summoned to the ambassador’s office. This is something he has dreams about. Also nightmares.
“Barnes: Do you know what the hell Griffiths has gotten herself into?”
“I’m not exactly sure what you’re referencing, sir.”
Tanner Snell stares at the ineffectual drunk who serves as liaison between the consular and intelligence. He really should fire this buffoon.
“Are you talking about the kidnapping?” Barnes suggests.
“Maybe.” The ambassador squints. “What’s the kidnapping?”
“An American businessman went missing yesterday morning. His wife came to the embassy for help, before she knew that he’d been abducted. Then she got a ransom call, and last I heard she was planning to try to get the ransom together.”
“What do you mean, the last you heard?”
“I was told to butt out.”
“By?”
“Griffiths.”
Snell groans. “Do you know anything about this kidnapping that might turn it into a thing?”
“No sir I do not.”
Snell glares until the guy understands.
“But I will definitely try to find out,” Barnes says, “and get back with you as quickly as humanly possible.”
*
Ariel takes a closer look at the wound on John’s cheek. “Come on, let’s get this cleaned up.” She leads him to the bathroom, turns on the hot-water tap, places a washcloth underneath.
“Ow,” he says when she places the cloth against his cut. She wipes away the dried blood, and can see that the cut is not very large after all. It’s the swelling that’s really going to hurt. “We need to get you some ice.”
“I’m going to shower.” He starts unbuckling his belt, turning away. Not exactly shy, but close to it.
So is she. They’ve barely been together, in the overall scheme of things. Ariel and Bucky had lived together full-time for years, they’d had sex hundreds of times, maybe more. After all that intimacy, Ariel would’ve thought that she really knew Bucky. That he really knew her.
This had been a large part of her devastation: realizing that she’d been so wrong.
*
A year after she married Bucky, Ariel pushed the birth-control pills to the back of a bathroom drawer. She’d spent the better part of the previous two decades worrying about getting pregnant. It had never occurred to her to worry about not getting pregnant.
It had now been a year of failing. Though maybe last night had finally done it, or the night before, or before, back-to-back-to-back evenings of clinical sex, a chore that made Ariel feel like another type of failure, on top of the long-term failure of her old acting career, and the more recent failure to find a satisfying replacement to occupy her time. And now? She was no longer good at pretending to enjoy sex.
She was also no longer good at pretending to enjoy Bucky’s friends, and the parties they threw.
“Every summer,” Ariel heard one of the men saying, off to her left, “we rent a boat in the Mediterranean, fully staffed. It’s such a great way to get quality family time.”
“Couldn’t agree more.” Another guy was nodding along. “Love it. So what’s the biggest boat you’ve ever rented?”
To Ariel’s right, Tory Wasserman was on a different subject with the women: “Slade had his surgery at Mayo.”
The age difference between Ariel and Bucky was not an embarrassing amount—they could still be thought of as the same generation, maybe—but his friends and their wives were having back surgeries and facelifts while Ariel was still going to her college friends’ weddings.
“They’re the best. The absolute best.” Slade had slipped a disk. “Then we got one of those handicapped tags, you know those things? So now I can park anywhere. I drive around the city so much more. I barely take taxis anymore.”
Tory was beaming, waiting for people to praise the cleverness of her pathology. They did.
Ariel suddenly felt sick. She looked around at these people bragging about their privileges, their genius children, their rented yachts and obscure jewelry and name-brand physicians who inject poison to paralyze their foreheads.