That night, Alls filled another three pages with numbers. Grace sat on the floor just outside the office, keeping her eyes open as she had been asked to. She wasn’t worried about him cracking the safe, not really. She was leaving anyway. He would get what he wanted and they would part ways, again.
“I hope you’re not disappointed when you get in,” she said. “There’s a very good chance you’re going to find nothing but fakes.” She thought about the real rubies she had effortlessly returned to Jacqueline that afternoon. She hadn’t even thought about keeping them, she realized with pride. “I’m almost sure of it.”
“Well, we’ll see.” His voice floated from behind her.
“Why this safe? I can tell you a dozen places more promising.”
“Because this is the closest thing I know of to your safe. Do you have a safe deposit box you want to tell me about?”
“The stuff on my desk is all I have.”
“Stuff,” he said. “Too bad for you, then.”
“There are other things I can do,” Grace said. “Sometimes I fix things up to sell them. I’ve probably made eight or nine hundred euros this year that way.”
“Inkwells,” he said. “Weekend projects.”
“It helps.”
“I can’t believe you’re not rich yet,” he said. “That is what really surprises me. I was sure you’d find a way.”
“I’m not qualified for much, you know.”
“Look, I’m self-taught too. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. A bachelor’s degree just isn’t for everyone. But I thought you’d be with some asshole, someone really sleazy, like a banker or someone always about to make a movie.”
“Lovely,” she said. “That’s not really my thing anymore.”
“What isn’t?”
“Hitch your wagon to a star. It turns out I can’t stick to the trail.”
She heard him scratching his pen at the paper, coaxing out more ink.
“When did you find out we were married?”
“The day after the robbery. He was in a sorry state, telling all his secrets. I had no idea you were such a nasty piece of work, Gracie. That you put him up to the forgery, that it was pretty much an ultimatum—I mean really.” He sighed dramatically, sarcastically.
She swallowed. “And when did you tell him—”
“About us?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Never.”
“What?”
“I never told him. He doesn’t know.”
“He doesn’t know what?”
“Anything. Everything. I told him nothing.”
“But what happened when he saw the painting wasn’t there?”
“He didn’t. I made the switch, I had to. And then he freaked out so bad afterward he didn’t want to look at any of the stuff anyway, wouldn’t touch the bags. I cut our SkyMall fake into pieces and flushed it down the toilet. I didn’t want him to know either, Grace. Not after you’d left me high and dry. You forget that.”
It couldn’t be.
“I told them I’d hidden the painting in the boat shed,” Alls continued. “We’d all agreed that if anything happened, there was no painting, never was. Later, I told Greg I’d destroyed it, and he was relieved. But Riley never said another word about it, not even to me.”
But Grace wasn’t thinking about the painting. She was thinking about what Riley didn’t know about her. He might have sensed something about Grace and Alls but never let on, not even to Alls. He had that much pride. It was impossible to think now that Riley didn’t know, when for so long she had been sure he did. That his parents didn’t know either. Her heart heaved.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell him,” she said. “Even after you were arrested.”
“Why would I? To punish you? To beg for his forgiveness? Grace, he was still talking about you all the time. How disappointed you would be, how he had let you down, how he could tell that you weren’t really feeling it anymore but he thought he could get you back.”
She had been wrong about everything. She had been carried away on loop after loop, thinking Riley knew everything she had done, that he had thrown open every deception. Now it seemed worse that he didn’t know. It meant that she had gotten away with it. She had fixated on so many fears, but that had never been one of them. Grace felt guiltier than she had ever felt before.
“So he still doesn’t know,” she said dumbly.
“What, you want to go back to him? Is that it?” She heard him push himself up. “Is that what you’re telling me?”
“No,” she said. He was standing in the doorway. “No, not at all. I just can’t believe that all this time I thought—I thought you would—”
“I was in love with you! Do you understand that? Did you ever understand that? Maybe you think you bamboozled me or something, that you made me do what I did for you. Well, you didn’t.” He slid down the doorframe until he was sitting on the floor.
“I did everything I did because I loved you,” he said. “I fell in love with you when I was sixteen, as stupid as a person ever is, and I couldn’t let it go. I stayed in Garland because of you. I used to read your books, you know that? I used to go around the house when you weren’t home and pick up the books you left splayed open, and I would read the page you’d just read. I never knew what the hell was happening, but that seemed right, in a way, since I never knew what the hell was going on with you. I would read these pages that you’d just read and try to catch some glimpse of you, some clue. No, they weren’t pages of your thoughts, but they were as close as I could get, like I was sitting in the seat behind you on a train, seeing every tree the moment after you did. And that is a stupid way to try to know someone, but how else can you know someone who refuses to be known?
“When you came home from New York,” he continued, “I thought you came home for me. I felt horrible about what we did, but when you came home you were going to leave him. I was sure of it. But the looks you gave me that first week, Grace, goddamn. You turned on your fucking floodlight so bright I couldn’t see to walk in front of me.”
He squinted, watching her closely. “I half expect you to do it right now, but you can’t anymore, can you?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, wishing it were true.
“When I don’t want to be looked at, I look down, close up, and shut up. But not you. I watched you do it for years—the second anybody crept too close, your motion sensor would trip, and you’d laugh, you’d smile, you’d nice up so fast and so bright that you’d bleach out every shadow, every detail. You’d have everyone in the room staring at you and they couldn’t see a goddamn thing. You came back and blinded me. And I fell for it again and again, just standing there blinking in the dark, because I couldn’t stop staring, trying to see.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Why? I knew better. You didn’t fool me, Grace. I only fooled myself.”
“I loved you,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter now.”
29
When they went back to Bagnolet in the morning, Freindametz was making tea in the kitchen, still in her raincoat over her nurse’s uniform. She had just returned from the hospital. Usually, she had a cup of tea and then went to bed.
She must have been exhausted from her night of work, because it took her a moment to register the presence of a strange man in her kitchen. She tightened her raincoat as if it were a bathrobe and turned a bitter eye on Grace.
“Qui est-ce?” she asked. “Qui est cet homme?”
“C’est mon cousin, en visite,” Grace said. “David, this is Madame Freindametz, my roommate.”
“Bonjour,” he said badly, extending his hand.
“Where is he sleeping?” Freindametz asked.
“In my room. I’m sleeping on the couch.”