In the early afternoon when Ruby is asleep, I walk through the condo collecting items of clothing thrown at random here and there: Ruby’s jumpsuits stuffed helter-skelter in the cushions of the sofa, discarded socks of Zoe’s left beside the front door. I drop them into a heaping laundry basket, make my way into Chris’s and my bedroom and retrieve an overused bra slung over the door handle. I lift his suitcase from the floor, the one we exchanged at the Asian grill on Michigan Avenue, and begin to sort through its contents: button-down oxfords, work pants stuffed into a ball in the corner of the bag. I lift the pants from the bag, checking the pockets for pens and pen caps, handfuls of coins, the type of random things that typically materialize from Chris’s pockets while in the wash. Bottle caps and binder clips, an entire package of travel tissues that disintegrate into a million pieces, and—
My hand lands on something I recognize almost instantly, even before pulling the shiny blue package from the pocket, the words her pleasure socking me in the gut. I double over before the bed, dropping the laundry basket to the floor. Some kind of gravelly sound emerges from me, a gritty, desperate gasp for air. I press a hand—two hands—to my mouth to silence the squall that wells up inside me, a sudden, violent storm brewing deep inside my bowels.
I stare at that condom wrapper, confirming everything I believed to be true.
My husband is having an affair with Cassidy Knudsen.
I envision the two of them in ostentatious hotels in San Francisco, New York City and now Denver, their bodies coalescing between Egyptian cotton sheets. I see them in Chris’s uninhabited office during nonbusiness hours, and me, stupidly falling for another cover story: working on an offering memorandum or writing a prospectus, doing due diligence on one company or another.
These burdens—the long hours, the endless business trips—were his alibi, his attempt to camouflage a secret liaison with another woman.
My head spins, imagining Chris, in the kitchen, humbly admitting that Cassidy Knudsen would be joining him on his last trip. I picture the two of them together, later on in their hotel room, laughing about it, laughing about how piqued I’d been to discover that she’d be there. I picture the two of them taking pleasure in my unease and insecurity, in my jealousy.
It’s a business trip, Chris had said. Strictly business.
And yet...
I put it all together in my head: the unanswered phone call, the contraceptive in the pocket of Chris’s work pants. The proof, finally, that I’ve longed for for so long.
I cross the bedroom to the dresser and remove from the top drawer various items that I lay across the bed: a set of matching underwear—lace bra and panties—in a pale shade of pink.
I stare at those items, long and hard, knowing what needs to be done to settle the score.
WILLOW
Of course everything I told Louise Flores was not the truth.
She had me write it all down, in my own words, on a fresh sheet of notebook paper. She paced the room, her heels clicking on the concrete floors, while I wrote it all down, about the chef’s knife, and Joseph with his gaping eyes. I even made up a thing or two about Miriam, how she was asleep when I went into the room, but I did her in nonetheless, just because I could.
She gazes at me, shaking her head and says, “You’re just lucky you’re a juvenile, Claire. Do you have any idea what would happen to you if you were tried as an adult?”
I shrug my shoulders and say, “There’s no death penalty in Illinois.”
She stops her pacing all of a sudden and peers over a shoulder at me.
“But you didn’t commit the crime in Illinois, Claire,” she says. “You were in Nebraska,” where I know good and well murderers can be put to death by lethal injection.
Especially those over eighteen, those who commit murders that are willful and premeditated.
Like waiting until someone is asleep before creeping into their room with a knife.
I didn’t want Matthew to get in any trouble. ’Cause I knew that what he did, he did for me. Never did I stop thinking of Matthew, not one day since I left. I thought about him every single day, and at night, when I lay down on the bed, I thought of him and cried, quiet-like so Mrs. Wood and Mr. Wood wouldn’t hear. I wondered where he was. Wondered if he was okay.
When she’s got it all, the whole grand confession in writing and on tape, she tells the guard to bring me back to my room where Diva sits on the floor and sings, tapping her long vermillion fingernails against the bars of our cage for a percussion effect though someone screams at her to shut up. I ignore her interrogation—Where have you been all day?—and climb onto my bunk, pulling a thin white sheet over me, all the way up over my head.
I close my eyes and remember that night, the things I didn’t tell Ms. Flores.
HEIDI