And what is Nate doing with my phone?
I try to sit up but my head spins. For a moment, it seems like I might throw up, but the feeling passes. The floor feels so cold under me. I wish I were in my bed. What’s going on?
“Nate?” I croak.
Nate’s eyelashes flutter in surprise. He must have come back for something and discovered me lying unconscious on the kitchen floor. “Eve?”
“What…?” My throat feels parched. Again, I get a wave of overwhelming dizziness. “What happened?”
Nate doesn’t answer. He doesn’t try to help me up. He just stares down at me.
What is going on here? Why would he…?
Wait.
I get a flashback to a conversation with Nate from earlier in the evening. I want a divorce. I said those words to him. I told my husband I wanted him to move out. Why would I have said that?
And then, while I lie on the cold kitchen floor, it starts to come back to me. The meeting with Higgins, finding Addie and Nate kissing in his classroom, the ultimatum followed by Nate moving out, and then last of all, Addie breaking into my house. I went to try to talk some sense into her, and then…
She hit me! That girl hit me with a frying pan right on the head!
And now I’m confused. Because I told Nate to move out, and he did. Yet he’s standing over me now, holding my phone. How long have I been lying on the kitchen floor? I definitely did not invite him back.
“Give me my phone,” I croak.
Again, he doesn’t answer me. He just keeps looking at me, a dark expression on his face.
“I… I need you to…” My head throbs with each word. My God, Addie sure clocked me hard. “Call 911.”
He narrows his eyes at me. “Do you remember what happened?”
I attempt to sit up again, and this time, it’s a sharp jab of pain in my temple that pins me to the floor. “Addie…she…she knocked me out with a frying pan.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” My head clears slightly. I make another attempt to sit up, and this time, I’m successful. “Nate, that…that girl is very troubled. We need to talk to Higgins about her.”
“Easy for you to say.” He sneers at me, and for a moment, it’s hard to remember why I ever loved him. “It won’t destroy your life to talk to her.”
My head aches too much to have this argument with him. “I’m sorry.”
“God, you are heartless.” He shakes his head. “What do I have to do, Eve? Do you want me to beg you?” He gets down onto his knees next to where I’m sitting on the floor. “Please, Eve. I’m begging you. Don’t take this to Higgins.”
“Nate,” I groan.
“Please. Don’t do this.”
“I don’t have a choice, Nate. It’s the right thing to do.”
“You don’t have a choice.” His voice is mocking as his handsome features twist in anger. “You have a choice. You like the idea of destroying me. I bet you get a kick out of it.”
It feels like an ice pick is jabbing me in my head. I can’t have this conversation right now. “Can we talk about this later?” I clutch the side of my head, pressing on my aching scalp. “You need to call an ambulance. She really smacked me hard.”
Nate’s eyes are glassy. He’s looking down at the floor, a dazed expression on his face. “No.”
“No? What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means…” He raises his eyes to look up at me. “It means I won’t let you wreck my life.”
I don’t entirely understand what he means by that. At least not until his hands wrap around my neck.
“You’re not telling anyone about this, Eve,” he growls. “I won’t let you.”
His grip tightens around my neck, and I can’t get a breath in anymore. It feels like my eyes are bulging out of their sockets, and black spots dance in my vision. I desperately claw at his hands, but Nate is much stronger than I am, especially since I just got knocked unconscious.
The next five seconds seem to last an eternity as I realize that my husband has every intention of choking the life out of me. He will do anything to keep me from ruining his reputation—even this.
My vision slowly fades to black. I am dying. This man is killing me, right here and right now. I can’t even take a last dying breath because he is crushing my windpipe. And as I die, I wonder who will care that I’m gone. Not my parents, who barely speak to me anymore except on holidays. Jay might care, although on some level, he’ll also be relieved.
And certainly not my husband, who is the one squeezing the life out of me and is the last face I see before I die.
OceanofPDF.com
Chapter Fifty-Eight
ADDIE
I CHOOSE a navy-blue sheet to wrap the woman I killed in.
They mostly have white and cream-colored sheets, and I have to search to find a darker color. There’s blood all over her hair, and it will go right through the white sheets. Navy blue is a better bet.
As I walk down the steps with the navy-blue sheet draped over my arm, I get a flash of vertigo. I can’t believe all this is happening. I can’t believe Mrs. Bennett is dead in the kitchen and that it’s all my fault. Every time I think of it, my entire body starts to shake.
Thank God Nathaniel is levelheaded enough to know what to do. Obviously he’s right that calling the police won’t go well for me.
I step into the kitchen, expecting to find everything just as I left it. Except instead of Mrs. Bennett lying on the floor with Nathaniel standing over her, now he is crouched next to her. And his shoulders are shaking.
“Nathaniel?” I say. “Are you okay?”
For a second, it’s like he doesn’t even hear me. Then he turns around, and I notice his eyes are slightly damp. Was he crying? He looks more rattled than he did when I left the room, but I guess that makes sense. It probably just hit him that his wife is dead. And even after everything she did, he must have cared for her on some level.
After what feels like an endless silence, he gets back to his feet. “I’m okay. Let’s do this.”
Great.
The next step is wrapping Mrs. Bennett in the sheet. It means I have to get close to her dead body, which makes me almost want to throw up. But I have to do this. If I don’t, I’ll go to jail for the rest of my life. And it’s not like if I come clean, it would bring her back to life.
So I take a giant breath and join Nathaniel next to his wife’s body. But the weird thing is she seems to be lying in a slightly different place than she was before. I thought she was closer to the kitchen island.
“Did you move her?” I ask.
He nods. “I thought it would be easier to wrap her over here.”
He’s thought of everything.
I crouch next to Mrs. Bennett, my heart pounding. Her features are slack, and her lips are tinged with blue. There’s blood caked in her brown hair, smeared on the kitchen floor. And I notice one other thing:
Dark red marks on her neck.
I stare at the marks for a moment. I got up close and personal with Mrs. Bennett when I was checking to see if she was alive, and I’m almost certain those marks weren’t there before. I would have for sure noticed them.
“What’s that on her neck?” I blurt out.
Nathaniel’s eyes drop as he studies the red marks. He frowns. “Christ, who knows?”
“They weren’t there before, were they?”
He snatches the sheets out of my hands and starts unfolding them. “Yes, they were.”
Were they? I chew on my lower lip, unable to tear my eyes away from those angry red marks. They almost look like they’re in the shape of…fingers.
That’s weird.
“Hey,” Nathaniel snaps at me. He’s got the sheet unfolded and lined up next to Mrs. Bennett’s body. “Are you going to help me with this or not?”
All of a sudden, my head is spinning. Are we really going to do this? Are we really going to dispose of Mrs. Bennett’s body and cover the whole thing up? It doesn’t sound like the right thing to do.
“I think,” I say softly as I get back to my feet, “that we should call the police.”
Nathaniel stands up too, following me as I scurry across the kitchen, trying to get as far from the dead body as I possibly can. I almost make it back to the living room before he reaches out and grabs my arm.