In Belle River, only strangers used the front door. Family, friends, and neighbors came in through the mudroom or the garage, shouting hello without bothering to knock. This must be something official. Aubrey hoped it was the event she’d been waiting for. She felt excited and sick at the same time, like at the cabin, when Logan learned the truth about his dad. Nothing wrong with seeing a person for who they really are. But it was still hard, watching your kids grow up and face the harsh reality.
“I don’t know, honey,” Aubrey said. “Why don’t you go see?”
Lilly came back a moment later, her face white with worry. “It’s a lady from the police. What should we do?”
“Well, if she’s from the police, we’d better let her in,” Aubrey said.
And so the final piece of the puzzle fell into place. Aubrey had been waiting for this moment for a very long time. Ethan’s comeuppance. She never thought she could pull it off, but she did. She shouldn’t have doubted herself. She wasn’t the na?ve fool they took her for. She was a magna cum laude graduate of Carlisle (would’ve been a summa if not for freshman spring) whose perseverance had paid off.
After she found out about Ethan and Kate, Aubrey spent months paralyzed with grief and rage. She’d lie awake at night, sometimes with Ethan beside her, sometimes alone, thinking about the two of them together, and wishing them dead. No matter where she was or what she was doing during the day—teaching a yoga class, chatting with the other moms as she waited for Logan to finish soccer practice, making lentil soup, braiding Viv’s hair—in the back of her mind, Aubrey was fantasizing about killing her husband and his mistress (she no longer thought of Kate by her name). Their deaths were always grisly and painful, whether she did it with a gun or a knife, or poison, or ran them down with a car. She visualized the looks on their faces in the moment they realized they were going to die. She played over and over in her head the words she would say to make them understand that she had won and they had lost. It was all she thought about.
Aubrey thought constantly about killing them, but she didn’t act, because she was afraid of getting caught. Not on her own account, but for her kids. She couldn’t leave her children alone in the world, with the double stigma of a dead cheater father and a mother who was a murderer. People would talk behind their backs. There would be no more playdates, no more birthday-party invitations, no mom who earned brownie points by serving as room parent or chairing the middle school dance committee. Aubrey had grown up without any of those things, and she knew how much it hurt. She wouldn’t do that to her kids. Leave them to be raised by Ethan’s snooty parents, who would badmouth Aubrey and turn them against her? Never. The punishment for Kate and Ethan had to look like an accident, so Aubrey could escape unscathed and live happily ever after with her children (and, if things went how she hoped, with Griff, who would make a caring stepdad).
But an accident seemed so complicated to arrange. Aubrey thought about it for hours on end and got nowhere. She was not technically inclined. The CSI stuff was sure to trip her up. Any plan she devised would end up overlooking some key detail—fibers or hairs or a computer search on how to dismember a body that she forgot to erase. Eventually she decided that her best option was to get somebody else to do the dirty work. If Aubrey didn’t actually commit the murder herself, they couldn’t trace it back to her. But she was a housewife, a mother and a yoga instructor, not a hardened criminal. She didn’t know how to hire a hit man. You couldn’t just go advertising on Craigslist, could you? It seemed like too big a risk, so she did nothing, except to obsess and get increasingly mad at herself.
One night, after the kids were in bed, when Ethan was out, and Aubrey was drinking tea and feeling alone, she took a frayed copy of the Tao Te Ching that she’d owned since grad school down from the shelf in the living room. The book fell open to a chapter she’d read many times, though not in years. It was a chapter on self-control and self-mastery, and challenged the reader to think about the following question: Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises on its own? That was it, Aubrey realized: the question was the answer. Aubrey needed to wait, to stay positive, and trust herself, and the solution would eventually become clear.
And so it did. On a chill, rainy Wednesday afternoon, a couple of days before Kate met her end in the Belle River, Aubrey happened to see Tim Healy duck into Shecky’s Burger Shack. Something furtive in Tim’s manner caught her eye. Shecky’s was such a Carlisle hangout that an image popped into her mind of Tim carrying on with some college babe. She dismissed it out of hand. The idea of Tim Healy with some nineteen-year-old was ludicrous. He’d always struck her as loyal as a dog. But then she thought, hmm, you never know. And if it was true, well, wouldn’t that serve Jenny right.
Ever since Aubrey learned that Jenny had kept silent about the affair, she’d been rethinking their friendship. Years earlier, when Jenny moved back to Belle River from New York, Aubrey welcomed her with open arms. Aubrey was a young mother, a doctor’s wife, making her life in Belle River. Jenny had grown up and gone to college in town, but she’d never been an adult there. From the beginning, Aubrey invited Jenny to everything—dinner parties, yoga class, the annual benefit at the hospital. Once Jenny and Tim got married and started a family, Aubrey invited Jenny to join her playgroup, her babysitting co-op, her girls’-night-out group, and recommended her to the director of the top preschool in town, which resulted in T.J. getting accepted in a very competitive admissions climate (and Reed, too, since siblings got in automatically).
Aubrey wouldn’t say Jenny was ungrateful for her help, exactly. But neither did Jenny acknowledge that Aubrey was now her equal. Jenny had looked down on Aubrey since the day they met, in Whipple twenty years earlier, when Aubrey walked in with her ratty clothes, her enthusiasm, and her na?veté, and smacked into the wall of Jenny’s condescension. Aubrey had come a million miles since freshman year. She’d done coursework toward her master’s (though admittedly never finished), married a doctor, bought a big house, started a successful yoga studio whose clients worshipped the ground she walked on, and had three amazing children. But as far as Jenny was concerned, nothing had changed. It took that awful Labor Day party to show Aubrey where she really stood with Jenny. The fact was, Jenny still looked down on her, still took their friendship for granted, and would trample on Aubrey’s happiness in order to preserve her own.