And he’d never told her.
How do you spend hours teaching someone how to fake a signature, weeks, if not months, prepping for this worst-case scenario, make fake IDs, fake passports, pick the perfect bank . . . and still not tell your wife the actual fucking number of the actual safe deposit box?
Men.
“. . . in case you want privacy.”
Manny had been talking to her. She followed his gaze to a black door on her left.
“Did you use the privacy room last time you were here?”
“No,” she heard herself say. “I didn’t.”
“Will you need it today?”
“Yes.” There had to be six hundred boxes in here. For a small, former farming community? What were people putting in here—recipes for peach cobbler? Daddy’s Timex?
“Well,” Manny said.
“Well.”
He led her to the middle wall. She reached into her bag for the key. Held it between her index and thumb, felt the numbers there. She dropped it into her palm—865—as Manny inserted his own key into the box marked 865. She placed her key in the other lock and they turned them together. He withdrew the box, rested it along his left forearm.
“You said you would be needing privacy?”
“Yes.”
He indicated the door with a jut of his chin and she opened it. The room beyond was tiny, nothing in there but four steel walls, a table, two chairs, and thin white shafts of recessed lighting.
Manny placed the box on the table. He looked directly at her with their bodies only inches apart and she realized the asshole was actually hoping for a “moment,” as if his charms were so universal and magnetic, women had no choice but to act like porn stars in his presence.
“I’ll be out in a few minutes.” She moved around to the other side of the table and slipped her bag off her shoulder.
“Of course, of course. See you out there.”
She didn’t even indicate she heard him and only looked back up again once he’d closed the door behind him.
She opened the box.
Inside, as promised, was the messenger bag she’d seen Brian enter the bank with four days ago. Had it only been that long? It felt like a thousand years in her rearview.
She wrenched the bag out of the tight space and held it by the handles as it unfurled. The cash was on top, as he’d said it would be, stacks of hundred-and, in one case, thousand-dollar bills, neatly rubber-banded together. She transferred them to her bag. All that was left were the six passports.
She reached in and pulled them out and a small bit of bile and vomit reached her mouth when she saw that there were only five of them.
No.
No, no, no, no.
She beseeched the recessed lighting and the cold steel walls: Please, no. Don’t do this to me. Not now. Not after I’ve come this far. Please.
Hold it together, Rachel. Look at the passports before you lose all hope.
She opened the first one—Brian’s face stared back at her. His latest alias was there as well: “Hewitt, Timothy.”
She opened the next one—Caleb’s. His alias had been “Branch, Seth.”
Her hands shook when she reached for the third passport. Shook so bad she had to stop for a moment and clench them into fists and then press the fists together and breathe, breathe, breathe.
She opened the third passport, saw the name first—“Carmichael, Lindsay.”
And then the photograph:
Nicole Alden.
She opened the fourth passport: “Branch, Kiyoko.” Haya stared back at her. She opened the fifth and final one—the baby’s.
She didn’t scream or throw anything or kick over a chair. She sat on the floor and placed her hands over her eyes and stared into the darkness of herself.
I’ve watched my life away, she thought. I’ve failed to act at every step of the way, and I’ve justified that by claiming I was here to bear witness. But in reality I was just choosing not to act.
Until now.
And look what that’s gotten me. I am alone. And then I die. All else is window dressing. Wrapping paper. Sales and marketing.
She found a pack of Kleenex at the bottom of her bag, past the stacks of money, and used a couple of tissues on her face. She found herself staring back in the bag, the money taking up the left side, and on the right, her keys, her wallet, the gun.
And as long as she stared at it, and it could have been ten minutes or one, she had no idea, she knew in the end she could never point a gun at him and pull the trigger a second time. She didn’t have it in her.
She was going to let him go.
Without his passport—fuck him, that was staying here—and without his money, because she was walking off with that.
But she couldn’t kill him.
And why?
Because, God help her, she loved him. Or at least the illusion of him. At least that. The illusion of how he’d made her feel. And not just during the false happiness of their marriage, but even in these last few days. She would rather have known the lie that was Brian than the truth of anything else in her life.
She dropped the pack of tissues back into her bag and pushed the stack of money in over it and that’s when she saw the flash of dark blue vinyl. It slipped out between two stacks of bills like a card used to cut the deck.
She pulled it out of the bag. It was a United States passport.
She opened it.
Her own face stared back at her—one of the photos taken that rainy Saturday in the Galleria Mall three weeks ago. The face of a woman who was trying hard to look strong but hadn’t gotten all the way there yet.
But she was trying.
She put all six passports into her bag with the money and left the room.
34
THE DANCE
Leaving the bank, she again looked for the woman with the neck tats and the perfect posture but, if she was in the building, she wasn’t anywhere Rachel could see her. She turned right past the waiting area and saw Manny behind the teller’s window, speaking to Ashley with his chin tilted toward her shoulder. They both looked up as she turned left at the door, Manny’s mouth opening as if he were about to call after her, but she went through the front door and into the parking lot.
Now she had the perfect angle on the cars under the tree, and the sun was cooperating too. Of the four cars that remained, only one was clearly occupied. It was the Chevy that had backed into its spot, and a man sat behind the wheel. It was still too shady to see his features, but it was definitely a man’s head—squared off at the top and at the jaw, ears the size of change purses. No way to tell if he was there to kill her or survey her or if he was simply a middle manager ducking out on his work, a john getting a blow job, or an out-of-town salesman who’d arrived early for an appointment to beat the traffic that clogged I-95 in Providence between eight and ten.