Bang, bang.
A few years into the marriage, as he got serious about running for the Senate, she became more suspicious about affairs. How could she not? With him absent, so often? So many women around him with the exact same look in their eyes that she’d once had? How could she miss it? She owned that look. She invented it.
She quelled her suspicions with more long hours at the firing range. She became friendly with the owner. He flirted, and not subtly, either. Adjusting her stance from behind. Her husband was busy gearing up for his Senate run. They had the money, they had the organization, they had the endorsements. An entire apparatus was being built up around him. He was never home, ever, and she wasn’t studying anymore or even pretending she’d go back and finish her degree, or doing much of anything, really, except shooting. The having-a-kid part was going nowhere, too, not that it would have helped. Her therapist called it depression, and gave her pills, then different pills. She checked his phone when he left it unsupervised, looking for texts, photos, anything. Finding nothing. Why was she so jealous? Maybe she was the one who wanted to stray.
The shooting instructor started giving her rounds of ammo on the house.
How did she find out in the end? It took some doing. The locked office. The passwords. He wasn’t one to get tripped up by some stray sext. She knew she had to get clever. There were unsavory characters hanging around all the time now, like that one bodyguard who was super-creepy, Perry Garrett, and that weird little toad of a man, Lester Vogel. Her husband long ago sold the analytics firm that had made him unimaginably rich and was now spending most of his time focused on his Senate bid and, if not that, on different boards. Different committees. Donating to some institute he’d lately become obsessed with. The Fell Institute. He swore its techniques would change history. But he kept everything else in his life well hidden. A black box she became obsessed with opening. After all, how can you be married to a black box?
And no one else would have opened it, no one would have found out, not ever, no one could have, except for her. Except someone with that kind of time on their hands, and that kind of access, and that kind of motivation, and that kind of paranoia that keeps you obsessively prying. To everyone else, he seemed normal, admirable. Those who knew—they must have, that small circle—they were silenced by money, or the promise of power, or the shackles of similar sins.
Maybe he even wanted her to know, to find out, in his arrogance, in his sickness. Maybe he half-suspected she would find out, and assumed that, if she did, she’d say nothing, and maybe he would have been right.
Because if it had only been affairs, she probably would have stayed silent.
The locked office. The late nights.
She got access, finally. Cracked passwords. She found files. On his computer.
Those videos. The children.
She never knew he had those kinds of appetites.
To be honest, she’d never let herself believe that anyone did.
And she did say nothing, at first. It would ruin him, but it would ruin her, too, assuming anyone believed her. So she turned the interrogation on herself. How had this happened? How did she not know earlier? Maybe she saw something in him before and refused to acknowledge it. Or maybe she was rotten, too, somehow, to be attracted to him. To find herself in his orbit. After all, she fell in love with him. You are damaged, too, you must be, she thought.
She said nothing to anyone else. How could she? What would she say? Who would believe her?
And at the firing range, she began to imagine the paper target was herself.
Bang, bang.
And that started to feel like the only way out for her.
God may forgive, but He rarely exonerates.
And, who knows, maybe that’s how it would have ended for her—with the tycoon’s increasingly distant and press-averse and pill-dependent wife finally taking her own life, a quiet, shocking suicide, in some tragic, unforeseen swoon. Cut to the sorrowful interviews during which he’d pause, and choke up, and struggle to compose himself. Start writing the redemptive feature stories about his loss, and moving on, and his selfless and well-intentioned warnings about how best to study your own loved ones for the tragic signs. He’d have been fine, and she’d have been free, so maybe that’s how it should have ended. Maybe that’s what would have happened.
If the test hadn’t read positive.
Because it was only when the blue indicator on the pregnancy test said positive that she dropped the stick in the toilet and flushed it and went to the bedroom and got the gun she’d practiced with for so many hours and walked up behind him as he sat in his office at his desk where she’d found all his secrets and shot him in the back of the head.
She remembers now.
The bang. The numb ache of the recoil. The smell of gunpowder.
She must have missed him.
A little bit.
Even with all those hours of practice.
She didn’t know she missed at the time. She was going to shoot them both, she remembers. Him and her. Him first.
But the truth is, she hesitated, when it came to her. She had the time to do it. But she wavered.
Thinking of that baby that only she knew she had inside her.
And in that single moment of wavering, an aide had time to intervene; he heard the shot, ran in, grabbed her wrist, yanked the gun away from her chin, where she’d finally planted it, so by the time she pulled the trigger again, it was too late, she was just shooting at the ceiling.
Then the ambulance. Then the hospital. Then the prison.
Then the deal.
No memory of any of it. Until now.
It never went to trial. The apparatus intervened. His aides brokered something different. They must have known he might survive. They must have seen it coming.
Instead, she’d be warehoused away, her memory wiped clean, part of a new program, run by that institute her husband had donated so much money to, the one he’d been so obsessed with. Because the most important thing to them at that point was that she could never tell anyone. What she knew had to disappear. It didn’t matter how many years they sent her body away for. It was her memories they cared about. They had so much invested in him, and nothing invested in her. So it couldn’t go to court. What mattered was that she could never reveal, to lawyers or reporters or to anyone else, just why she did what she did. What she’d discovered about him. About his appetites.
So a deal was engineered in lieu of a trial. After all, he was still alive, barely, on life support. But there was hope. She didn’t know that. Soon, she didn’t know anything.
They arranged to have her mind erased, so she could never tell anyone what she knew.
Trouble is, none of them knew about the baby.
And the baby was born in the Blinds.