He’s on his feet now, too.
“Who’ve you been talking to Bryn? Did you hire a detective to hunt down information on me? Is that what this is all about?”
“I didn’t hire anyone, Guy. Your lies are finally catching up with you. I’m surprised people at the opera company aren’t wise to you by now. What would they think if they knew you’d embezzled money? Miranda certainly wouldn’t be so adoring of you.”
He grabs my arm, not hard, but it’s unexpected, and I flinch at his touch.
“Miranda? Have you said something to her?
“Let go of me, Guy.”
“What did you say to her?” He doesn’t loosen his grip, and his voice is low now, almost a growl.
He scares me. The words form in my head and I can’t believe I’m thinking them. But it’s true. I don’t know him and I don’t trust him and I’m afraid of what he might do. I yank my arm away.
“I don’t need to wreck things for you, Guy. You’ve wrecked them enough for yourself.”
I take off then, walking fast and hard toward the park exit. I’m afraid he’s going to follow me, but the only sound behind me comes from the empty plastic bottle being dragged again by the wind.
I walk even faster once I’m back on Broadway. One block. Two blocks. Three. I wonder if Guy’s on the sidewalk now, watching me from a distance or even trailing behind me. I don’t want to look back and risk meeting his eyes.
There’s a café open up ahead, and I decide to duck inside. That way there’ll be no chance of him following me to the inn. Entering, I twist my head a little to the side so I can observe the street in the direction I’ve come from. I don’t see any sign of Guy.
Inside I find a table at the back. The place is only a quarter full right now, people in small groups murmuring over their coffee or eating alone, reading newspapers or their tablets. A woman checks me out, as if she may know me, but quickly looks away. I keep my eye on the plate glass window in the front, making sure Guy isn’t lurking out there.
I order an espresso. It’s the last thing I should be drinking with my heart still racing, but I need the caffeine to help my mind sort this out.
Now what? I can still feel the crunch of Guy’s fingers through the sleeve of my jacket and wonder how alarmed I should be. I’ve assured him I won’t make trouble for him at work, but he has no guarantee of that. He knows that if Brent finds out how much he misrepresented parts of his background, he’ll be fired in disgrace immediately. And the organization will waste no time taking a closer look at the books.
I think again of that day Guy went into work—anxious, he said, that he’d miscalculated the numbers. It was the same day I found Eve’s body, and I’d hurried to his office after being questioned by Corcoran. I’d been surprised to find Miranda in the office, too, supposedly catching up on paperwork. I wonder now if there was another reason for her presence that Saturday, that maybe, just maybe, she and Guy are in cahoots on an embezzlement scheme and have been ripping off the opera company. That could explain her protectiveness of him.
But it’s not shady financial dealings that worry me most; it’s the stuff about Eve. Snippets of evidence suggest that Guy was involved with her, and I can now see that any assurances from him to the contrary are utterly worthless.
Did he kill her, though? Perhaps she tried to break off the relationship, and he couldn’t stand it. Maybe he discovered she was shacking up with another guy—Derek said she dated around—and he couldn’t stand that. Or maybe Eve figured out he was embezzling money and threatened to blow the lid off. I think back again to Eve’s comment to me in her office: Ask your husband. The underlying message could have actually been, Your husband’s a thief, so maybe he took the cash.
I set down my cup and rest my face in my hand. How did I get here? I wonder. Sitting in a café hours from my real home in New York, wondering whether my husband is not just a thief but a murderer, too.
Perhaps there were always signs, and I simply chose to ignore them as I carved out this shiny new life with Guy. I think of my friends and their surprised reactions when I announced my engagement after a six-month courtship. Wow, it’s moving so fast, one of them had said. Maybe that had been code, an attempt at warning me to slow down and get a better read on Guy.