Finn felt a weight sliding away from him, a relief that was almost frightening. He couldn’t help but smile, yet he still managed to say, “She isn’t my wife.”
“Oui, mais, er . . .”
Finn went in and pressed for the elevator, then went up the stairs rather than wait for it. He heard a voice as soon as he opened the door, and walked into the kitchen to find Adrienne sitting talking to Debbie, coffee cups in front of them.
“Hello.”
Debbie jumped up and said, “Oh my goodness, I’ll leave you two alone.”
Adrienne looked up and smiled at Finn, a smile that was still measured. “You don’t have to leave, Debbie.”
Debbie laughed nervously and said, “Oh, but I do.” Then she looked at Finn. “Hailey went back to school today. I know you said about being vigilant, but she was insistent, and . . .”
He was impressed, and wasn’t sure why, that Hailey was maintaining her secretive habits. Certainly, he wasn’t about to reveal her deception by telling Debbie she wasn’t at school.
“That’s good. She’s safe now, anyway.”
“It’s taken care of?” He nodded and she mouthed a silent thank you to him.
Adrienne stood, and gave Debbie a brief hug before she left. She turned to Finn then and kissed him on both cheeks, but offered no hug.
“We need to talk,” she said.
“Okay.” He sat in the chair vacated by Debbie. Adrienne sat down again. She looked more beautiful than he’d ever seen her, a glow about her that was probably nothing more than the glow of enforced separation. She looked a little more curvy, too—the healthiness of the diet in her brother’s house. “Are you back?”
“I don’t know.” She frowned, and then gave a little noncommittal smile. “I want to be. I’ve missed you, and yes, the last few days have been . . . a revelation. But things have to change, Finn. Most of all, I need you to be completely open with me, completely honest.”
“Things will change. And I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
“Were you a spy?”
That was clever, starting with something they’d already covered.
“For want of a better word, yes. I left six years ago, and I can’t talk about a lot of what I did.”
“Did you ever kill anybody?”
He was surprised by the question. Unless Adrienne was bluffing him, Debbie hadn’t mentioned what had happened in their apartment. He’d have to let her know that it was okay to tell Adrienne—in his experience, most people needed one confidante.
“I killed two people, one of them by accident, one of them . . . ” He stopped. He would have to tell her about Sofi in time, but not now, not yet. “That was years ago, but in the last week I’ve killed four more.”
Her mouth fell open.
“You’ve killed four people this week!”
He nodded, surprised at how lightly he carried those deaths, certainly more lightly than Sofi’s, or even the guy in the church.
“Two of them were the people who killed Jonas, and one of those was trying to kill Hailey when I intercepted him—I killed him in their apartment.”
Adrienne looked more shocked by that revelation. “But Debbie didn’t say anything . . .”
“I told them to forget about it, not to tell anyone. I also killed the two people who ordered Jonas’s death and who would never have left me alone if I hadn’t killed them.”
As if it was the one revelation she hadn’t expected, she said, “You’re a killer.”
“Hardly. I’ve killed people, that’s not the same.”
“Would you kill again?”
“If I had to, and so would you. It’s what we do to protect ourselves and the people we care about.” She smiled, finding something worthwhile in that comment. “There’s something else I need to tell you, about my past—”
As if trying to head him off at the pass, or perhaps because his previous comment had rendered her incapable of keeping quiet, she said, “I’m pregnant.” He became immediately concerned about his face, fearing that he could not make the expected expression fight its way through the shock. This was why she looked so good, so curvy, so fecund—it was obvious to him now. He tried to speak, but she said urgently, “I’m having it, so don’t even think about it.”
He was taken over by a different kind of shock, and said, “What makes you think I would wanna get rid of it?”
“You kept saying you didn’t want a family.”
“Yet! All men say that, and . . . I had other reasons, but . . . How long have you known?”
“The last time we spoke, when you were in Béziers. I tried to tell you, but I didn’t get the opportunity.” He shook his head, already ashamed of the persona he’d maintained and even become in the last six years. Then, as if to drive home that the change would not be as immediate as he imagined, she said, “I thought you might have noticed at Mathieu’s, that I drank no wine.”