Oh, she could write about Seever, and she’d have a captive audience; people would be eating right out of her hands. She could write about the way he’d held her naked hips, the rough feel of his hands grabbing them so he could nudge in a little deeper. Or she could write about the way he’d liked to tie her up, or when he’d asked her to fix the sleeve of his shirt around his neck and choke him while he masturbated, but she can’t. She wants to write again, but her pride keeps her from going that far, because people would look at her and they’d know, and Dean would too, and she doesn’t want to see the revulsion in his eyes. It makes her cringe, the idea that one day everyone could know these things about her, and how would she defend herself? By saying that she was so young, that she’d wanted a good time, that she hadn’t known he was a killer? And all those things are true, but no one will care, because all that matters is the juicy story.
She’d been turning this over in her mind when her stomach had started churning, and she’d run for the bathroom. It’s because of Seever, she thinks. The vomiting. That’s all she can think, because it started after she started pursuing the Seever story, not long after she’d started sleeping with Hoskins, and it’s tapered off over the years since then, mostly disappeared. But still, even now, if she thinks about Seever, if she thinks about that period of her life, her tongue gets thick and heavy, and her stomach flops helplessly. When it first started, she’d attempted to diagnose herself, got online and looked up symptoms, tried to get in her own head and make sense of the cloying taste on the back of her tongue after meals, the way her throat would clench, and the strange pleasure of emptying her belly after filling it with food. Maybe, she thought, she did it because Seever got so fat as the years passed, or because Seever had such huge appetites—for food, for murder, for life—or maybe it was stress, because it was hard to write about a man everyone hated so much, even though she hid the difficulty, made it seem easy. Or maybe it didn’t have anything to do with the men in her life at all, or her job, it was just her, trying to make herself smaller somehow, to pare back everything she was, to shrink until there was nothing left of her at all.
*
Her cell phone rings as she’s leaving the bathroom. It’s Dean.
“Where are you?” he asks, concerned. This is the best part of marriage. You always have someone waiting at home for you.
This is also the worst part of marriage.
“Are you at the hospital?” he asks. “Is everything okay?”
It hadn’t occurred to her, when Dean surprised her with a new phone a few months before, that it wasn’t just a nice gift from her husband. It was brand-new, in a hot-pink case, fully loaded with all the bells and whistles. She hadn’t found out until later that he could find out where the phone was anytime, pull up the information on a website and check her location, like she was an animal implanted with a tracking device. All the phones have it, he said, and she believed him, and if that’s what he needed, that glowing blue dot on a computer screen that was her, she’d let him have it.
“I’m fine,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s—Heather.” There’s only the slightest hesitation as she spins the lie. She’s out of practice these days, but she can’t tell her husband what’s going on. If he finds out it’s Hoskins she’s waiting for, there’ll be all kinds of trouble, because even though they’ve gone to counseling and talked it out and did everything imaginable, Dean thinks she still wants to be screwing Hoskins.
“Heather?”
“Yeah, you know. The woman I work with? The one who sells those oils? The, uh—essential oils?”
“No.”
“You know, the pretty one. I’ve told you about her. I think she got food poisoning. Bad piece of fruit she ate during her break.”
“Is she okay?”
“I’m not sure. I’m out in the waiting room. I can’t leave yet, I don’t know if her husband’s coming to pick her up.”
“What time do you think you’ll be home?”
“No idea,” she says. Someone steps into the waiting room, catching her eye so she looks up. It’s Chris Weber, and the moment he spots her his face goes bright red. “Here she is. I’ve got to go, I’ll try to be home soon.”
“I figured Corbin was full of shit when he told me what you’re up to,” Weber says, walking quickly up to her, his legs stiff. He’s wearing slacks and a blazer, a turtleneck. When he’d first started at the Post, all he’d wear were blue jeans and sweatshirts. Street gear. He’s moved up in the world. A serious reporter. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I’m waiting for a friend to be released from emergency care,” she says coolly. “Why are you here?”
“I know it’s Detective Hoskins back there,” Weber says, stepping close. “This is my story, and I’m going to make you very sorry if you don’t back the fuck off.”
He’s taller than her, bigger, and he’s probably used to intimidating people with his size. But she spent years in the newsroom, teaching herself to talk fast and act tough, to swear like a sailor and hold her liquor. When you play with the boys, you have to behave like one, and after all those years at the Post, a man in a turtleneck doesn’t bother her in the least.
“What’re you going to do if I don’t?” she says. “Break my legs? Tell my mommy?”
“What kind of game are you playing here? This is my story.”
She laughs, actually laughs in his face. It feels good, not to have to be pleasant, not to be kind and helpful, like she has to be every day at work.
“Are you new here?” she asks. “It’s not your story. It’s all up for grabs, anyone can take the gold medal.”
“This is my chance,” Weber says. “Do you know what I had to do to get this job?”