34 EMMA

Now

Emma walked into the police station with Christopher Best beside her and tried to calm the galloping pace of her heart.

Detective Mehta was a round-faced woman with a stocky frame and a button on her shirt that was on the verge of falling off, hanging loosely in its hole with a stray thread sticking out.

“I want to state for the record that my client is here of her own accord, and is free to go at any time, but has chosen to cooperate with this investigation,” Chris said.

“And we appreciate that,” Mehta said, without looking at Chris at all. “Emma—can I call you Emma?—we have the statement you and Mr. Best have provided, of course, but I’d like to go over things one more time to make sure that we have all the details.”

Emma nodded. They weren’t looking for additional details, they were looking for inconsistencies. She went over things again, from the time she got home the night before to when the police arrived. Mehta had a good poker face, but Emma didn’t think that anything she said had made the detective relax or trust her more by the time she was done.

“You came home around nine o’clock,” Mehta said. “Is that correct?”

“Around then. I don’t know exactly,” Emma said. “I didn’t come straight back from the bar. I sat in the park for a while. There were a few other people around.”

“Any particular reason you went to that bar?” Mehta asked.

Emma hesitated. She didn’t want to lie, but going too far down this road wouldn’t be good for anyone. Not her, not Logan, not JJ. “I knew Logan worked there. I wanted to talk to him. You know what happened to my parents the last time I was in town, obviously. And you know…” Mehta, mercifully, nodded without making her spell it out. Emma shifted in her seat. “I wanted to talk to Logan a bit, about being back and what happened all those years ago.”

“You and Logan Ellis were friends?” Mehta asked.

“Our parents were friends, I suppose. We knew each other, that’s all,” Emma said. “I thought he’d probably talk to me. We chatted briefly, and then I left.”

“And you saw your husband in the carriage house,” Mehta said, and then they were going back and forth over the timeline again. Emma stumbled only once, stating the wrong time and then quickly correcting herself, and Mehta looked up but didn’t seem bothered. Best looked unhappy, but not enough to put a stop to things.

“Ms. Palmer, there were a number of firearms found in your house. Are they yours?”

“They belonged to my father,” Emma said. “They’d been in storage, but Nathan went and got them. I didn’t want them in the house. I told him as much.”

“Any particular reason he wanted them?”

“Protection,” Emma said, all too aware of the irony.

“He felt he was in danger?”

“We’d been having some trouble with vandalism,” Emma said, keeping her voice measured.

“Bad enough that he thought you needed a firearm.”

“Like I said. I disagreed,” Emma replied.

“You said that you asked him to get rid of them. Did you handle any of the guns at all?” Mehta asked.

“Once. The Glock, just to clean it. Nathan didn’t know how.”

“Why would you clean a gun you didn’t want around?” Mehta asked, eyebrow raised.

“Keeping busy, I guess,” Emma said. It sounded glib, and Mehta frowned. “Was it … do you know if it was one of those guns that killed him?”

“We’re still conducting tests,” Mehta said. She laced her fingers, hands resting on the tabletop, and Emma’s mouth went dry. This was it, then. The part she’d been dreading.

“How was your relationship with your husband?” Mehta asked.

“Not great, recently,” Emma said. Mehta looked interested at last, straightening up. “Things have been stressful. It’s the reason we moved out here.” She explained about the house. The baby.

“It sounds like he screwed up pretty bad,” Mehta said. Emma thought she was trying to sound sympathetic. Like they were venting on a girls’ night out. But Mehta wasn’t built for it.

“It was difficult. And Nathan had a hard time with coming here, given my history with the place,” Emma said. “We were working through it.”

“I see,” Mehta said. She angled her body in a way that seemed to exclude Chris, making this conversation just between her and Emma. “I get it. Marriage is hard. You fight. Things fester.”

“We didn’t fight. Not really,” Emma corrected, shaking her head. “We talked, that’s all.”

“That’s surprising. Nathan lied to you. Cost you a house, your savings—forced you to move back to a place that’s got to have a lot of terrible memories. You must have resented him for that.”

“I didn’t care about the money. Or the house. And being here … It’s not hard because of Nathan. It’s hard because of me. My past. That isn’t his fault.”

Isn’t. Wasn’t. Tense got slippery at times like these. She remembered once hearing someone in the next room saying, “Did you notice she said didn’t? My parents didn’t have any enemies. Past tense, right away. She didn’t have to correct herself.”

As if that meant anything.

Mehta sat back in her chair. Her finger tapped against the table, and Emma’s eyes fixed on it. Her father used to do that. Tap, tap, tap. Like a metronome; like a timer, ticking down.

Mehta sat forward, squared up. Next would come the blunt statement made into a question, meant to take Emma off guard and provoke a reaction.

“Were you aware that Nathan was having an affair?”

She had expected the question. But still, she almost laughed.

Did she know her husband was having an affair? Of course she did. It was a miracle that it had taken her as long as it did to find out. She had known he was feeling guilty about something—easy to read even when he was trying not to be—but she hadn’t pried. She couldn’t see what good there could possibly be in knowing the answer.

It was the stupid shared calendar that had done it. He was always on her to put things on it, and she was always telling him that she didn’t really have things to put on the calendar. Her anemic social life had cratered after her accident, and she hadn’t attempted to resuscitate it. Anytime she had appointments and things, she handled them during the day when he was at work, so she didn’t see why he needed to keep track of them, but she’d dutifully logged in once a week to add things in, sometimes putting in random work deadlines just so that she would have something to add.

One Monday, there it was: a woman’s name and the name of a hotel. Her chronically organized husband had put his romantic rendezvous on the wrong calendar.

And, of course, he’d never disabled his phone tracking. She’d glanced at it once at the time listed on the calendar to confirm where he was. She’d already met Addison—a somewhat severe-looking woman with bright green eyes and aggressively bleached hair who had been awkward the one time Emma had dropped by the office.

Nathan used to sit Emma down to do what he called a “trust audit.” Every corner of their lives an open book to each other. It had started when they first got serious. He would have her log into all of her accounts, and he would hand over his computer for her to do the same—check through private messages and emails, even pull up the call logs on the online portal for their phone plan. He insisted it was a demonstration of how much they trusted each other, how they had nothing to hide. She would page through his Facebook and click a few random emails to satisfy him, but she never understood his reasoning. If they trusted each other, they shouldn’t have to look.

Inevitably, he would find something that made him, in his words, a little uncomfortable. A too-familiar sign-off, an after-hours chat with a work contact about something not work related. He would trot out phrases about professionalism and respect for your partner. She would apologize—and beg off girls’ night with the friends who he felt were a bad influence, cancel the coffee date with the male colleague Nathan found too forward. Then the whole thing would repeat a few months later.

Of course, he had been hiding things. And that day she had done what she hated, snooping through Nathan’s emails and accounts. He had been a little careful, at least. He used a dummy email account, but he’d saved the credentials on the browser.

The emails and phone calls went back months. She didn’t look beyond that. She didn’t want to know how long it had been going on.

She supposed she must have felt numb, but that seemed like too restrained a term for it. She had felt more like she had ceded control of her body completely, handing it over to an operator with no investment in the situation. She forwarded emails to herself, erased the evidence of having done so, and put Nathan’s computer back, all without having what she could identify as a genuine emotion.

She went upstairs. She sat on the end of the bed. She felt like she was pressing her ear to a wall, listening to muffled sounds on the other side. Only it wasn’t the murmur of a conversation but the hideous thrashing of her own emotions. If the wall crumbled even a little bit, there would be nothing to stop the agony.

And what good would it do?

He would leave, or he wouldn’t. He would love this other woman, or he wouldn’t. If she confronted him, it would be a fight. It would be recrimination and sorrow and tears and screaming.

Or she could wait. And when he left her—if he left her—she wouldn’t be surprised. She would have her things in order.

Or he would stay, and wouldn’t it be better then, too, that she hadn’t said anything? Because they could go on as they were, and she could keep it quiet, this horrible thing she knew.

She had so much practice, after all.

So she had waited. She had never checked his secret email account again, or tracked his movements on the phone. She had convinced herself that she was doing what she had to do.

Beside Emma, Chris shifted. He hadn’t said a word yet. They’d gone over this. They had decided on what to say. It didn’t make it easier. “Yes, I was aware of that,” she said.

“Really.” Mehta raised an eyebrow. She might have been expecting shock or a false denial; she seemed taken aback not to get either.

Chris was talking. Taking over. Explaining that she’d been aware of the affair, and how long, everything that she’d told him. She let him drone on, staring at the tabletop.

“Ms. Palmer,” Mehta said. She’d lost track of the conversation. Mehta had asked her something.

“I’m sorry. What was that?” Emma asked.

“I asked whether you had confronted your husband about the affair,” Mehta said.

“No. We never discussed it,” Emma said.

“You knew your husband was cheating on you, and you didn’t say anything?” Mehta asked.

Emma stared at the wall behind Mehta. Her cheeks were flushed, the back of her neck clammy. Mehta must think she was pathetic. “I didn’t want him to stop just because he got caught.”

“And did he?” Mehta asked. “Stop, I mean.”

“I think so,” Emma said.

“You’re not sure?”

“I couldn’t exactly ask him, could I?” Emma pointed out. “Do you know … did he break it off?”

Again, a pause. Again, considering whether to offer this information.

“The affair ended two months ago,” Mehta said. Emma’s stomach twisted. Then it hadn’t been long after she found out. Before they knew about the baby, though—so he hadn’t ended it because they came here. “But it appears that the woman was the one who broke it off.”

Emma let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “I see.” Then he hadn’t chosen her after all.

“I think we’re done here,” Chris said.

“I still have questions,” Mehta replied.

Chris shook his head. “I think Ms. Palmer has been more than cooperative, and she has been through quite an ordeal. We can talk about setting up another time to continue this discussion, but for now we are done.”

“One more thing,” Mehta said. She took a piece of paper from a folder and slid it over to Chris. “We have a warrant for Ms. Palmer’s phone and computer.”

“My computer is at the house,” Emma said. “My phone—I need my phone.”

“We can get you a phone to use,” Chris said, looking the paperwork over. “This is all in order.”

“We need you to hand it over now,” Mehta said.

“Can I get some numbers off it first?” Emma asked, and Mehta nodded. Chris offered a pen and a pad of paper, and Emma sat frantically scribbling things down. When she was done, Mehta took the phone from her without so much as a thank-you, and Chris touched her arm, indicating that it was time to get up.

Back at the car he gave her a look that was not entirely pleased. They were standing on the street, baking in the sun. A few people passed on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, well out of earshot. Some of them cast curious glances at Emma.

“I’d like to have someone go talk to this woman,” Chris said. “I’d like to know why she broke things off with Nathan, and what was going on between them. And most of all, I want to know what she’s going to tell the police.”

“Do you think I’m a suspect?” Emma asked.

“Of course you’re a suspect. Right now, you’re pretty much the only one. We need to make sure there is nothing that could bolster that suspicion, and it wouldn’t hurt to have some alternate avenues to investigate. I want you to keep thinking about who else might have wanted to harm Nathan.”

“Wait. The cameras,” Emma said. She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Nathan got them set up, so there should be footage, right? We didn’t have a camera covering the carriage house, but there was one at the front door and the back door. It would show me getting home and not leaving again. If someone else came to the house, they might be on it. That’s got to help.”

“Do you have access to the footage?”

“I think so. I’ll have to use a computer,” Emma said. “I can probably borrow Gabriel’s.”

“Ms. Palmer, do I need to point out the obvious?” He only called her that when he was frustrated with her.

“You’re just going to have to deal with it. I can’t give up the one person who actually likes me in this town. Someone I have never had any romantic involvement with at all, by the way,” Emma said.

“All these years and you haven’t gotten less stubborn,” he muttered.

“Would you rather I ask JJ?” Emma said, watching him openly. He shifted uncomfortably. “She doesn’t like you very much. Why not?”

“Your sister and I had something of a disagreement during the investigation into your parents’ deaths,” Chris said. “She thought I was, in her words, ‘out to get her.’”

“Meaning what?” Emma asked, alarmed.

“Meaning I tried to convince her to come forward with any information she had that might help you,” Chris said quietly.

“You weren’t supposed to—” Emma began, and clicked her teeth shut. “You were supposed to protect all of us,” she amended.

“I was trying to find a way out of the mess you’d gotten yourself into, Emma. And your sister wasn’t my client,” Chris said.

“You were Uncle Chris to her, too,” Emma reminded him.

“It wasn’t like I was trying to throw her to the wolves, whatever she might have thought. But I suspected that she knew something that might have helped you. And judging by how fiercely you guarded her secrets, I’m guessing you thought the same,” Chris said. “You took a bullet for your sisters, Emma. And that’s your prerogative. But right now, you ought to remember that they’re not your only family anymore. And you’ve got other obligations.”

Emma’s hand started instinctively toward her abdomen, but she forced herself to drop it. “Believe me, I know,” she said.

He made a noise of surrender. “Get the footage if you can and send it to me. I can pass it along to the police if they don’t already have it—and assuming it shows what we expect it to.”

“You mean, as long as it doesn’t show me waltzing out with a gun to murder my husband?” she asked. “I’ll get it.”

“And then you stay put,” he said.

Stay put. Sit tight. Wait for things to blow over—or not. That was the smart thing to do.

And there was no way she was going to do it.