18-MAY
Grace killed Ames. Had Ardie misheard her? Grace. Grace said she had killed Ames. Sloane had spouted wine like a whale, which Ardie couldn’t even pass off as Sloane overdoing it, because Grace Stanton had confessed to killing Ames Garrett. Which wasn’t at all true, of course. Had Grace actually met Grace before?
“Why would you say that?” Ardie asked, tentatively.
Grace’s eyes were slightly unfocused, as though the wine were working double-time. “Because I did. I was the last person to see Ames,” she said. “I—oh—” The word escaped as a sad, little moan. An animal giving up the fight.
“Grace, you’re not making sense.” Sloane’s chest rested against the tablecloth as she tried to get as physically close to Grace as possible.
“I am,” Grace said. “I finally am.” She pinched her chin down for a moment, collecting herself. “I was so angry with him, for being fooled into believing that he actually cared about me. Or maybe it was just my pride hurt that he thought I could be fooled. Anyway, I told Sloane that much. But then … but then that morning—the one that he died—he messaged me, something ridiculous, baiting me: I thought we were friends. That was what he said. It should have been me saying that to him, you know? So I went up there.” She tilted her head back now, for a second, stared up at the exposed beams of the ceiling. “When I couldn’t find him in his office, I knew he was up on the balcony, smoking. And I swear, I just thought, I’ll go speak my mind to him. Well, I did. Or I was and I was smoking and I felt very together. I mean, I was sort of shaking but I felt good. Strong. You guys have always been so good at standing up for yourselves and I just wanted—”
Ardie let out a burst of laughter. “Really? After what I just told you? You think that?”
Grace looked sober. “Yes. I know that.” And in response Ardie just pinched her lips together and felt an uncharacteristic squeeze on her heart, because they would never see themselves the same as they saw each other and that was a gift. “Anyway, I was talking and he sort of leaned in to light his cigarette off of mine and—I don’t know—I freaked out. It spooked me. I had this weird spasm and I don’t know how but my ring snagged his eyebrow. One of the prongs was loose.” She examined the shiny rock on her left hand that sparkled brightly in the natural light. Ardie missed wearing a ring. She’d sold the diamond and wished she hadn’t. “Gosh, there was this bright gush of blood on his face.” She covered her eyes, recalling. “Seriously, it dribbled down.” And Ardie wondered: Had she seen the gash on his eye? “He wiped it with his thumb and smeared it all over the railing and he called me … he called me a bitch. No one’s ever called me a bitch before. At least not to my face. I still don’t know what came over me. It was like I was a different person. I saw black. I said, ‘Go take a flying leap.’ Who says that? On a balcony?” Grace wiped the film of tears from underneath her eyes. “I was afraid maybe Katherine saw us talking out there, saw me hit him. Then I left. Well, anyway, you know the rest of the story.”
Ardie did. But not the same one that Grace knew.
Sloane hadn’t touched her wine since Grace started talking. “You cannot put that on yourself, Grace,” she said. “We have no idea what was going through his head.”
“Sloane’s right.”
“Trust me, I—”
“You weren’t the last person to see Ames,” said Ardie.
Sloane’s glance quickly tracked up, the question written clearly on her face: What had happened on Floor Eighteen?
Ardie only knew for sure what happened to her, because of her, and what might have happened without her, after she’d, by chance, gotten on an elevator with Katherine and seen her get off on the eighteenth floor.
She only knew this: A payroll officer would confirm that Ardie had received a signature on payroll tax documents around 1:30 P.M., although the payroll officer hadn’t checked the exact time, which would explain why, shortly after Ames’s death, she would be seen riding an elevator and she would be cleared of any possibility of wrongdoing. Ardie, on the other hand, knew that she’d received the signature of the payroll officer closer to 1:25 PM, a discrepancy of five minutes.
What happened in those intervening minutes before Ardie inserted herself into the scene? She imagined Ames pacing the balcony, sucking on the end of a cigarette, an image that wasn’t difficult to conjure because Ardie had seen it before, though it had been years now. She imagined Ames trying to justify himself to Katherine, trying to explain how he’d never done anything that anyone didn’t want him to do. A speech that she’d also heard before.
Ardie had felt uneasy the moment Katherine had left the elevator and had been thinking of Sloane when she made the life-altering decision to stop off on the eighteenth floor herself. She intended to ease her conscience. Just to check. She watched through the sliding glass door, drawn by the rising voices—or the rising voice, rather, which was Ames’s.
Ames raked a hand over his face. Katherine tried to push past, but his arm went out, blocking her.
The slap was a shock. Electric. Polarizing. Ardie’s chin flinched inward in sync with Ames’s own. Katherine’s hand had struck out like a viper.
If Sloane had been accused or if Grace or even if Katherine had, Ardie would have told the next version of events. She would have said that it all happened so fast. She would have gone to the police then, no matter the fact that it was too late. She would have told all of it.
But that hadn’t happened. Something more insidious had taken the place of those would-be events. Instead, Grace had been privately blaming herself, spiraling, and so the question became: What should Ardie do now?
“You saw Ames?” Sloane asked and it felt as if the restaurant around their table ceased to exist. Grace’s tears stopped. She stared.
“Not just me,” Ardie answered slowly.
And it was then that the waitress showed up to take their orders. Ardie imagined how they must look to this poor woman with the green suspenders. The strange thing about delivering bad news was how it was rarely new information to the messenger. So Ardie had to allow for her words to take the color of revelation for the sake of Sloane and Grace. She had to choose what to say. Carefully.
She ordered seared rainbow trout with soba noodles and sprouts.
Meanwhile, Sloane and Grace held their breath until the waitress left. Ardie had meant to ask for another refill of her water.
“What are you saying?” Grace’s fingers wrapped tightly around her cross necklace.
“Ames asked to speak with Katherine and she went. When I found this out I was, understandably, concerned.”
There was a fascinating tidbit Ardie had once heard: Women walked around the world in constant fear of violence; men’s greatest fear was ridicule.
“And you’re sure that this was after I talked to him.” Grace’s forehead wrinkled. There was a new expression on her face: hope.
In reality, it didn’t happen as fast as Ardie would have liked. When Ames’s hands were around Katherine’s throat and he was shouting at her, spittle flying into Katherine’s eyelashes, there must have been words, but Ardie couldn’t remember which ones. Katherine’s eyes bulged like a cornered deer’s, her back to the balcony’s cement barricade. The flare of heat in Ames’s face purpled.
The sliding glass door peeled apart, the sound cutting like a blade.
“Ames.” Ardie hooked him by the shirt collar, grabbed his elbow, and pulled him off. What on earth did he think he was he doing? She remembered, even knowing Ames the way that she did, being surprised by him in that moment. Like, Oh, and he’s capable of this, too. Katherine’s hands pressed to her windpipe, her chest collapsing.
And in the next second, Ardie felt her insides explode. She wondered what he saw in that last second of his life. Blind rage, teeth bared, curiosity, cold intent, or pent-up frustration. She knew what she saw in his eyes—hatred and carnal fury and a how-dare-she. She felt the struggle. Felt his arms on her. Felt his strength and her own and the fact that they were both holding back just a bit, out of some instinct that cleaved them to propriety.
And then the thought struck her: there was no returning from this moment.
They’d passed the point. The moment she had grabbed him off Katherine.
She pushed him, again, this time with her shoulder in his chest. Grunting in surprise, he staggered. One leg left the ground as he struggled for balance. And then—and then—the weight of him simply dissolved.
Gone, windmilling backward through space.
Katherine kneeled down, panting where his feet used to be, and it seemed nearly impossible, too far-fetched to believe what she’d just seen: Katherine—a woman in a crisp black pantsuit—grabbing Ames’s standing leg and … heaving.
She was actually trying to throw him over the ledge. Forcing his center of gravity too high.
And Ardie understood that Katherine had experienced the same revelation. No going back.
Thank you, Ardie had whispered, hands on her knees as she caught her own breath. Sweat coated her forehead.
The truth: Ames might have caught himself. Or Ardie, with her hands full of his shirt, might have pulled him back. Were it not for that one. last. push.
Afterward, they took the stairs.
“I’m absolutely positive,” Ardie said.
Grace started to speak and then stopped herself.
“Oh,” was all that Sloane had to offer.
A bomb goes off and pieces fly out in unpredictable directions, causing destruction of varying degrees. Collateral damage.
If she went over the story enough times, she could nearly convince herself that, in the end, he’d chosen to jump. Sloane stretched across the table and squeezed both Grace’s and Ardie’s hands, and Ardie felt a little sorry for men because they never got to hold hands with each other.