Owen had kicked the leg of the desk in his hotel room, upending the full water glass over the remnants of his breakfast tray and reducing the juice glass to shards against the plate.
The mess taunted him. Owen wasn’t the glass-breaking sort. Tsk, tsk for boiling over. He gritted his teeth. The dripping water splatted into the puddle on the carpet at irritatingly uneven intervals. He called the front desk to report the mess. The desk clerk said she’d send someone. The patient weariness in her voice briefly inspired him to break more shit just to make this worth it for everyone.
Instead, he took out a $20 bill for the tip and waited. Waiting while angry was his least favorite thing to do.
In the last few days, he’d come to believe that Marcelline hadn’t set him up for a stooge four years ago. The relief was both wonderful and terrible. Mostly terrible. Poorly spent time was the one thing you could never fix. He’d scared her, practically held her hostage. But it was probably worse than that. If she hadn’t run away, he might have done something bad. Something irrevocable.
Talking with Jonathan had convinced him enough of her innocence to feel glad that she’d gotten away. He’d even set a longer game to see the end of Jonathan because of it. To avenge her. And that idea hadn’t been unpleasant either.
If it had worked the way Jonathan had wanted it to, with him delaying the sale by screwing over Marcelline, it would have been a problem of more like the leg-breaking variety. Maybe some lost teeth. Some teachable moment for Jonathan that would have healed eventually.
But after everything, it was too much to have him sit across a table and shrug off the admission that he had, as far as he knew, let Marcelline die like a dog in the road for his own convenience.
Owen wasn’t forgiving enough to let that sort of thing go—losing years to an error of thinking, and falling out of standing with the worthless people who paid him. The Anningers had made Owen’s days about regaining what they’d lost and then some.
He had ended up dangling at the whim and greed of an overreaching, underwitted asshole who didn’t know what to do with a stroke of good luck. And that just wouldn’t cut it.
So Owen’s schedule for the day had been to first get the painting off the Anningers’ shopping list, then to get right on with removing Jonathan’s heartbeat from his chest. That was the plan.
But his certainty had started shedding.
Jonathan had Owen convinced that he really did think she was dead. But then all of a sudden, Jonathan revealed that he knew she wasn’t. He claimed that the two of them had even spoken in the last day or so. Then Jonathan changed the deal. He dangled the chance to talk to Marcelline as some sort of condition of doing what he’d already agreed to do.
And now Samantha, the closest thing Owen had to a colleague, to someone who could imagine what it was like to be him and to have his life, had the bad manners to reveal that she’d known the whole time; that she had played monkey-in-the-middle with his peace of mind for years. She’d threatened him over Marcelline’s disappearance.
He paced the shallow carpet between the bed and the dresser. The spilled water squished under his shoe.
He didn’t know what to think.
In an essentially desire-free existence, a single want had so much room to grow. And had it ever. It crowded out everything to the point he was kicking desks. Had Marcelline thrown in her lot with that smarmy little fuck? Or had she struck out on her own, saying and doing anything to make Owen useful to her goals? He’d never been good at reading her. Obviously.
Jonathan, though, was pretty easy.
• • •
Owen wasn’t sure that Jonathan wouldn’t let the call just ring through to his voice mail. But he answered it, somewhere near the last possible moment.
“Yeah?” Jonathan was trying hard for a neutral tone, but there was a hint of lava in his voice.
“I understand you’re having a rough morning,” Owen said.
To his credit, Jonathan didn’t make a big deal out of how Owen might know this. They were a bit beyond the smaller details.
“I’m straightening it out.”
“The thing is, Jonathan, I don’t think you are. I don’t see how that’s possible. I have a meeting here with Marcelline in a little while that seems to have eclipsed the meeting you and I were supposed to have. Then I’ll be on my way home soon and the painting will be on its way to its new owners. It just seems the payee will be different.”
“Don’t count me out of this yet.”
“Oh, how could I? I wouldn’t like you if you were just a tenacious little wannabe. But I like you less even than that. You’re tenacious not because you want it, but because you think you deserve it. I’m sure you’ll still be in it until the end, if you can only find a way. So what are you going to do tomorrow, Jonathan?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’ll be sleeping in my own bed. Marcelline will be, I don’t know, wiggling around in a bathtub full of money or something. And you will be? What? Back at home on dandelion row?”
Jonathan didn’t say anything.
“Or do you have enough squirreled away to also be somewhere else tomorrow? To get lost like you need to? You don’t have to answer right away. Give me a second of dead air for each thousand dollars you still have from what you stole four years ago.”
“Fuck you.”
“That’s what I thought.”
There was a knock on Owen’s door. “Housekeeping!”
He let her in and swept his hand at the desk.
Owen had wound Jonathan up enough that discerning the truth from a lie should be easier. It should be something he’d be able to compare to what Marcelline would tell him when they met. His pulse sped up at the thought of sitting across from her. Want. Anger. Forgiveness.
“How did you lose the painting?” Owen put the $20 bill on the newly dried desktop next to the maid as she swept glass into a doubled plastic bag. They exchanged knowing nods and she whispered so as not to interrupt his call, “Thank you.”
“You were just hours away,” Owen said. “It was right there.”
“Wait. You don’t know what happened?” Jonathan sounded a little hopeful. The kind of hope that makes a man with his foot in a door think more about the other side of the threshold than the relative weight of doors on ankles.
Owen sat on the unmade bed and leaned back on the headboard. “No, I don’t know what happened. Let’s just say that, tomorrow, when this is all over—for the second time—I’d like to be able to reflect on your candor in this particular moment. I’d like to see how it matches up to what bullshit story she’s going to tell me when I see her. Then I’ll know how to feel about this. I’ll know if I’m done with this whole thing. Or not.”
Jonathan took a moment to decide what to say. The maid blotted water from the carpet with a folded towel.
Jonathan sighed. “My stepdaughter took it.”
The housekeeper jumped at the laugh that broke from Owen. “You can’t be serious.”
Jonathan’s confirming silence only made Owen laugh harder.
“Carly again? Well, isn’t she just karma’s own little spatula.”