When Aubrey called to give Jenny the news about Kate late Sunday night, Jenny grilled her for information. Who found the body? What did the police think? When was the funeral? But all Aubrey could talk about was Griff, Griff, Griff, how worried she was about Griff. Who gave a shit about Griff? What about Kate, their friend, who was dead? Jenny hung up and started to cry. She’d loved Kate once. The wild child with the golden hair, full of chaos and laughter. Kate made life exciting, she made things sparkle. It shouldn’t have come to this.
It was late and the boys were in bed. Jenny went looking for Tim, because she needed someone to comfort her. She knew better, but she did it anyway, hoping. He was sitting in the den, half watching the ball game, a surveyor’s report from a jobsite on his knee. She told him Kate’s body had been pulled from the river.
“The river, huh? Poetic justice,” he said, stony-faced. Then he got up and walked away. She heard him in the kitchen, opening the fridge, and popping a beer, and she felt alone with her sorrow.
Jenny went to her room and slammed the door. She got in bed, pulled the blankets up, and started sobbing. After a while, Tim came in. Jenny rolled over and looked at him with wet eyes, but he turned his back and went into the bathroom to get undressed, something he never did. He was making a point: She would suffer this loss by herself. Tim had never liked Kate. No—that wasn’t strong enough. Tim hated Kate. He’d never forgiven her for whatever role he imagined she’d played in Lucas’s death. He was glad Kate was dead, and he wouldn’t pretend otherwise, not even for Jenny’s sake. Which was crazy when you thought about it, because he had no facts to back him up. Tim didn’t remember a single thing that happened that night at the bridge twenty-two years ago. The doctors had been right. His head injury had wiped his memory of that event, and to this day, it hadn’t returned.
Tim came back into the bedroom, and got into bed with his phone, scrolling through e-mails, ignoring her. The bulk of his body beside her felt as unyielding as a brick wall. Jenny sat up, reached for the box of Kleenex on her bedside table, and blew her nose. She longed to yell at him, to accuse him of heartlessness, of insensitivity, of being a bad husband. But she couldn’t, because she was the one in the wrong. There was a lie at the center of their marriage, a worm in the apple. And it was her fault. Years ago, when she lied to cover up Kate’s crime, Jenny took sides against Tim and his family. She was only eighteen at the time, and the pressure had been intense. To this day, it gave her the shakes to think about that meeting in her mother’s kitchen with Keniston Eastman and his lawyer. A young girl, naïve, up against the sharks of Wall Street—what was she supposed to do? She might have forgiven herself by now, except it wasn’t just the police she lied to. She lied to her own husband. She was still lying to this day.
But if Jenny was truly honest with herself, she would admit that she hadn’t been naïve, not back then, not ever. She got rewarded for her lie year after year. It’s not like Keniston gave her money—nothing so crass as that. He gave her a job out of college. He gave her sterling references and important contacts. And years later, when she was looking to expand Tim’s small family construction company into something bigger and more lucrative, Keniston gave her access to the people at Carlisle who had the power to award contracts. Jenny handled those bids; Tim didn’t know the details, he didn’t even know the basics. Carlisle’s business took Healy Construction from a mom-and-pop concern into a successful company with nearly a hundred employees. Tim never knew that Keniston Eastman played a key role in that. Tim hated the Eastmans, period. If he’d known of Keniston’s role in the contracts, he would never have accepted the work. So Jenny kept Tim in the dark. But she did it for a good reason. She was trying to build the business—for both of them, for their family, for the boys’ futures.
Jenny was just plain better than Tim at planning ahead, at making things happen. Their relationship had started years earlier when Jenny befriended Tim as he struggled to recover from his head injury, and it still retained a bit of that big sister–little brother flavor. Once Tim got better, and went back to school, Jenny would stop in to Shecky’s a couple of times a week to say hi and check up on him. When Tim turned eighteen, she brought him a pint of Jack Daniel’s with a bow on it (she was twenty-one by then, and legal), and they drove out to Dunbar Meadows on a muggy night to celebrate. They got trashed on a blanket under a big yellow moon to the sound of crickets chirping, and made out like crazy. The next day, they pretended it never happened. He came to her graduation and sat with her family, but after Carlisle, Jenny moved to New York. Tim went off to UNH, and they kept in touch only sporadically.
When her father died unexpectedly, about five years after her college graduation, Jenny came home to help her mother sell the hardware store. It was supposed to be temporary. But one night, bored and casting around for something to do, Jenny dialed Tim’s number for the first time in a long time. Tim was not long out of college then, working for his dad’s construction company as a job foreman, learning the ropes. When Jenny saw him that first night, outside the movie theater on College Street, she actually said “wow” out loud. Maybe it was all that physical labor. He was taller and bigger and tan from the sun. He was handsome. They went to Shecky’s for a burger for old times’ sake, and, sitting opposite Tim in the booth, Jenny realized that she’d never felt as comfortable with any other guy. In that moment, she knew what she wanted, and she wanted Tim Healy. She never stopped to think that there was a lie between them that could never be made right.
Tim switched off his bedside lamp without saying a word. Usually they kissed good night, but not this time.
“Good night,” she said tentatively. But he didn’t reply.
Jenny’s stomach hurt, and she tossed and turned. For a long time, Tim had been able to put Lucas’s death out of his mind, but with Kate back in Belle River, he couldn’t do it anymore. It ate away at him. That’s why Jenny cared so much about keeping the secret buried. Not because the scandal would rock her political career, or imperil their business, although those things mattered to her a great deal. Her biggest worry was for her marriage. Jenny would love nothing better than to come clean and fix things. But how could she, when she’d been lying to Tim for so many years?
With Kate dead now, the problem should go away. That would be a relief.