Chapter

Four

One hour until my next client, and I do what I’ve done so many times. I follow Cleo. With two questions banging around in my brain like rocks in a tin can, smacking hard enough to throw sparks.

The first: Ian, what did you do? What did you do?

And the second: Did you ever tremble when we kissed?

I stroll the cobblestone. Pretend to window shop. All the while, obliterating the therapeutic frame as I trail Cleo and her bicycle the few blocks through the fog, toward the water.

“I texted him back this morning and asked him to meet me,” she’d said, just before our fifty minutes were up. Typical Cleo, sneaking it in under the wire. “Down at the beach here.”

My skin had prickled. “Did you tell him you were in therapy?” With me? The unspoken question. Because even Ian, self-absorbed as he is—was—might’ve figured that one out. Me and her. Ex-wife meets new mistress. And then what?

“No. I’m afraid he’ll ask how it’s going. What I talk about. I told him I was seeing a friend in Carmel for breakfast. That it would be a good place to meet. But, he didn’t respond. Not yet anyway.” I’d felt relieved. Then stupid.

Ian is dead.

And I did nothing wrong, I remind myself again. Nothing that can be proven anyway. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Ian had said that on the first episode of Love Doctored, trying to make himself sound smart. As in, don’t despair, Mrs. Painfully Insecure. Of course, your husband still loves you even if he can’t bear to say the words aloud. Absence of evidence . . . what a crock.

And of course, I’d watched it. I’d ogled it. Like a car wreck. Or a house fire. Or an episode of that naked wilderness show with its stark white, soft bodies scrambling through the mud and the underbrush. I couldn’t look away. There was something obscene about my ex-husband handing out love advice on national television, dispensing his special brand of hypocrisy the same way he doled out medication.

I stop short of the beach parking lot, inhaling the briny ocean air, and wait for Cleo to lock her bike on a rack. Messenger bag slung across her chest, she walks with purpose past the cars to the white sand. She pauses to strip off her sneakers and socks, then trudges down the hill and past the cypress where the sea is the same gray-blue as the sky, and the fog blurs the horizon—trees, cliffs, houses—like a charcoal drawing.

I open my own bag, take out my Nikon, and shadow her. The camera is the perfect excuse. The perfect cover. And with the superzoom lens that cost me four and a half sessions with Cleo, I can see her face as clearly as if she was still sitting on my sofa, without getting too close.

The beach is nearly empty. Just Cleo, two black labs, and a man with hair as white as the seafoam. He tosses a piece of driftwood toward the water, and the dogs splash in after it. Cleo throws her head back and laughs. Exposing her swan-like neck, pale and graceful. Ian kissed her there the first time I’d seen them together, the first time I’d watched them through the eye of my lens.

Now, she glances back over her shoulders in both directions. Looks at her phone. And I know what she’s thinking. Part of me is holding my breath beside her, expecting to see him. Sauntering up, with his tousled hair and ice-blue eyes, designer jeans rolled up to his calves. And a chameleon smile that could be whatever you need it to be.

“Hey, Aves,” he’d say. Aves. That’s what he called me. He, meaning The Professor. Ian. Though Cleo had never said his name out loud. The Professor and his wife. Always that. Only that. It had been her idea. “Because they’re sort of well-known,” she’d said, with the kind of careful discretion The Professor valued in a mistress. And an ex-wife. Hence, the nondisclosure agreement I’d signed along with our divorce decree.

The dogs bound down the beach, barking at seagulls, and the man follows. Shrieking, the birds take to the air, scatter, and disappear in the fog.

Cleo is alone. And I wonder how long she’ll wait.

She examines her phone once more, removes a book from her bag, and settles in against the sand for the long haul. Waiting, after all, is the task of a mistress. And an ex-wife. Who knew we had so much in common? I snap a single photo of her this way. Relaxed and in profile. I want to remember her before. Before she knows what I know.

Ian is dead.

Kate too.

The permanent kind of inertia.

A sudden ring cracks the stillness like a whip, and Cleo jerks her head toward the sound of it. Me. And my pocket.

I stumble backward, juggling the camera, and fumble for my phone, answering the unknown number with a curt hello as I duck behind the twisted limb of a cypress. And just like that I’m back in my kitchen, caught and bleeding and breathing hard. The cut on my finger throbs under the bandage like a heartbeat.

“Hey. It’s me. You sound weird.” Luke’s voice, warm as it is, chills me like a spray of ocean water down my back. He never calls when he’s working. It’s a rule. Technically, one of mine, not Luke’s. Rules I assemble around my heart like iron bars. Though a quickie on his lunch break is perfectly legal. “Are you at your office?”

“Uh . . .”

Cleo’s gaze lingers on the spot where I’d stood. I want to hold the lens up, examine her face, but it’s too risky. Instead, I start walking away. “I went out for a bit. Why?”

“We need to talk.” Four little words. Cursed words. Where have I heard them before?

Honey, we need to talk. Daddy is sick. The kind of sick that makes him sad all the time. Be a good girl and don’t bother him.

Aves, we need to talk. I’m in love with someone else. I want a divorce.

Doctor Lawson, we need to talk. Your mother is suffering from progressive dementia. She’ll have good days and bad days. Until she has bad days and worse days.

“About what?” I ask, steeling myself for the blow. For the sucker punch to the gut that will drop me to my knees. “Where are you calling from?”

“The payphone at Bruno’s Market. Can you meet me?”

“The payphone?” A burst of nervous laughter breaks free, escapes. I sound slightly crazed. Hypomanic, Ian might have said. He’d always been fond of diagnosing me. “I didn’t know you knew how to use one of those things.”

Luke lets out his breath like he’s been holding it. And just as sudden as the laughter bubbled up, there’s a lump in my throat I can’t choke down.

“I have a client in twenty minutes,” I manage.

“I think you should cancel.”

“I can’t just—”

“Ava, cancel your client. Meet me at our spot. Now.”

“But—” The line goes dead. And the dial tone is my flat line. We have to talk. Doomed words, I already know. Because it’s the first time—the only time—Luke has ever hung up on me.

****

The Valentine statue—our spot, as Luke called it—is roughly a ten-minute walk up Ocean Avenue. Luke is already there, in uniform, sitting on one side of the bronze sculpture of an elderly couple who have just exchanged a valentine.

I hold in another fit of hysterical laughter and take a seat on the other side of the couple, next to the sculpted woman. Her head rests on her lover’s, a tender smile on her face. Forever. Only a love frozen in stone could sustain that long.

“When was the last time you saw Ian?” Luke whispers, each word weighted with worry. With accusation. And those words sink me like stones tied to my waist.

“What?”

“Just answer the goddamn question, Ava.”

“Summer, I guess. I ran into him on the street.” Luke doesn’t know it yet, how well I lie. But he’ll learn. “Why are you asking that?”

He stares straight ahead. His cop face.

“Please tell me what’s going on.” I grab for his hand, but he shrugs away, beyond the reach of my persuasion.

“What happened to your finger?” As if I’ve done something wrong. But I haven’t. I didn’t. Keep telling yourself that, kiddo. And the voice in my head is Ian’s. Again.

“I dropped a wine glass this morning cleaning up. I cut it. That’s all. You’re freaking me out looking at me that way. Like I’m a criminal or something. Did you forget you were with me all night? Or did I imagine you in my bed?”

He shakes his head, rolls his eyes at me, and sighs. Like I’m the young one, the one who’s still on the good side of thirty.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he says. And suddenly I wish he wouldn’t. But it’s too late to stop him. “Ian and Kate were stabbed. It was bad. Really bad. The sort of bad that doesn’t happen here. Not in Carmel.”

I feel the air rush out of me, my lungs like deflated balloons. “So it wasn’t . . . Ian didn’t . . .”

“God, Ava. Spit it out.”

“It’s not a murder-suicide?”

“No. Why would you say that?” The cop face again. It cuts me to the bone. But I pretend to shrug it off.

“A hunch, I guess.”

“A hunch? What are you not telling me?” It’s a loaded gun, that question. A revolver with a bullet in every chamber. Round and round and round it goes, where it stops . . .

“You think I’m lying to you?” I try to find the answer in his eyes, but he won’t even look at me.

“They haven’t figured it out yet—about you and Ian—and I’m not gonna tell them.” And by they, he means his father, Detective Jack Donovan. And his brother, Cooper. A chip off the old gumshoe block. “But, Ava, they will. And soon. So you better get your story straight.”

“My story. Right. So you do think I’m lying.”

“I didn’t say that. I just don’t know how else to explain it.” His frown softens, and I realize I prefer anger over this. He pities me.

“Explain what?”

“Your name was at the scene.” The scene. I get stuck on the words. Because that’s how it feels. Unreal. Staged. I’m in a scene, and Luke is acting. He’s the handsome, do-gooder cop who’s fallen for the black widow. “Ian wrote it on the bathroom mirror before he died. Or at least that’s what it looks like.”

“He wrote my name?” Why does my voice sound like that? Like I’m sinking underwater and Luke’s up on the surface, nodding his head.

“In his own blood.”