Working from home was slowing her down. Had Imani been in her office, the billing would have been finished already. Instead, she was filling out her third insurance claim out of the dozen or so she had pending. Everything was distracting her. The lingering scent of coconut curry from the dinner that Philip had whipped up. The dishes that she knew were sitting in the kitchen sink. The sound of the occasional passing car. The front door that had yet to open.
Tonya hadn’t replied to her message. But her renter wouldn’t avoid the coming conversation by ignoring a text. Imani was determined to sit at the dining room table all day if that’s what it took. The woman had to return sometime. She lived there, after all.
Though not for long. Hopefully.
For the umpteenth time since Philip had left, Imani wished that he was home. He’d argued that his role as Tonya’s boss put him in a precarious position with regard to kicking her out of the house. If he were present, Tonya could twist the conversation into a business issue, perhaps claiming that he was leveraging his position to make her acquiesce to something unfair. He didn’t want to give her grounds for a lawsuit.
Imani couldn’t imagine how Tonya would sue Philip for asking her to leave his family residence. But she also knew that even frivolous lawsuits cost money to defend against. She’d ultimately relented, letting him hide out at the restaurant, leaving her to deal with the problem he’d created.
Imani returned her attention to the insurance claim on her screen. Her ten-o’clock appointment on Tuesdays was a twelve-year-old boy with hyperactivity and extreme anxiety. His insurance had yet to reimburse her for the past five sessions. She was becoming nervous that the health care provider intended to dispute the diagnosis.
As she filled out the form, there was a sound at the door. Imani looked over her laptop at the entrance, back stiff and heart racing. Confrontation wasn’t her strong suit. She was good at asking questions, drawing people out, making them feel secure. Philip was the one who could throw a person out or fire them.
The door swung back revealing Tonya, wrapped in a peacoat. A floppy red hat covered her head. It had a fuzzy ball plopped on top, reminding Imani of the woolen beanies that she’d stuck the kids in as toddlers. It made Tonya appear a teenager rather than thirty-something.
Imani felt a pang of guilt. She would be putting out this young, single mother in the middle of winter, during a pandemic. But what else could she do? Continue to house a woman who’d been sleeping with her best friend’s husband and had his child? Who, for all she knew, had been involved in the confrontation leading to his murder? Who might be the reason that her friend was hiding out, trapped, or, worse, dead?
Thinking of Melissa solidified Imani’s resolve. She stood from her chair. “Tonya, did you get my message?”
Tonya entered the main room without removing her outerwear, as if she sensed that she wouldn’t be staying long. “Yes. Sorry. I meant to reply and got caught up. What did you want to discuss? Is it the peanut butter again?” Tonya began fidgeting with her coat buttons. “I realize that we had a bit of a misunderstanding there. Philip told me that his allergy is really only triggered by eating peanuts. He uses peanut oil in the restaurant to fry chicken, so I didn’t think my bringing it in would be a big deal.”
“His father died from ingesting peanuts.” Imani said it without thinking. She didn’t want to argue about legumes or allergies, but she hated that Tonya was making her seem unreasonable.
Tonya continued unbuttoning. “Really? I thought his father died in a car crash because he’d been drinking or something.”
Imani felt her jaw drop. Tonya was wrong. Michael Banks had perished after suffering a heart attack behind the wheel brought about by anaphylaxis. The story had run in the New York Times. But Philip had always said that his father had been a drinker. Tonya hadn’t gotten her news from nowhere. Clearly, her husband had discussed his personal tragedy and his dad’s behavior with his employee. How intimate had things gotten between them all those late work nights?
“No.” Imani heard the snippiness in her tone. “Philip’s father ate chicken liver pâté, which I guess the chef had mixed with some peanut butter to make it creamier or something. His throat swelled, preventing him from breathing. The lack of oxygen led to a heart attack while he was driving. He wasn’t even fifty.”
Tonya’s mouth opened, no doubt breathing out microscopic peanut particles from her breakfast. “How do you know?”
She couldn’t possibly care, Imani thought. No one could be this invested in eating PB&J—or winning an argument. “Philip worked at the restaurant at the time.”
“What post?”
Was she testing her? Imani wondered. “I don’t know. A low one. He wasn’t even really cooking yet.”
“Garde-manger?” Tonya asked.
Imani waved a hand, dismissing Tonya’s comment. She’d had enough of this tangent. Clearly, her renter had sensed that she’d wanted to talk about something serious—something warranting her immediate departure from the house. Tonya was attempting to distract her, buying time until the kids returned from school, no doubt in hopes that Imani wouldn’t kick her out in front of Layla.
“I didn’t want to talk about peanuts,” Imani said. “What I’d like to discuss is Nate. I met with your friend Micky. He explained the situation.”
Tonya’s big blue eyes grew impossibly larger. “What situation?”
Asking questions was Tonya’s arguing tactic, Imani thought. Don’t admit or deny anything, just keep playing the wide-eyed ingenue. “Nate sleeping with you—”
“He used my name? He wouldn’t—”
“He said his friend. I figured out that it was you after I recognized him from the restaurant.” Imani grabbed her purse off the back of her chair and rounded the table. She didn’t like the large piece of furniture between them, trapping her in a corner while giving Tonya rein to run upstairs or into the kitchen to grab God only knew what. Earlier, Imani had moved the big butcher knife from her meeting with Micky into her handbag.
“As I’m sure you can understand, I can’t live with someone who was having an affair with my friend’s husband.” Imani moved her hand closer to the bag’s mouth, in case Tonya got violent.
The woman chewed her bottom lip, shaving another few years from her already youthful face with the uncertain fidget.
“I didn’t have an affair with him.” Tonya’s voice was quiet. “That’s not true. Mike wouldn’t have said that.”
“He made clear that you two had a sexual relationship.”
“We didn’t.”
Imani had expected Tonya to excuse her behavior, rather than outright deny it. Surely, Tonya had to assume that Imani had guessed Layla’s parentage and put together the reason why her child support, had suddenly run out.
“Come on, Tonya. You can’t deny it. I get that it’s embarrassing to carry on with a married man and that it wasn’t all your fault. Mike said that Nate pushed you into performing sex acts with him during auditions by dangling the prospect of getting a role in his movies. But the evidence is Layla.”
Tonya trembled in front of her. Imani didn’t know whether the motion was fear of what would happen now that she’d been found out or rage. She dipped her hand into her purse, checking on the blade.
“Layla is not Nate’s,” Tonya said.
“Well, whose kid is she?”
“Mine.” Tonya’s lips twisted into a sneer.
Anger surged through Imani, electricity returning to a long-dead outlet. Tonya was mincing words, implying her lies rather than speaking them. Layla was hers alone because Nate wouldn’t publicly acknowledge her, not because he wasn’t her biological parent. Did she think Imani too stupid to understand the nuance?
“Why all the secrecy if Nate’s not the father?” Imani rubbed her thumb against the knife’s smooth handle. “First, you deny knowing him at all. Then, after I stumble upon his scholarship for Layla, you admit to having met him but characterize the relationship as strictly professional, which it obviously wasn’t, according to your own friend.”
Tonya shot her a murderous look. “It’s none of your damn business.”
Imani wrapped her fingers around the handle. “As long as you’re in my house, it’s my business. This is the safety of my family at stake.”
“How’s that?” Tonya shook, a tied string under too much tension. “How does my daughter’s father have anything to do with your safety? I told you he’s not in our lives.”
“Because he’s dead, right?” Imani gripped the knife tighter. “What happened? You went to confront him about not paying child support, and he got drunk and belligerent? He ordered you out of the house at gunpoint?”
Tonya’s hands dove under her hat. “Oh my God. Are you kidding me? You think I shot Nate? Why would I even do that if he was funding my life, as you so clearly believe?”
The knife vibrated in Imani’s palm. “Where is Melissa?”
“How would I know? South America? Russia? Anywhere without an extradition treaty is my guess.”
“She had nothing—”
“As long as we’re making up murder theories, let’s look at you and Philip,” Tonya shouted. “You two were the ones with all these fraught ties to them. Nate had invested in Coffre. Obviously, that didn’t work out well for him.”
“What are you talking about?” Imani’s shock loosened her grip on the weapon. Philip had never said anything about taking money from the Walkers. Was this another of his business transactions that he’d thought she hadn’t needed to know about?
“You really didn’t know?”
The question was a slap across Imani’s face, both a wake-up call and an act of aggression. Tonya was underscoring that Philip had been more candid about his dealings with her than with his own wife. Imani felt like a woman accosted in the ladies’ bathroom by a younger girl claiming to know where her man had been last night.
She steeled herself, determined not to give Tonya any more satisfaction by showcasing her ignorance. “Are you really accusing Philip of murdering Nate?”
Tonya’s pupils moved counterclockwise to the twelve o’clock position. “I’m only saying that pointing the finger at me is as ridiculous as suggesting it was your husband.” Tonya clapped, a nursery teacher trying to draw the class’s attention. “You are so desperate to avoid the obvious conclusion that you’ve invented this whole bullshit scenario. You can’t accept the truth. Your best friend was married to a complete and utter philanderer who used his position as a big-shot director to pressure women into sex acts and, I’m sure, extramarital affairs. She found out, grabbed their gun out of a safe or wherever they kept it, and shot him. Afterward, she ran off to avoid spending the rest of her life in jail and is now probably pretending to be a full-time barista in Montenegro or Saudi Arabia. End of story.”
Imani wanted to shut Tonya up, to put an end to her haughty and cruel commentary. The woman had no right to treat her this way in her home. To talk down to her. She raised the knife closer to the lip of her bag. “You’re spewing lies to cover up your involvement,” Imani said.
“I’m telling you the truth that you refuse to see,” Tonya retorted.
“I want you gone.” Imani nearly pulled the weapon from her purse as she spoke. “That’s the truth. I want you out of my house.”
Tonya crossed her arms. “Well, then, you’re going to need a lawyer. There’s a moratorium on evictions, and we have an agreement.”
“There’s no contract. We took you in out of the goodness—”
“Spare me. I’ve been paying rent in the form of labor,” Tonya said. “And it doesn’t matter. You need a sheriff to evict me. So, if you want to tell the police how you brokered an off-the-books work-for-rent situation, feel free.” Tonya started toward the stairs. “I need to get ready for my job.”
The knife seemed to pulse in Imani’s hand. “I want you to leave.”
“I don’t care,” Tonya shouted behind her.
Imani stepped in her direction. It was now or never, she thought. If she was going to order her tenant out at knifepoint, now was the time, before Tonya had the higher ground.
Imani released her grip on the weapon. She was a healer, not a fighter. “I’ll call the police!” Her threat didn’t even sound credible to her own ears. She didn’t want the cops in her house, possibly writing citations for them taking in Tonya in the first place.
“You do that!” Tonya yelled.
Imani heard more footsteps, followed by a door slam. She’d accused the woman of murder and still Tonya wouldn’t leave her house. That meant one of two things, Imani decided. Either her tenant was innocent, or she was even more dangerous than Imani had ever imagined.