The alleyway behind the restaurant was always dark, permanently shaded by the tall buildings flanking its sides. However, the blackness Imani walked into was of a different character. The lights that would typically shine from the neighboring buildings had been extinguished, a consequence of office cleaning crews no longer needing to toil into the inky morning hours to prepare for daylight’s computer workers. A solitary streetlamp posted outside Banque Gauche provided the only light. It cast a swirling beam into the space that faded out several feet before the restaurant’s side door. This was a noir scene, Imani thought, and she wasn’t a detective or a femme fatale. She didn’t belong.
Imani pulled the door handle, half expecting it to be locked. She’d tried to time her arrival for after the cooks departed, but before Philip typically left. The coming conversation about her husband seeking Nate’s investment—and hiding it from her—was bound to get heated. Imani didn’t want Philip’s colleagues hearing them shout at each other, nor did she want the kids listening in. In fact, she didn’t even want them to know she and their father were having a serious discussion. She’d waited until they’d all retired to their rooms before leaving. With luck, they might not even realize that she’d gone.
The door gave way, revealing a fluorescent blaze that was too bright for what her eyes had already adjusted to. She shielded them with her hand as she stepped onto the restaurant’s tile floor. “Philip?” she yelled, announcing herself. “It’s me.”
Imani passed the cleaning closet with its sink and mop. Beside it, Tonya’s coat hung from a wall hook. Imani felt her stomach sink. She’d known that Tonya might be with Philip. When she’d heard the front door slam hours earlier, Imani had suspected that Tonya had gone to the restaurant to work and plead her case. Still, Imani had hoped that Tonya would have left by now and been en route to her house.
Imani removed her own coat and hung it beside Tonya’s before advancing deeper into the restaurant. “Hello?”
Her voice and footsteps reverberated in the empty kitchen. The sound emphasized the space’s barrenness, adding to the bleak atmosphere. Without the bustle of chefs chopping vibrant ingredients and lighting things on fire, the restaurant seemed cold and clinical. The stainless-steel surfaces resembled morgue tables. The containers for knives morphed into carts for medical instruments.
“Philip!” Imani shouted. “Philip.”
A door opened. Philip emerged from a small office on the side of the kitchen. He wore his chef’s jacket. Imani had always found the uniform attractive in the way that military and police dress were sexy. They implied a certain discipline and drive, a willingness to reach an objective regardless of the obstacles. Is that why Philip hadn’t told her about the restaurant’s struggles? Had he thought securing financing his task to complete no matter what?
“Imani?” Philip’s voice rose at the end, asking why she’d come without verbalizing the question.
“I spoke to Tonya,” Imani said. “She insists that she never had an affair with Nate.”
Philip scratched at his jaw. Blond stubble lined the edges of it. In the overhead light, the bristle resembled needles on a prickly pear, the ones that would dig under the skin, causing days of swelling and itching.
“You don’t believe her.” His tone told more than asked.
“I don’t know what to believe.”
Philip drew closer. Imani spotted a swath of red at the hip of his jacket. Stains were a sign of a bad day in the kitchen. On a good one, all the food and by-products remained confined to cookware. Stains meant spills, mistakes, and lost revenue.
“Tonya came here, and I spoke to her. I told her that her connection to Nate, and the fact that she hadn’t mentioned anything, rubbed us the wrong way. I—”
A metallic banging cut him off. Philip’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling and the unseen source of the noise. He raised his voice to be heard over the clatter. “I told her that she needed to find someplace else to live.”
Imani patted the air, encouraging Philip to lower his voice. “Isn’t she here now?”
The racket continued, like hail hitting a metal gutter or the sound of pots and pans striking a fire escape. Imani had heard plenty of the latter in the pandemic’s early days when New Yorkers had made a nightly ruckus to show appreciation for frontline health care workers.
“No.” Philip’s volume ticked up another notch. “I assumed she’d gone back to the house to get her daughter and leave.” He put his hands on his hips and scowled at the overhead tiles, admonishing whatever lay behind them to be quiet. “Damn pipes. There must be a leak somewhere—or rats got into it.”
The thought of vermin scurrying above made Imani shudder. “You need an exterminator.”
“It’s on the list.” Philip returned his attention to her face. “Speaking of, I need to go down to Pennsylvania tomorrow.”
The mention of the Keystone State came out of left field. She and Philip rarely left the city, and when they did, it was to visit Westchester or see the leaves change color in New England. Occasionally, they went to the airport. What was in Pennsylvania for Philip? Produce?
“Why? Farmer’s market or something?”
Philip rubbed his forehead. “More and more places are being broken into, and I’m leaving late every night.” His hand dropped to his side, a surrendering gesture. “A friend gave me a gun, but I need bullets.”
Imani examined Philip’s expression for a sign of sarcasm. Her liberal, anti–Second Amendment, embittered ex-marine husband did not do firearms. “You said that the last thing you ever wanted to do after a tour in Afghanistan was clean or hold a handgun. Firearms belong on battlefields, not in cities full of civilians. That’s your mantra.”
Philip’s blue eyes fixed upon her face. She’d begun to associate their color with water because they’d so often possessed a glassy quality. However, seeing them now, she pictured a different image: two blue dwarf stars, each its own nuclear explosion.
“Circumstances change, Imani. The pandemic made every moron run out and buy a gun, and now they’re all waving them around like we’re in a spaghetti western. They’ve got no training whatsoever, but with a gun, they can kill someone. They can kill me or you. The kids. I need to protect us.”
As Philip spoke, the banging picked up. Its rhythm had been consistent, like the ping of a steady drizzle, the kind of noise that could be relegated to the background despite its volume. But it was now rising to a crescendo, rain reaching the heaviest part of a downpour. If rats were behind this, they’d been worked into a frenzy.
“We should get out of here.” Philip glanced at the ceiling. “It’s not good for the kids to be sleeping alone in the house.”
Though Imani agreed, she hadn’t left them in the first place only to avoid asking what she had to know. “I actually came because I wanted to talk to you about something Tonya said to me. She mentioned that Nate had invested in Coffre.”
Philip shook his head dramatically, a toddler pretending that he had no idea where the crayon on the wall had come from. “Where’d she get that idea?”
“I’m guessing from you.”
Philip stared at her, as if he wanted to burrow into her brain and dig out the memory of Tonya’s revelation. She met his look. Imani was not about to be intimidated by the man she’d slept with and leaned on and laughed with for nearly twenty years. Philip owed her an explanation.
He averted his eyes, conceding the staring match. “Yeah. Okay. When I started Coffre, I asked him if he wanted to come in as a silent partner. The home equity line of credit that I took out couldn’t cover all the investments in the new place plus Banque’s refresh, so I needed money, and Nate and his friends were all hot to be restauranteurs like De Niro. I guess they thought it would add cachet to their images.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Am I supposed to tell you every business decision that I make? Do you tell me the circumstances of every patient that you see?”
“This is different.”
“Nate invested. So what? It’s not like he was the only one. He brought in some business associates as well, who, I might add, have proven to be nothing but pains in my ass. But I don’t tell you all that nonsense because you don’t need to hear me griping after a long day of work. I know that you get enough of that from your patients. When we’re together, it’s about enjoying each other and our kids. Not rehashing all the shit.”
“That shit is part of our lives, Philip. That’s what you do in a marriage, share the good and bad. It’s a line in the standard vows.”
Philip snorted. “Well maybe it shouldn’t be, Imani. You know what you learn in the marines other than how to shoot a gun or maybe disarm some idiot waving around a pistol?”
Imani glared at her husband, waiting for him to answer his clearly rhetorical question.
“Compartmentalization.” Philip nodded, agreeing with himself. “You learn to leave your childhood in the past because you can’t be thinking about how Daddy hit Mommy when you’ve got to shove a gun in some guy’s face in front of his kid. You learn to channel all the anger and hurt and whatever other crappy emotions you’ve felt and direct it squarely at the enemy.
“And then you know what you learn? You learn to walk away, to leave the battlefield back there so you’re not coming home screaming at your kids or slapping your own wife. You learn to be home when you’re at home and at work when you’re working, and that business is not at home. It has nothing to do with it. The kids have nothing to do with it. You have nothing to do with it.”
Philip’s body language grew increasingly agitated as he delivered his monologue. His arms flailed. His jaw worked back and forth.
Again, Imani refused to be intimidated by her husband. “Of course I have something to do with it when it involves our livelihood and our home and our friends!” She was shouting, both to be heard over the banging and to match Philip’s aggression. “You didn’t think it could impact our family’s relationship with the Walkers to go into business with Nate? I mean, Melissa always said he wasn’t known for investing well. How did he handle it when the place went under? I have a hard time thinking he shrugged and said, ‘Welp, that’s business.’”
Philip stepped toward her. His shoulders were square. His arms were held out from his body. A chill ran up Imani’s spine.
“Nate’s a dolt. He invests in Coffre, right? Gives me money to set the place up and market it, run it for a while until it takes off. Then, when the place has to close because of a damn pandemic, he tries to argue that he should get his money back, completely ignoring the fact that we had to pay the rent for the entire restaurant space, including Banque, during the shutdown. It’s not like we could keep Coffre functioning while letting the main restaurant fail. What’s Coffre going to operate inside? An ABC Carpet? A Google headquarters?”
Philip gestured wildly as he spoke, his fingers coming within inches of Imani’s face. She stepped back. “When did you have this conversation with him?” She lowered her voice, afraid of her follow-up. “Was it the night he died?”
Philip abruptly stopped moving, a freight train slamming into a wall. Imani could almost feel his body buzzing across from her, reverberating from the impact.
“No.”
“I saw the crime scene photos, Philip. There was a bottle of Bushmills on his desk. Black label.”
Philip’s hands went to his hips. “It’s a good whiskey.” His eyes shrank to slivers. “What are you getting at, Imani?”
Hairs stood up on the back of her neck, not only from the cold tone of his question but also because she knew exactly what she was suggesting. Her husband had gotten into an argument with Nate. Things had become heated. Nate had grown intimidated by Philip, perhaps even scared. He’d grabbed Melissa’s gun, and Philip had gone into war mode. He’d compartmentalized, forgetting that Nate was a friend, focusing only on neutralizing the enemy. The only question was what he’d done with Melissa.
And what he might have done with the woman whose coat still hung in the kitchen.
“Where is Tonya, Philip?”
He shook his head. “Huh?”
“Her coat is on the hanger. It’s freezing outside. She wouldn’t have left without it.”
Philip shrugged. “I guess I got a bit adamant when telling her that she had to leave. She must have run out without it.”
He was lying. Imani could see it in his eyes, the way his gaze grew more intent as if scanning her face for signs that she believed him. She remembered what Melissa had told her all those years ago about controlling her own micro-expressions and forced herself to picture a blank wall, to stare at Philip but see something else entirely, an expanse of fresh cement, smoothed like the surface of an undisturbed lake.
“It’s on the hook by the mop, next to my coat,” Imani said, keeping her tone casual. “Go get it for her? Layla was asleep, so she’ll still be at our house by the time we come back.”
Philip’s pupils flitted from her to the knife block that Imani knew was behind her and then the walk-in fridge. He was a combatant weighing his options, she realized, figuring out how to neutralize the threat that she posed.
“We can get it on the way out,” he said.
“All your talk about rats makes me not want to be in that alley. Go get Tonya’s coat while I grab some aspirin, and then we can head out the front door.” Imani added a bit extra breath into her voice to simulate exhaustion. She touched her forehead, mirroring Philip’s common stress response. “The drama of today has given me the worst headache.”
Before he could respond, Imani strode to the far side of the kitchen and the cavernous entryway that she knew led to the pantry. “The medicine’s in here, right?” she yelled over her shoulder as she passed into the adjacent room, navigating by the light from the kitchen outside. Wire shelves were filled with dry goods. Rice. Flour. Clear Tupperware bins of spices labeled with tape and markers.
What she was looking for lined an entire bottom shelf. Giant tins of frying oil were arrayed like glistening sardines in a can. Olive. Sunflower. Peanut.
Imani heard Philip’s footsteps, walking away, doing as she asked. She uncapped the peanut oil, lifted the jug to her lips, and took a large gulp. It tasted unctuous, like pouring liquid soap on her tongue. She forced herself not to spit it out—or swallow.
Philip’s footsteps drew closer. Imani could feel the heat of his presence behind her. She turned around, confirming that he stood in the space between the pantry and kitchen, blocking her exit. Heavy black wool was draped over his forearm. He pulled one of the coats free and held it out to her.
Imani couldn’t speak. She walked over, smiling her thank-you, and wrapped her arms around Philip’s waist. She put her head on his chest. Tears filled her eyes as his arm went around her back. She concentrated on the warmth of his hand running up and down her spine, trying to commit the feeling to memory, knowing that she might not feel it again.
She loved Philip, but she’d only ever known one side of him. The other side was a monster.
She lifted her chin and stared at him with all the love that she could muster, forcing thoughts of Melissa and what he’d done to her out of her mind. For a moment, she needed to remember that her husband was also the man who’d given her Vivienne and Jay, who’d lifted her over the threshold of his carriage house, who’d danced and laughed and cooked and made love with her. She needed to remember the twenty years of mostly happy moments that they’d shared on the occasions that he’d been able to wrest himself from his restaurant.
Philip leaned down. His lips pressed against hers.
Imani was sure he’d taste it immediately. She grabbed the back of his head, holding it steady as she forced his lips open with her tongue. She pushed the oily liquid held in her cheeks into his mouth, a mother bird feeding a chick. He tried to back away, but she held on, kissing him harder, determined that every drop end up down his throat.
Philip shoved both hands into her chest. She stumbled back, grabbing on to a shelving unit to stop herself from falling. Her husband’s face was red. He headed toward her, fist raised, ready to knock her lights out.
Before he could act, his hands went around his throat. His mouth moved, trying to say something, to accuse her, perhaps. To ask why. No sound emerged. His throat was closing.
“I love you,” she shouted. “And I’ll call nine-one-one. But I need to find Tonya.”
She ran past Philip’s doubled-over body and into the kitchen. The banging was still audible, though fainter than before. Imani followed the steady pings, aware that they were a signal. Rats had not gotten into the ceiling. Someone was jostling the pipes.
The sound seemed to grow louder as she exited the kitchen into the main dining room. It was nearly empty, just stacked chairs and tables, a large bar, and a big open floor. No one was in here. Imani turned to the metal expanse at the room’s end.
The vault door was massive, a stainless-steel eye with a multi-pronged iris at its center. She ran toward it, removing her telephone from her pocket as she did. Emergency was three simple numbers.
The phone was ringing before her hand hit the wheel in the middle of the door. She wedged the cell between her shoulder and ear as she began to turn.
“Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”
“My husband is having a severe allergic reaction. He’s in his restaurant, Banque Gauche, and he must have eaten peanuts. You have to come. I don’t have an EpiPen.”
“Does he keep an EpiPen anywhere nearby, or Benadryl?”
Imani suspected that both were somewhere in the kitchen, but she couldn’t give either to him. She pushed the wheel left with all her might. “Please come.”
Metal pins slammed into place, unlocking the door. Imani pulled it toward her. Her arms vibrated from the weight of it. The phone fell from her ear. She leaned back, employing all her strength to retract the wall of an entrance.
It cracked open. She moved to the fissure and pushed the door back, peering inside. The space beyond was pitch-black, the kind of darkness that seemed to make objects magically disappear. “Hello, Tonya? Are you in there? It’s Imani.”
A scratching, shuffling noise answered. For a moment, Imani was tempted to shut the door. Maybe she’d gone crazy from grief and isolation. Perhaps all that was really inside Coffre were starving, cannibalistic rats.
“Hello?” Imani screamed again.
A strange form stumbled toward the doorway. She could just make it out in the slight shift of darkness. Imani stepped back.
The woman who emerged was severely dehydrated and malnourished. Her skin was taut against her bones, like the plastic of a drum against steel. Her blond hair lay oily and tangled against her shoulders. Imani had never known her to look like this. Still, she’d know her best friend anywhere.
“Melissa,” she shouted.
Her friend limped from the room. She started to fall forward, exhausted by the weight of the other woman leaning heavily against her side. Imani pulled both Tonya and Melissa into her arms. As she did, her side grew damp. She touched the spot and raised her hands to her face.
It was blood.
“I knew you’d come,” Melissa whispered. “I knew it.”
It was the last thing she said before collapsing into Imani’s chest.