I settle the last from the tray of purple phlox into the soil at my mailbox and pat the dirt all around. It’s a glorious Sunday morning, and Atlanta’s spring has made a spectacular appearance. Bright sunshine, low humidity and flowers everywhere—in window boxes, lining the streets, in great pink and white bursts on dogwoods and cherry trees. The blooms blanket the city with a layer of yellow pollen, choking me with allergies as thick as my dread.
It’s day thirty-three, not that I’m counting, and still no sign of Will.
“There are more than twelve thousand surveillance cameras in this city, and that number keeps growing,” Detective Johnson said to me only a few days ago. “You can’t make it through a day here without being recorded somewhere.”
Her words were as much a promise as a warning. According to Liberty Airlines and the Georgia Department of Public Health, William Matthew Griffith is dead. According to Detective Johnson and the Atlanta Police Department, however, the matter isn’t so clear. Corban’s killer has not been found. Will’s DNA has not been pulled from the wreckage, either.
But since there’s a death certificate, there were a flurry of letters going back and forth between the insurance companies and Evan’s firm, and last week he handed me a trio of checks with long lines of zeros. I did as Evan advised and deposited them into an interest-bearing account until we know for sure—which, of course, I already do.
But as of today, I’m the only one.
Will covered his tracks well. The police couldn’t trace any of the phone numbers back to him. Not from my cell, and not from Corban’s. They couldn’t find a single file on the recovered computer to implicate Will in the embezzlement. The only reason they have to suspect he’s alive at all is me—because I told Detective Johnson the truth. That morning I made my statement was like a cleanse, flushing out all the toxins. I told her everything, starting the morning of the crash. She didn’t seem surprised, but until she finds hard evidence either way—alive or dead—she said it’s best not to touch a cent of the money.
“Hey, Iris,” my neighbor Celeste calls from across the street. She gestures to the flowers I’ve planted to replace the bushes the police and press flattened. “Looks pretty.”
I brush off my hands and push to a stand. “Thanks. Just trying to spruce things up before the place goes on the market tomorrow.”
As I say the words, a sharp pain hits me in the center of the chest. Despite the millions gathering dust in a bank account, I’m selling the house. I can’t afford the mortgage on my own, and my credit cards are already maxed out paying for the care of Will’s father. I’ve moved him from that horrid facility to a private memory care center, a beautiful building with sunny rooms and a cheerful staff. The monthly bills are killing me, and though Evan assures me money won’t be a problem by the time he’s done with Liberty Air—Tiffany’s story checked out, and she even produced a few damning photographs of the bachelor party in full swing to back it up—the investigation will take months or even years to sort through. My broker assures me there’s no better time to sell than now—“It’s springtime in a booming real estate market, Iris. You’re going to get top dollar”—and it makes me want to shake her.
I’m not selling the house for the profit, you idiot. I’m selling it because I need the cash.
I tell myself it’s just a house, an inconsequential and inanimate thing, and losing it can’t erase the memories I made here, but it still stings. Despite my half-empty bed, despite the blood that was shed here, I don’t want to leave. Only a month ago, Will and I were trying to fill this place with babies.
“Oh, no. You’re moving?” Celeste makes a too bad face, and her eyes dart around like goldfish. I can practically hear her thinking: Whatever will we talk about once you’re gone?
I nod. “This place is too big for just me.”
Another pang, just as sharp as the first. That morning of the crash, I wanted so badly to be pregnant, and I was, officially, for almost a week. Turns out I was a statistic, one of the one in ten pregnancies that ends in early miscarriage, and the crying jag lasted almost as long. I tell myself it’s better this way, that a baby would have united Will and me, inextricably and forever, in a bond much more complicated than marriage. But it still hurts to think about what could have been.
Celeste gives me a bright smile. “We’ll sure miss having you around.”
I’ll bet. The press seems to have finally lost interest in my story, but my neighbors haven’t. They ring my doorbell all day long, popping by with casseroles and lasagnas, peppering me with questions about That Night, hoping I’ll share a gory detail or two that they haven’t already heard on the news. My fifteen minutes of fame have made me the most popular resident in all of Inman Park.
But just like I do now with Celeste, I smile and thank them politely, and then I move along.
Evan calls on my cell as I’m walking into the house. “Hey.”
“Hey,” I say, and already, I’m smiling. Evan and I talk a handful of times a day, and our conversations always start like this. “What’s up?”
“Braves versus the Cards at two, that’s what’s up. I’ve got seats behind the dugout. Wanna meet me there?”
Yet another thing Evan and I have in common, a healthy obsession with watching sports. We’ve discovered over the course of these past few weeks that there are many more interests and quirks we share, happier, more relevant things that bind us beyond the way we lost our spouses. It’s strange, when you think about it, how the one thing that brings two people together can be the exact thing keeping them apart. Maybe one day, way, way down the line, things between Evan and me could develop into more, but not yet. Not anytime soon. Both of us have a lot more grieving to do.
“Sure,” I say. “But it’s your turn to buy the hot—” I step into my kitchen, and there he is, there’s Will. The air rushes from my lungs.
He’s disheveled, and he’s lost weight since I saw him last. The lines on his face are deeper, too, slashing across his forehead and cupping the sides of his mouth like parentheses. Even his hair, a dark close-clipped brown, has gone gray around the temples. But he’s still as handsome as ever. My body goes numb at the sight of him.
“What happened?” Evan says into the phone, his tone turning serious. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.” My throat is strangled, and the word doesn’t come out right. It’s blurred and formless, even in my own ears.
The line goes quiet. “Is he there? Wait. Don’t answer that. Just...be careful, and call me later.” He hangs up.
I drop my phone onto the counter with a clatter, my eyes never leaving Will’s. I grip the marble and wait for the violent spasm of hatred and fury at seeing him again. I brace for it, but it doesn’t come. What comes is relief, swift and sudden, and love, like a warm layer of honey around my heart. I still love this man, dammit. I’m still in love with him. Despite all the lies and betrayals, I probably always will be.
“God, I’ve missed you,” he whispers.
I run to him, throwing myself at him with a flying leap.
He wasn’t expecting it. He goes back on a foot, but he catches me with a loud grunt. His hands wrap around my bottom, mine wrap around his neck, and after that I lose track of who does what. All I know is that he’s kissing me, and I’m kissing him back. Thirty-three days is the longest we’ve ever been apart.
And then I come to my senses.
I scramble out of his grip, rear back with an arm and smack him on the cheek as hard as I can. The flesh-on-flesh sound is loud, almost deafening in the stillness of the kitchen.
Will doesn’t move.
I rear back and hit him again, another hard slap where his cheek has already bloomed bright pink, the perfect shadow of my handprint.
Will jerks a little at the contact, but he lifts his chin and waits for another. It’s almost like he wants another blow. Like he welcomes the pain.
When I don’t rear back for a third time, his face sags. “You weren’t supposed to come looking for me. You weren’t supposed to ever find out the truth.”
“What is the truth? Because after the past month, I’m thinking pretty much every word out of your mouth was a lie.”
He shakes his head. “I never lied about my feelings for you. Never. That part is 100 percent true.”
A spiked ball of pain lodges behind my heart. I look around the kitchen, at once familiar and strange, at the notes on the fridge and the pictures by the bar and the marble countertops we picked out on a weekend road trip to South Carolina, and blink back tears.
“Yet you still chose the money over me.”
He doesn’t nod, but he doesn’t shake his head, either. “I gave the money back. Remember?”
“You didn’t give it back. You planted it on Corban’s computer, and for what? So the police would stop looking for you, so they’d think you were dead?”
“I did it for you. I killed Huck for you. The police weren’t going to do it, not until they saw a weapon, but Huck was a sick bastard, and he would have snapped your neck without blinking, just because he knew I was watching. I couldn’t give him that chance.”
Huck? I frown. “I thought Huck was living in Costa Rica.”
“Huck is Corban. His name is Corban Huck, not Hayes.”
And suddenly, it all makes sense. The kid who lived down the hall at Rainier Vista, the son of the woman who testified she heard three voices fighting the night of the fire, is Corban. Corban is Huck. Will’s best buddy, who was supposedly running a surfing school in Costa Rica, when he was here, in Atlanta, all along.
The lies just keep on coming.
I cross my arms over my chest, lean a hip against the counter and settle in. “Tell me, Will. The truth this time. I need you to tell me everything.”
* * *
We end up on the sectional in the den, where never, not even during the worst of our arguments, has there been so much air between us. Only a month ago, we would have talked everything out in the center of the couch, Will propped in the corner with me tucked under an arm. We would have held hands just because our fingers were close, would have soothed our harsh words with a caress or a kiss. But today, four couch cushions and a coffee table separate us like an impenetrable crater.
Will leans forward, his elbows on his knees, straightening a stack of magazines on the table. Busywork while he gathers his words. Next to the pile, two bottles of icy water sweat onto their coasters in a slice of afternoon sunshine. I watch a drop gather on one of them, growing fat and heavy at the bottom, and track it on its downward descent.
“I told myself it didn’t matter you didn’t know the whole truth about me,” Will says, still looking down. “About that part of my life, I mean. Rainier Vista. My parents. I thought it was okay to keep all that from you because I got out. I put it all behind me.” He checks my expression, trying to calibrate my reaction, and he must not like what he sees, because he frowns. “You have to know, I’m not that person anymore.”
I hold my face and tone steady. “Who set the fire?”
“I had nothing to do with the fire. The fire was all Huck.” When I don’t respond, Will looks away, pausing as if to give himself a silent pep talk. “But, okay, yeah. I knew what he was up to. I knew and I didn’t try to stop him. I didn’t go around beating on doors, either, warning people to get out.”
“Oh, Will...” My voice cracks into a long silence.
He watches me, and there’s guilt in his expression. “I know. I know, okay? And for the rest of my life, I will hear that mother’s screams. I will see those two kids coming out in body bags. But, swear to God, I’m not the one who lit the match.”
“Your mother died that night, too.”
“That woman doesn’t deserve my tears, not after what she did.” He doesn’t sound angry or bitter, just resigned to the fact that his mother wasn’t much of one. “Ditto for the man she married.”
“I saw him in Seattle, Will. Your father’s not well.”
“Do you want to hear that I feel bad for him? Because I don’t, and neither should you. And you shouldn’t be paying for his care. Any man who’d wake up their kid in the middle of the night just to give him a busted lip doesn’t deserve a penny of your money. I’ve washed my hands of him, of everyone in Rainier Vista.”
“Everyone except Huck.”
Will shakes his head, and he leans forward on the sofa, planting his elbows on his thighs. “No. I don’t know how he found me, but our reunion was not a happy one. He didn’t give me much of a choice. He told me I had to move those stocks for him or he’d tell you everything. He was one crazy son of a bitch, but he was brilliant at knowing a person’s Achilles’ heel. He knew you were mine and how much you meant to me.”
I close my eyes briefly, the words coming back to me in a nauseating rush. Let’s smoke that rat out of his hole. What do you say? Corban may have been the one pulling the strings, but it was Will who committed the crime. First, when he stole from AppSec, then again, when he squeezed the trigger. Just because someone was threatening him, my husband is not without blame.
An old, familiar ache blooms in my chest, but I swallow it down. “Go on,” I say, opening my eyes. “So, what happened?”
“You know the rest. Nick found out. I left.”
“No, I meant, what did you think was going to happen after you moved those stocks? There’s no happily-ever-after with five million stolen dollars sitting in your bank account, Will.”
“I know, but... I had to move the stocks. There was no other option.”
“You could have told the truth.”
“No. I couldn’t.” He shakes his head, quick and vicious. “You don’t understand. I’d never been with a girl like you. So smart and funny and kind. And so damn beautiful.” He looks at me, and his face cracks open. “How could I not fall for you? If for no other reason than the way you looked at me.”
“How did I look at you?”
“Like I was good. Like I was worthy.”
I nod, because it’s true. I did think he was good. I thought he was worthy. It never occurred to me he was a thief or a liar or a murderer. What part of the man I loved was real? What part of us?
I’m crying now, the tears coming hard and fast. I’ve held it together for long enough, and there’s no one here but us. There’s no reason to hold them in any longer.
“Huck sent me texts pretending to be you.”
“I know. It’s how I knew he was losing it. It’s why I came back.”
“You didn’t send any of them?”
“Only the first couple, when I tracked you and Dave to Seattle. I knew what you were doing there, and I needed you to stop. When you didn’t, when I found out what Huck was up to, I put that note in your drawer because I was worried, but otherwise...” He shakes his head. “All from him.”
“But why?”
“To fuck with your head or to feel out how much you knew, who knows? Most likely some combination of the two. He wasn’t exactly the most rational person on the planet.”
“And the crash?”
At the accusation in my tone, Will sits up a little straighter. “I had nothing to do with the crash.”
“Then how did your name get on that manifest?”
“I was going to Orlando, remember? I—”
I stop him with a palm. “I talked to Jessica. There was no conference.”
“No, but there was this guy.” He winces. “For fifty thousand bucks he’d give me a new identity, make me disappear. I was meeting him in Key West.”
I think about that morning in bed, the way he surprised me with the ring, his expression as he slid it up my finger, and the tears well up all over again.
I gesture for him to keep going.
Will inhales long and deep, blows it all out. “Anyway, I’d missed my flight, so I was waiting at the gate for the next one when the Liberty plane went down. It was almost too easy. You’d be surprised how many holes there were in Liberty’s firewall, how easy it was to buy myself a ticket and get my name on the list of passengers. I didn’t realize until afterward that a plane headed to Seattle would open up a whole other can of worms.”
I think of Susanna, clutching Emma to her chest as that plane fell from the sky, of Evan’s haunted eyes at the memorial. “Those poor people! Their poor families. And for two whole weeks, I thought you were one of them, spread in a million pieces across a cornfield. Do you know what that did to me?”
“I do, and I’m sorry. I can’t begin to tell you how much.”
I look down, at my hands wringing on my lap, at the two rings my husband slid up my fingers. And then I press a palm to my chest, where his ring still hangs on a chain under my shirt. “What about your ring? What about your briefcase and computer?”
“Planted.” He winces. “People will do pretty much anything for money.”
People like you, I think, and pain lodges like a spiky boulder in my chest. I demanded the truth, but now I want to slap my hands over my ears and unhear his words. I want to press control-alt-delete and force a restart. The truth is too much. My husband is a monster.
“See?” he says. “You’re already doing it.”
“Doing what?”
“Looking at me differently. Like you’re wondering how you ever could have loved me.”
I fall silent, because it’s true. That’s exactly what I was wondering.
Will looks away, his gaze landing on the framed Rolling Stones photograph I gave him last year for his birthday. “You preach about nature and nurture and those poor little rich kids you work for, and yet you can’t put yourself in my shoes. You can’t imagine what it’s like when your dad’s too busy whaling on you to hold down a job and your mom’s too drunk to care. Or what it feels like to scarf down a sandwich of rotten mayonnaise and moldy bread and feel relief there’s something lining your belly. Your life is so far removed from that kind of hell, you can’t even picture it.”
His words weigh heavy on my heart at the same time they harden it. Yes, experience has taught me to not blame the child for their parents’ questionable behavior. Children are the product of their parents, and crappy or nonexistent parenting skills load down a child with baggage that’s no fault of their own. I’ve said it often enough that Will knows I believe this to be true. He knows I won’t think less of him for his parents’ failures.
But he also knows I teach my students to move past their baggage by becoming accountable. I teach them responsibility for their own actions and behaviors, to follow the rules and live up to expectations. I told Will this part, too, but just like I had been able to pick and choose what I wanted to believe about him, he was able to pick and choose what he wanted to hear.
“I didn’t know about your life because you never told me. You didn’t even try. How can I imagine something I don’t know anything about?”
Now, for the first time today, Will grows defensive. He lurches to the edge of the couch, and his forehead creases in a frown.
“Come on, Iris. Get real. What would you have said if I’d told you? What if I’d taken you for coffee that very first day and told you Huck and I had a plan, a brilliant, foolproof plan to walk away with more money than we ever dreamed possible. Would you have given me your number? Would you have agreed to a second date?” He shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
“What you and Huck did was wrong, Will. To your parents, to those poor kids and their mother, to AppSec, to me. To our marriage. And what if that plane hadn’t gone down? You were just going to fly off to Florida and disappear? Did you stop for a second to think about what that would be like for me?”
“I only thought about you. You are all I thought about, even after I left. I wanted to make babies and grow old with you, Iris. I wanted us to last forever. But I couldn’t rewind things with Huck. He threatened to tell you the truth about me, and then Nick found out about the stocks, and he knew I was the one who moved them. I couldn’t stay.”
“Because you wanted the money.”
His hands fist into tight balls, his knuckles hard and white on top of his thighs. “No! Not because of the money. It had nothing to do with the goddamn money.”
“Then, why? Why couldn’t you stay?”
Will’s jaw clenches, and he looks away.
“Tell me why, dammit!”
“Because I’d rather you think I was dead, okay?”
He slings the words like weapons, looking just as surprised to have sent them flying as I am to be on the receiving end. He’d rather I think he was dead than what? I wait for him to explain, and his defiant expression collapses into anguish. It distorts his features like a hosiery mask pulled too tight.
“I fucked up so many things, but my legacy was the one thing I wanted to do right. I wanted you to think I died on that plane, so that you’d never know the truth. I wanted you to have honorable, happy memories of the man you fell in love with, the man you saw every time you looked at me. I wanted to be that man in your memories.”
His words break my heart, and I’m as confused now as I’ve ever been. People are dead. Millions of dollars went missing. What Will did is wrong on so many levels, and I know I should be boiling over with fury. I know I should feel blame and anger and confusion and, yes, hatred, too.
And yet, looking into my husband’s beautiful, wrecked face, I can’t seem to summon up anything other than sorrow. An overwhelming sadness for a man who would rather fake his death than reveal the truth.
A sob elbows up my throat, startling us both. “I should hate you. I want to hate you. I want to be physically ill because I’m sitting in the same room as you, but I’m not. I don’t. I still love you and I despise myself for it.”
Will moves closer. He scoots down the couch until he’s on my side, sitting right here, less than a foot away. “I’ll always love you.”
This is the one thing, the only thing, I know is true. Every person has a redeeming quality. Will’s is that he is capable of love.
“So, now what?” The tears have started up again, because I already know the answer: Now he leaves. Now he disappears.
He loops a finger around mine, running the pad of his thumb over the Cartier he put there, a ring that I should give back, though I know with everything inside of me that I will wear it until the day I die. “Come with me. We’ll live on a hillside overlooking the ocean and sleep under the stars. We can disappear, just you and me.”
I’m shaking my head before the last word is out. I couldn’t leave Dave, could never do that to my parents. I could barely contemplate a move to the other side of the country, much less a disappearance. I know better than anyone what that does to the people left behind.
He smiles, and it’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. “It was worth a try.”
He runs his finger down my arm, and I shiver. Will is not playing fair, and he knows it. My skin has always been too sensitive.
“Stop,” I whisper, but I don’t mean it, not even a little bit.
“I can’t stop, and I can’t leave.” His hands wrap around my waist, mine wind around his shoulders. The movement is natural, like there’s nowhere else in the world our hands should be. “Not without saying goodbye to my very favorite person on the planet.”
So this is it. This is goodbye. I remind myself of all the reasons I should be glad to see him go. The money. The lies and deceit. His dying father and his dead mother. Corban and the two dead kids. Especially the kids. He is not the man I married. I want to hate him for what he’s done.
But then I look into his eyes, and he looks like my husband again, the man who slow-danced with me at the top of Stone Mountain with a dozen tourists watching, who slid rings up my fingers and thanked me when I said “I do,” who, the last time I saw him, asked me for a little girl who looked just like me. I see him, and I remember the way he used to be, the way we used to be, and my heart breaks all over again.
He kisses me and I let him. No—it’s more than that. He kisses me, and I put thirty-three days of heartache and confusion and relief into the way I kiss him back. It’s like a first kiss and last kiss and all the kisses in between, and suddenly, I can’t come up with a single reason for fighting it, this last goodbye between me and Will. I can’t muster even the tiniest pang from this gnarled and painful past month. He wants me. I want him back. I have no fight left.
I take him by the hand, pull him off the couch and lead him upstairs. We lose our clothing on the way, dropping piles of cotton and denim on the stairs, the landing runner, the floor by the bed—our bed.
When we’re both naked, he lays me down on the mattress, taking me in with tenderness, with reverence, with love. He runs the back of a finger over the ring—his ring—on a chain on my chest. “Beautiful girl.”
I hold up my arms in answer, in invitation.
We make love, and it feels like the most natural thing in the world, and also the most heartbreaking. How many times have we lain here just like this, sweet and salty and familiar? A couple thousand, at least.
And yet this time will be our last.
His mouth is on the move, traveling over my skin. Pressing kisses onto my neck, my breasts, loving every inch of me. I feel the orgasm building, swirling, circling just out of reach, and I close my eyes, fist the sheets in both hands and wait for it.
Maybe it’s about revenge, about me wanting to hurt Will in the same way he hurt me, about repaying his betrayal with a betrayal of my own. Maybe it’s about justice, plain and simple, about holding Will accountable for the fire and the money and the innocent lives shattered. Or maybe it’s a combination of both. My reasons may be muddled, but my next move is crystal clear. I don’t for a second doubt that it’s the right one.
I open my eyes, and my husband is moving above me. His head is tipped back, his cheeks slack and eyes squeezed shut with pleasure, and I know from all the times before that this is a critical moment. His critical moment. It will last another handful of breaths, at least.
I reach around to the back of my nightstand, push the panic button and hold it.
Three seconds, that’s all it takes.
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from THE ONES WE TRUST by Kimberly Belle.