Vera came two days later, in the afternoon.
I ushered her in without exchanging any pleasantries, my relief at seeing her muddled with anger, deep in my chest, at what they’d said, the way they’d said it.
She took a seat on my sofa, looking downright bashful, her hands folded in her lap, her face flushed. Dusty jumped up, and she nuzzled him briefly. She cleared her throat, and I took the seat opposite her. “I’ll get right to it: I really am sorry,” she said. “For springing all of that on you the other night.”
I picked at a loose thread on the knee of my jeans. “It was strange not seeing you guys for a couple of days,” I said, without looking up. “I didn’t realize what a rut we’d gotten into.”
I’d meant to say routine, but rut had come out instead. I wanted to hurt her, I supposed, for tipping the scales we’d balanced so well, for reminding me I couldn’t count on anyone.
She didn’t take the bait. “I wanted to give you space.”
I shrugged. “Okay.”
Vera tugged at the sleeves of her top—all black, as usual, and nearly sheer. “You didn’t call me, either, you know. I figured you didn’t want to talk after you ran out like that.”
“I didn’t run out,” I said, averting my eyes as my voice cracked. “It was late. I was tired.”
She abandoned her place on the sofa and sat next to me instead, hooking her arm around my shoulders. I didn’t shrug her off; it felt so good to have her near me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, steadying my voice, feeling foolish. “I don’t have a lot of people in my life anymore. I don’t have family, and I don’t have a partner, and it’s been nice spending time with you guys, and when you rip the rug out from under me like that, tell me people want to hurt John—which you’ve never even thought to hint at before—and don’t even give me a chance to take it in, and then ask me about watching your house . . . it’s like I mean nothing to you.”
She held me closer, tucking my head into the crook of her neck. She smelled like laundry. Her lips found the edge of my forehead, planting a kiss right where my hairline began, and she began to slowly rub my back. “That couldn’t be further from the truth, Lucy. The reason we told you is because we care about you so much. I should never have mentioned money. I can see now how insulting that sounded.”
I pulled away, disentangling myself. “What exactly did John mean when he said people wanted to hurt him? And why didn’t you tell me? Don’t you think I, of all people, would understand something like that?”
She scooted away from me and stared at her hands. “I didn’t want to tell you because I was afraid you would judge us.”
“Judge you?” I asked. “Wait, does this have something to do with Rachel?”
Vera looked up, her eyes cutting. “No,” she snapped. “It has nothing to do with her.”
She exhaled slowly, and her tone softened. “I’m sorry. I might as well just tell you the truth. About a year ago, John started teaching art classes.”
“In the cabin,” I said.
She nodded. “The first few sessions went really well. They were way better than the normal hippie-dippie offerings here. People loved them—locals, mostly, but sometimes a weekender would drop in, too. Anyway, in February, he got the idea to do one-on-one lessons. I guess one of his students was asking, this girl Claire—she was in high school, but she took her work very seriously. I encouraged it, it just seemed like a natural extension of what he was already doing. He took on other private lessons, too. Only after a few months”—she swallowed—“there were rumors that he and Claire were . . .”
I narrowed my eyes, weight pressing at my chest. “Were what?”
Vera tugged at the collar of her top, as if suddenly hot. “I guess people thought, why is he giving these lessons way out in this cabin in the woods? Why not in town? Why not in our house, or at the gallery, where I was? Woodstock can be very progressive, but at the same time, it can be small-town, especially for the people who live here year-round. It’s a tight-knit community. Insular. People talk. Sometimes, people talk a lot.”
My heart ticked faster. John wasn’t like that. John couldn’t be like that. “There were rumors that they were what, Vera?”
She blinked slowly. “I don’t know, Lucy. It was all hearsay, but . . . well, you know.”
Vera, brutally honest Vera. She’d run up against something even she couldn’t say out loud.
“Did she actually . . . accuse him?”
Vera shook her head quickly. “No, but still . . .” She pressed her hands to her knees. “I overheard someone talking about him at Platform, that bar we told you about—I used to go there for happy hour, after I closed up the gallery—maybe they didn’t realize his wife was sitting right there, or maybe they did and just didn’t care. Anyway, I went home, and I just lost it. I broke half the dishes in the cabinet. Good stuff, too. Stuff he’d gotten from his grandmother and all that. But when John got home, he swore up and down that nothing had ever happened. He seemed appalled that I’d even think it, with a teenager and everything. I asked him how the talk started, and he said he didn’t know. Maybe some of her friends let their imaginations get the best of them. Half the people in that class had a crush on him—you’ve seen John, he’s a good-looking guy.”
“But if the girl never even said he did anything . . .”
Vera sighed. “Her dad was furious, came to our house screaming, saying he knew something happened. Afterward, I tried to talk to Claire, but she didn’t want to talk to me. And then I guess people found out about that and thought I was harassing, well, a survivor, you know.” She lifted a hand, then let it drop. “I wasn’t harassing her. I was just trying to understand. I only ever tried to talk to her a couple of times, but people made it sound like I was stalking her or something, and then that got around, and it all just snowballed. People thought it didn’t matter if Claire accused John or not—she was a child, and tons of crimes like this are never reported, which I obviously know. I’m a feminist, too. I just . . .” Her voice trailed off.
I knew the words running through my head were wrong. You believed these sorts of stories. You just did. That’s what you did if you were a good woman, a good human. I remember reading about that film director, how the girl he raped didn’t even want the government to go after him, not after so many years; I had told Ellie that it didn’t matter—he still deserved his punishment, no matter what the victim thought, what the victim said.
Only this seemed different. This was John. I took a deep breath. “Do you actually think it’s true?”
Vera pressed her lips together. “Call me awful, but I couldn’t believe my husband had a relationship with a sixteen-year-old.”
Her eyes studied my face, searching for my reaction, and I knew it deep inside me: I believed in John’s goodness.
In over a month of trying to quell my stupid crush, he’d never done anything even close to inappropriate with me. He loved Vera; even more, he respected her. I knew vile, hollow men. Davis. All those awful guys in college. John wasn’t one of them.
What’s more, this explained it all. The graffiti. The way Maggie had told me to watch out for them. The tires, most definitely slashed by Claire’s father. It wasn’t an affair; it was a rumor.
“I don’t believe it, either,” I said finally.
A smile crept across Vera’s face.
“So you want to leave because of this gossip?” I asked.
She sighed. “If it were only that, I would stay and try my best to hold my head high. It’s the lawsuit that’s got us scared.”
“Lawsuit?”
She sank into the cushions, as if begging them to swallow her whole, and Dusty nestled himself between us. “Claire’s father. He’s a top contractor in the area—through his business, he’s become friends with a bunch of lawyers, even a judge—and he’s over here all the time, driving up and down the road. He says he’s just helping out his wife with her work, but I know the truth. I know he wants to scare us. Sam Alby.” She paused, narrowing her eyes at me. “You haven’t seen him, have you? When you moved in or anything?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t see many people on this street.”
“Okay.” She sighed. “At first he was going on about a criminal case, but nothing ever came of it; then he started talking about a lawsuit. He hasn’t filed yet—from what I hear, his lawyer is still speaking to people in town, trying to get witnesses to assassinate John’s character—but it’s going to happen very soon. It has to. In New York, the statute of limitations for emotional distress is only one year.”
Vera bit at one of her nails, then stopped abruptly, lacing her hands together. “I spoke to a lawyer. Since Claire hasn’t reported a crime, the police can’t charge John for statutory rape, but she—well, her father—can sue us for emotional distress, and the damages have a high ceiling. Even if he can’t prove it, even if Claire won’t testify, we could be tied up in it anyway, hemorrhaging money. He hates John, he believes his daughter has been violated, and he’s not going to let it go,” she said. “Any lawyer worth their salt starts at three hundred dollars an hour. We’ve only got twenty grand saved between the two of us. That’s sixty-six hours of work, Lucy—I’ve calculated it more than once—not even two goddamn weeks. We would be completely wiped out by a lawsuit, and once the savings were gone, we would have to take out a second mortgage, dip into the little equity we have in the house. And if Sam Alby did win . . . the house, the cabin, the business, it’s all in both of our names. He could take everything. It would destroy us.”
She tugged at the ends of her hair. “John found this area an hour west of Lake George in the Adirondacks. It’s really remote, all woods and state land. He wants to go there, not tell anyone where we’re going. If we use our savings and rent out the house, if the gallery sells a bit more, if we had one big show that could kind of put it on the map, perhaps we could come back after the statute of limitations is up, once things have died down . . . Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like I’m foolish,” she said. “The more I think about it, the more John and I talk about it, the more I know it’s foolish. I know moving, even if John calls it disappearing, isn’t going to stop a lawsuit from going through. If we go, we have to really go. We have to make damn sure Sam can’t harass us anymore—and that his lawyers can’t find us. Sometimes I think this asshole won’t stop unless John is dead.”
Van Gogh. The name, the way they’d morbidly turned it into a verb, rang in my head. Their always joke.
Dusty jumped down, leaving white hairs all over Vera’s black leggings.
“Look,” she said, lifting a hand before I could ask any more questions. “I’m sorry to spring all this on you, it’s not your problem to solve. I just hope you won’t hold this against us.”
“Of course not,” I said. “I would never hold anything against you. I just, I don’t understand—”
Her hand found my knee, squeezed, almost a touch too hard. “Let’s not talk about it anymore, okay? Let’s just try and go back to normal. We care about you, Lucy, we really do. Have dinner with us. We can even go somewhere nice. Screw Sam, we can even go somewhere public. There’s a place just down the road in Kingston that’s having a grand opening tonight. It’s only fifteen minutes away, but hey, at least it’s a different town. It could be our treat.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to,” she said. “Please.”
I hesitated, questions dancing in my mind. Questions I could tell she didn’t want to answer. But did the details even matter right now? I had skeletons, too, plenty of them. We were linked, the three of us, by our torrid backstories. There was a reason we’d met, and I knew it maybe better than they did. They were the best thing that had ever happened to me, and I understood, deep down, that they were good. Our friendship couldn’t just end, half-cocked plan or not. “Okay.”
Vera stood up, brushing off Dusty’s fur. “Forget we said anything about this. I’ll see you tonight.”
I nodded, but I knew as well as she did that I wouldn’t forget. I couldn’t.
The restaurant was dark, accented in rich wood and painted a shade of burgundy, like a scene out of The Maltese Falcon.
The waitress led us to a booth in the corner, John and Vera piling into one side, me on the other. I hadn’t seen John in days, and I noticed the changes in him like a lover would. His eyes were puffy, as if he hadn’t been sleeping well. His beard was unkempt, needing a trim.
I glanced around, wondering if the gossip mill extended beyond the confines of Woodstock. My eyes caught a woman across the restaurant, her head turned toward us, her eyes fixed on John. Christ, I thought. Maybe it really was that bad.
I kept my gaze focused straight ahead as the waitress came and went, rattling off specials, bringing us wine, taking our orders, things that none of us could really afford—lobster fettuccine for John, rack of lamb for Vera, grilled branzino for me.
When the menus were gone, John looked up, his eyes quickly casing the room before landing on me. “Vera said she told you everything.”
Vera set her wineglass down, nudging him. “I told you we weren’t going to talk about it tonight.”
“I know,” John said. “I just—I want to thank you, Lucy, for believing me.”
I bit my lip, feeling suddenly awkward. I stole another glance around the restaurant, spotted another woman looking over, but it was hard to tell if I was being paranoid or not.
“It’s nothing,” I said, turning back to John. “I hope you’d believe me if it ever came down to it.”
“Obviously I would,” John said.
I took a deep breath, wanting to say more, wanting to say what I’d been thinking since Vera left my cottage . . .
“All right, enough already,” Vera said, lifting her glass. “Cheers. To putting all this behind us.”
We lifted our glasses and clinked them together, quickly falling back into the comfortable familiarity of our little trio, leaving the bombshells of the last few days unspoken.
It wasn’t until our dinners came out, smelling of rosemary and lemon and earthy roasted goodness, and I took a first bite of fish, that I again got up the guts to say what was on my mind. I swallowed. “Whatever the plan is, I want to come with you.”
Vera froze, a forkful of bleeding lamb hovering in front of her mouth. John grasped at his wine.
I flaked off another bit of fish, summoning all the courage I had in me. “I know that sounds wild, and I know you guys are still figuring out what you’re doing, and we’ve only known each other a short time, but if you do go, I don’t have ties here. My ties here are . . . you.”
Their hands intertwined, and Vera’s mouth opened to deliver her verdict.
A crash, a wine bottle smashing onto her plate, breaking her glass, sending bones of lamb flying—onto the table, onto John’s dish, into Vera’s lap.
The wine was everywhere, droplets spattering the bottom of Vera’s chin as if she’d been shot in the heart, covering my branzino, turning the white fish purple.
“Goddamn it,” Vera yelled.
“What the hell?” John looked up, became a statue.
The man responsible for the spill was large, with a thick neck and sausage-fingered hands. He looked to be in his mid-fifties, with receding gray-brown hair, and he wore a button-up denim shirt, Brillo-pad hairs crawling from beneath worn cuffs. His eyes were fixed on John.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry!” our waitress cried, hurrying over.
“Sorry about that,” the man told her, his voice almost comically apologetic. “I tripped on my way out, knocked their wine bottle right over.”
“It’s okay, sir,” she said, surveying the damage as everyone around us stared. Vera blotted at the front of her shirt with a napkin, her gaze fixed on her lap. “Let me go get someone to help.”
The man’s eyes turned to slits once the waitress was out of sight. He looked disdainful, disgusted, but at the same time disturbingly calm. He didn’t look at me or Vera, only at John.
“She was sixteen, you pervert,” he said, before walking away.