Mia’s mouth opened, but no words came out. It was like the day the earthquake had rippled up from Olympia all the way to Seattle. Like she was frozen in shock.
But she had always been afraid of this, hadn’t she? Scott had been in debt up to his eyeballs, and then he had started secretly drinking again. He must have known it wouldn’t be long before the debt collectors began calling the house, before Mia learned about the whole sorry mess. Unable to see a way out of his predicament, had he made an impulsive decision to end it all rather than face the consequences?
If Scott had killed himself, it certainly hadn’t been done in hopes of their benefiting. He had let his life insurance lapse, so his death had left them with nothing. Nothing but debts. The kids got Social Security benefits, that was all. But Scott had been spared watching their lives fall apart.
The seven months he had been dead sometimes felt like seven days, at other times like seven years. He had hidden so much from her. Was suicide his final deception? If Scott suddenly were to appear before her now, Mia thought she might be tempted to kill him herself. As it was, she had no place to put her anger.
“I took a look at the accident report.” Charlie glanced down at his empty hands and then back up at her. “There are things that don’t add up.”
Heat rushed from Mia’s heels to her hairline. How dare he! What made him think he should stick his big nose in? The knowledge could do nothing but hurt her. She swung her legs off the couch and sat up. “You looked at the report? Let me get this straight. You looked at the accident report for my dead husband, a man you never met?” The skin on her face tightened. “What business is that of yours, Charlie Carlson?”
“After I met you, I got curious. What was supposed to have happened didn’t seem to make a lot of sense. Don’t you want to know the truth?”
Truth? The truth was that being obsessive might be what made Charlie such a good homicide detective—and maybe a bad human being. The idea of Charlie poring over the details of Scott’s death, of smashed glass and smashed bone, seemed nearly obscene.
“What’s next, Charlie?” Mia was fisting her hands so hard her nails dug into her palms. She wanted to take one of those fists and smash it into Charlie’s nose. “Are you going to start going through my garbage? My underwear drawer? You don’t get to go pawing through things that have nothing to do with you. This is my life you’re talking about. My life. And my children’s lives.” Even though she was alive with anger, she kept her voice a low, hissed murmur. If they learned that their father had killed himself, what would that do to Gabe’s and Brooke’s mental health? “Let the dead bury the dead.”
She would never forget that night. Wasn’t that hard truth enough?
“I won’t be home for dinner,” Scott had told Mia over the phone. “And don’t bother waiting up for me.”
“Working late again?” Her stomach twisted. He had been working so many hours lately, sometimes until late into the night. She had asked him a half dozen times if anything was wrong, and he always brusquely assured her that everything was fine.
As Mia waited for his answer, she stared at Brooke’s head, bent over the dolls spread over the carpet in the family room. Their daughter would soon turn four, and she had recently become captivated by the idea of friends. She could spend many minutes pairing up appropriate plastic friends. Just pairs, though, no groups of three or more. In Brooke’s world, each doll or toy had only one soul mate.
Could Scott be seeing another woman? Mia gripped the phone so hard it cut into her fingers. It would explain his silences, his bad moods, the way he could be sitting right beside her on the couch in front of a sitcom and seem a million miles away when she spoke to him. There were times he came home so late that she was already in bed. But she always roused herself and wrapped him in her arms, nuzzled his neck.
She was sniffing for the scent of another woman, or even another soap, some brand stocked by a hotel.
But so far he had always smelled only of Scott.
“I’m having dinner with a client.” His voice was colored with some emotion she couldn’t name. Impatience? “I need to go over some things with him, but he’s been too busy to meet during the day.” His tone didn’t encourage any questions.
She went to bed a little after ten and finally fell into an uneasy sleep, futilely reaching out for him every time she shifted. When the doorbell rang just before two in the morning, part of Mia wasn’t even surprised. Part of her had known something bad was coming—just not what form it would take. She stumbled downstairs and looked through the peephole. Two cops. One wore a white clerical collar with yellow crosses embroidered on the points. She let out a single sob, then bit her lip. Hard. Gabe and Brooke were still asleep upstairs. When they woke, their lives would be irrevocably changed. Let them sleep as long as they could.
With the taste of blood fresh on her tongue, Mia opened the door.
And now Charlie wanted to rub her nose in the truth. What was true, anyway? That she and Scott had been married for sixteen years and had become strangers? That she now carried an almost unimaginable burden—debts, worries about her children, and the knowledge that Scott hadn’t felt he could confide in her?
Or that Scott had abandoned her long before he died?