“That’s all I care about, as well.”
He waits until their car has turned at the corner before shutting the door and quietly making his way to his office in the backyard.
He will not think about how similar the crimes are. Will not think about a girl, found dead in a lake, more than twenty years ago, and a woman, now, also found dead in a lake, only miles from where he is standing.
How long was Beverly Cooke in the water? He wanted to ask details, wanted to know more, but he couldn’t ask, not without looking weird, or guilty.
They’d sensed his eagerness to hear more, hadn’t they? Moore had, at least. He needs to be careful around her. He can imagine just how easily she can spin lies from truths.
No, he has bigger problems.
The combination safe in the closet of his office is keyed to the date of Olivia’s first miscarriage. Morbid as hell, he knows, but a sequence no one outside the family would ever latch onto.
He moves aside the stack of emergency cash, the contracts, the envelope with the small gold ingots his mother left him in her will, the gun, and pulls out a file from the bottom of the stack, one he never in a million years thought to need again, cursing himself.
So naive. You’ve always been so naive. Of course this could happen.
The file is laminated, has a cheery yellow cover with a hand-drawn house, smoke rising from the chimney, a white picket fence, and two genderless people in shadow, holding hands. A child’s drawing, commissioned from an adult artist, he’s sure of that.
The red print is subdued, elegant in contrast with the childish drawing.
Winterborn Life Sciences.
He closes the safe and takes the file to his desk, shoving papers out of the way. He puts on his glasses and goes through the paperwork.
A copy of the questionnaire, his medical records, blood work. The release forms. IQ tests. He was healthy. Smart. Handsome. Attractive as hell to anyone who wanted to use him. The perfect donor. Especially because he wanted no contact from the children he might sire. I give to you my essence and expect nothing in return.
Of course, he wasn’t expecting one of them to become a killer.
He slams shut the file, tosses it on the desk. There’s nothing here to give him answers. There’s nothing to tell him what he needs to know. And he can’t exactly call them and demand answers, can he?
Well, that’s not true. He could…
He needs Lindsey. She’ll know what to do.
But his sister’s phone goes to voice mail. She’s either driving or in a meeting. He leaves her a brief message—“Call me, it’s urgent”—and sets his phone gently on the table, facedown.
He is overwhelmed. The thoughts are coming so fast he can’t keep track of them.
Olivia.
She is the priority.
He chastises himself—he’s called his sister for help before calling his wife to offer solace. No wonder Olivia ran. She’d just gone through hell—another miscarriage, the news he had a child, the police on their doorstep, the death of a friend—and he’d let her leave. What sort of monster is he?
He starts to dial her number, puts the phone back on the table.
How can he face her? What is he going to say?
He should have told her, should have confessed immediately when she’d made the damn gracious offer a year ago for him to donate sperm so he could leave a piece of himself behind. He should have fessed up immediately when the police said he had a kid.
Instead, he lied to her, he lied to them, and now what is he going to do?
Olivia will be devastated.
More devastated than she already must be.
Good job, asshole. You’re going to ruin her life, on top of everything.
She has every right to be rocked by this news, news that should not have been a surprise.
God, why did he lie? It was knee-jerk, immediate. Hide the truth, no matter what.
You didn’t lie. You omitted. The cops will get it. You needed to have a heart-to-heart with your wife. You needed her on your side before you revealed the truth.
He fingers the edge of the phone. You love her. She’s your wife. You don’t have to say the right thing, you just have to say something.
“I’m not pregnant anymore. I lost it. This morning.”
The chasm in her eyes as she broke the news.
His heart is bruised. Another baby gone. Another life unled.
It’s not Olivia’s fault. He knows this. So why does he resent her so much?
Things have been hard lately. It’s not just losing the babies. Their lives, their relationship, have become singularly focused. There’s nothing like basal thermometers and missionary-style timed sex to make the heart go wild.
It wasn’t always like this. Their before was incredible, full of travel and excitement and impulsivity. And when they started trying, it was a heck of a lot of fun.
Even when it became clear they weren’t going to get pregnant without professional help, Olivia devised naughty games to make the stud calls—as she referred to them—sexy instead of drudgery. The doctor’s office wouldn’t let her in the room with him when he was giving his samples, so she wrote him dirty letters he could read while he masturbated instead of rifling through the skin mags left on the small side table. They both agreed there was something singularly gross about wanking off with the same magazines as the guy he’d sat next to in the waiting room who’d been called in first, the two of them stiff-shouldered and avoiding eye contact.
But as she lost pregnancy after pregnancy, all the little touches disappeared. She sank deeper into her grief. There were no more notes, no more jokes. Things were serious now. She reeked of desperation. He saw the way she looked at young families and pregnant women. He saw the avarice in her eyes, the way her lips tightened, the smile becoming a rictus, even as she pretended things were fine. After the fifth miscarriage, he’d said the magic words—why don’t we consider adoption—and she’d gone ballistic.
She didn’t want someone else’s kid. She wanted her own. Their own. She was torturing herself for him, damn it, so he could have a child to call his.
The irony of this moment is not lost on him.
He starts to dial her, again. Puts the phone down, again.
He just doesn’t know what to say to the stranger who is his wife. To the crying, desperate, unhappy woman he saw earlier. He will never forget her face when she heard the news. The betrayal he’s done to her. To them.
Again.
7
THE WIFE
Olivia manages to swim deep in her work and avoid Park until dinnertime. He’s called several times, each message progressively more intense.
“Please come home. Please.”
“I have to talk to you.”
“I have to explain.”
“Please, Olivia, let me explain.”
“Damn it, quit ignoring me or I’ll come to the build, and we’ll talk this out in front of the crew.”
With every call, it sounded more and more like he’d figured out who the mother of his mysterious son was.
You can’t ignore him forever, Olivia.
She is tired, hungry, crampy, and sad. So sad. She’d managed to keep things together until the call to the clinic to let them know about the baby. The nurse who answered had burst into tears, a very unprofessional but entirely human response, and that had set Olivia off, too. They’d cried together, two women separated by a few miles and an unbreachable gulf. The nurse, a sweet lady named Brigit Blessing, had suffered her own trauma, her own loss, a few years before Olivia and Park started working with the clinic. A child born who lived for only a few hours. That loss, Olivia felt, was a thousand times harder than anything she had faced. The needles, the pills, the terrible side effects, the days she had to lie in bed before and after the harvesting while her ovaries filled with blood and fluid, swelling her belly to comical proportions and making her incredibly sick, the blood in the toilet, again, and again. No. It didn’t compare. There had been no breaths. No opening of eyes, no flexing of limbs, no touching of fragile, translucent skin. Olivia’s tragedies are amorphous blobs, swept away on a current. If she’d held one in her arms and watched them die? No. She would not be able to go on. That Brigit was able to continue working with young mothers and their own many disappointments was a testament to her strength.