“We don’t know for sure. Old enough to ejaculate. Now that your wife’s out of earshot, who’s the mother?”
Park shakes his head again. “I told you. I honestly have no idea. I don’t have a lot of exes. Olivia and I dated in high school. I had a girlfriend in college, then Olivia and I got back together.”
Osley’s eyes glitter. “Speaking of the girlfriend in college—”
“She’s dead. Which I assume you already know, or else you wouldn’t be here.”
3
THE WIFE
“The suspect in our case is your biological son.”
That word, that word. Olivia wants a son. She wants sweet-smelling baby skin to cuddle. She wants so much, more than she’s ever going to get. More than she deserves.
Who has birthed her husband’s child? Is he telling the truth that he doesn’t know? He’s been faithless before; has it happened again, and again, and again? When did this anonymous woman spread her legs for him to sow his seed?
She opens the cabinet, assesses the array of bottles. It is tempting, too tempting, to seek the oblivion of a pill. How easy it would be to just check out of this situation.
Park has a child.
If this was happening to anyone else, the irony would be delicious. They’d lie together on the couch, legs intertwined, watching some random documentary about the story, a mysterious child who murders women, drinking wine and giggling at the absurdity of it all.
Can you imagine? Poor guy. He had no idea.
Poor guy? Poor kid!
But this is their chaos. There is no way they’re going to keep it a secret. If Park doesn’t cooperate, the police will just leak it to the media, and he’ll be forced to confront the story in the press. They are going to be scrutinized, pitied, torn asunder. She can already hear the screams from the street as she slams the door—Mr. Bender, how does it make you feel to know you’re father to a murderer? Mr. Bender, why didn’t you tell your wife you had a child with another woman? Mrs. Bender, how are you still living under this roof knowing your husband lied to you all these years—
“Jesus.”
Olivia shuts the cabinet, scrubs her face, twists her chocolate hair into a bun, changes from her yoga pants and T-shirt into leggings, boots, and a blazer. Her therapist is going to be pissed at her for normalizing things again. She’ll want both Olivia and Park to sit down and discuss their “feelings” about the miscarriage immediately, add entries to the dog-eared journals they’re both supposed to be keeping, sharing those words between them, but damned if she’s going to put herself through another round of who’s fault is it? That’s all their conversations are anymore anyway. Olivia—I’m so sorry, the money, it’s me, we can’t keep doing this; Park—it’s fine, it’s not your fault, we have plenty, we’ll try again. Reassuring, cajoling, tender, conciliatory, while inside she can feel him blaming her.
At some point, he will want a baby enough to try with someone else, and he’ll divorce her, leave her the house maybe, as a consolation prize, with its sterile bathrooms and haunted toilets, while he sets up shop across town with a leggy blonde who produces two-point-three perfect towheaded little beasts within the first five years.
Now he has his deepest desire. It doesn’t matter how. It only matters that he is a father, and she is not a mother. Maybe she can just get her tubes tied so she doesn’t have to go through the agony of hope anymore. She won’t tell him. She’ll just never get pregnant again, and they can go back to their lives before they became those people, the people she felt sorry for, the people she pitied. The statistics. The anomalies. The curiosities. Infertility is fascinating to those who seek to break its back. The doctors and the therapists who get rich at the expense of those desperate to procreate. Oh, they care. But they’re still rolling in it.
Stop. Stop. You’re not getting anywhere with this line of thinking.
She swipes on a little lip stain, then heads for the front door. Let Park deal with the police. She needs to get out of here.
The detectives’ Crown Vic sits at the curb like a great black buzzard hovering over a freshly dead deer. Her Jeep is in the driveway—since Park put a gym on her side of the garage, her car was nominated to sit outside in the weather. “It’s more rugged than mine,” he’d said at the time, dismissing the fact that hers was much more interesting to people who might want to break in. “Who wants to steal tile samples?” he scoffed, laughing at the very idea, so she’s been parking in the drive for the better part of two months. She is grateful for it now; she can slip away without raising the door and drawing everyone’s attention.
She leaves the car in Neutral and lets it roll backward out of the drive, then whips the Jeep around, heading toward Belmont. The Jones build will give her plenty of distraction today.
She feels only a little guilty about leaving him with the cops.
Work. Focus. Escape.
Between teardowns and new builds and the renovation boom, she has five houses currently underway and a wait list of ten more. Nashville is slammed with new construction right now. She can’t drive a block without seeing a construction site. The big boom downtown, multiple skyscrapers going up at once, gave the town the nickname Crane City, but now, with the influx of tech jobs and the vagaries of the COVID pandemic, the push is out of the city into HDH—high-density housing, also known as “tall and skinnies”—on the fringes of downtown, and the suburbs beyond. Add in new builds, renovations, additions—every craftsperson in Nashville is spoken for.
She is grateful she has her own crew who’ve been working with her for years, grateful she has the jobs lined up to keep them busy, because finding new and reliable tradesmen in this environment is like casting a line into the final hour of an end-of-season salmon spawn. Everyone is looking for people, and anyone worth their salt is committed for months.
Though there are plenty of craftsmen who will do whatever Olivia Bender wants, just to have a chance at the publicity. OHB Designs is regularly featured in all the magazines around town and many national publications. There’s even been talk of a television show, but she’s resisted. She hates the idea of losing her privacy, of having to conform to others’ ideals of what her life and work should look like. Anyway, trying to have a baby is a full-time job, as she’s told Park numerous times. I’d rather be a mom than have a show. How many times has she said it? Twice? Three times? At some point, she’s going to start believing it. Though now…police on the doorstep, the phone ringing, the neighbors staring. Murder, and scandal. A child, not of her blood. What of their privacy? Their lives are being upended, and it is only going to get worse.
Maybe now is the time to open negotiations. Maybe she should capitalize on this.
Olivia Hutton, you are a horrible person. Human, but horrible.
Stay the course. Do your work, your way. That’s what will get you through. It always has.
Olivia has a reputation for creating elegant, livable spaces that are at once homey, personal, as minimal or maximalist as her clients want, but always done with taste and restraint. She understands space and color, knows how to take down a wall and make the room come together, knows when an exposed beam or shiplap wall or quad-level crown molding or orange velvet barstool will do the trick. With her architectural design background, she is not just sought after, she is the crowning glory for anyone who gets her on their job.