Lily stared hard, watching for any sign of movement, but the store lights were off, and she couldn’t see anything but the shape of a dark SUV. “Shit,” she cursed. Detective Mendelson had made her paranoid. A vehicle might have been parked there once or twice a week for the past six months and she wouldn’t have noticed until now.
“I need a drink,” she muttered, thinking of the red wine she’d stashed under her bed. She didn’t particularly like red, but it didn’t need refrigeration, and she didn’t want to leave alcohol in the kitchen for her son to experiment with. She tried to protect him in every way she could, reading all the pamphlets the school sent home about alcohol, drugs, depression.
Don’t keep alcohol in the house. Don’t drink in front of your kids. Set a good impression. Hide your wine in your bedroom like the pitiful parent you are.
Lily huffed out a bitter laugh. When she’d met Jones, she’d never even tasted wine, and she still had yet to taste the good stuff. Her bottles were eight dollars max, and most were closer to six, and being at room temperature didn’t help the quality.
God, it felt like a movie she’d watched once, that brief moment of her life she’d spent in a beautiful two-story house with a nuclear family on a reasonable budget. They’d been planning a trip to Disney World. She would’ve seen the ocean on that trip. She would have insisted on it.
She’d had wine by then, of course. She’d even had a martini at a neighborhood party, though she hadn’t liked it. If everything had gone as planned, she would have been an established neighborhood organizer by now, volunteering for the PTA and maybe working in the school office for a few hours, with Everett already in middle school. Or maybe they would have had more kids.
She winced away from the idea of what might have become of her if Jones had gotten away with his crimes for another year or two. They’d been halfway through finishing the basement, anticipating the space they might need once Everett had a little brother or sister. She would’ve had another child. A baby to take care of in addition to a young boy. She didn’t want to think about how much more hopeless she would have felt.
Lily glanced at the glass door, hesitating before she went back in. But she couldn’t hide outside forever, wondering what the hell her ex-husband’s crimes had dragged to her doorstep this time.
“Homework hour for both of us,” she declared once she was back inside and locked up tight behind two doors. To keep the peace, she ignored the window he’d closed on the desktop when she’d walked in. At least he got out his backpack without arguing with her, and he retreated to the couch so she could work on an online assignment.
He seemed entirely back to normal. “I really like Josephine,” she tried, testing the waters of his mood.
“Yeah. She’s cool.” He didn’t seem inclined to offer more, so she dropped it. She knew there was no chance it was a romantic involvement, since he’d blurted out at age ten that he liked boys and not girls. He’d been clear on it since then, so what more could she ask about Josephine? It’s not like he would volunteer answers anyway.
She was too strict to be one of those moms who got treated as a best friend. That was what she’d chosen, but she did occasionally yearn for adolescent giggles and whispered tales. Hell, she’d barely left those behind when she’d had him at age twenty.
When an alert buzzed on her cellphone, Lily looked up from her work to find that Everett had retreated to his room and she was all alone. A glance at her phone revealed that it was five minutes to eight, and her gate alarm was ringing.
Mendelson. Heart hammering, hands shaking, she lurched to her feet and raced to the office. When she glanced at the security feed, she was sure it was him, appearing just as promised. A white man leaned out the open window of an SUV to push the buzzer again. A second glance revealed that he looked nothing like the detective. This man’s hair was shaggy and brown, not blond. Just a stranger here to give her a heart attack.
She glared as she turned on her microphone. “Can I help you, sir?”
“Oh hi!” he said, his eyes flashing up to the camera. “I’m here working on my uncle’s storage unit. I misplaced the note with his gate code on it, so I was hoping you could buzz me in?”
“Sorry, sir, I can’t open the gate without the code. You’ll have to call him.”
“I just tried. He didn’t pick up.”
“Please come back between nine a.m. and six p.m. tomorrow after speaking with your uncle.”