Abigail was a star witness in the wide-ranging investigation.
She was hoping it would never go to court, but she was also willing to do whatever it took to make sure the various members of Silvanus paid for what they’d done.
Eric Newman had tried to get in touch with her, sending an email to the same address he’d used way back when, before the wedding. He said that he didn’t expect her to ever forgive him, but that he’d like to explain his role in what had happened. She imagined that he wanted to talk about how Chip Ramsay was a charismatic figure, that he’d been seduced like other damaged men during one of Chip’s seminars in San Diego, a weekend event called “Men Finding Their Voice” or something like that—that was most likely where both Eric and Bruce had been recruited years earlier. She never replied to Eric Newman’s email.
She was about to open the photographer’s link when movement in her small backyard caught her eye. It was the black feral cat that sometimes lived in the attached garage. The owners, before renting to Abigail, had informed her about the cat they’d named Bonnie, wanting to ensure that Abigail would keep an eye out for her and occasionally put food and water out, especially if there was bad weather. Abigail had agreed, but she’d rarely spotted Bonnie since she’d moved in.
Abigail watched the cat move stealthily across the lawn, keeping low, stalking a lone sparrow on a fence post that marked the boundary of the property. Bonnie got about three feet from the bird before it sprang into the air and landed on a low branch of a tall maple tree. The cat stretched her spine and nonchalantly circled back, as though she hadn’t been that interested in the bird in the first place. Abigail watched the sparrow, now arcing its way toward a small shrubby tree. Did it know how close it had come to being eaten?
She finished her coffee, went back inside to get a second cup, and made toast for herself. Her father had called and left her a message wanting to know if she’d like to go see an afternoon movie, and Zoe had sent a text to see if she wanted to get lunch.
She decided she wasn’t quite ready to make decisions regarding her day and took her second cup of coffee back outside to the patio, putting it down on the coffee table next to the small white stone with the red ring that she’d kept from Heart Pond Island. She touched a finger to the stone before leaning back, gathering her laptop, and clicking on the link that brought her to the wedding photographs.
There were hundreds of them, as the photographer had promised, laid out in a grid that loaded surprisingly fast. Most were in black-and-white, but a few were in color, and the images unspooled on the page like cards being turned over. Abigail had been prepared for a tidal wave of emotions but, oddly, maybe because she was expecting that, she felt relatively unmoved by all the pictures. She remembered the day well—getting dressed with the bridesmaids while sharing champagne, the official photographs on the hill with the Hudson River in the background, the walk down the aisle, the vows they’d written themselves, the cocktail party, dinner and dancing. She actually found herself enjoying some of the pictures, getting to see her friends and family dressed up again, having fun. The pictures that showed Bruce were harder to look at. Not because she grieved for him or missed him in any way, but because she found herself studying his face in the pictures, trying to see if there was any moment when he gave himself away, when he showed his true nature. She couldn’t see it.
In the posed pictures he looked stiff at times, his smile a little too wide, but that could mean anything. In the candid shots, he mostly looked relaxed and at ease with himself. There were even shots where he was looking at Abigail, and it looked as if there was love in his eyes. How had she been so fooled?
It was one of the questions she found herself asking a lot these days. How had she not recognized Bruce’s true nature? Had she been blinded by his romantic gestures? Or by his money and his success? Or had he just seemed so different from Ben Perez that she’d fallen for him regardless? She wasn’t sure she’d ever know.
But she did think there was maybe a clue in the wedding pictures. Maybe he looked as though he was in love with her because he really was, in some perverted and strange way? Even though he knew what lay ahead, that he would get his revenge for her infidelity, he still felt love for her, or an approximation of love?
And maybe she was reading too much into it? The most logical explanation was that Bruce was a psychopath, a psychopath who had gone to a seminar that told him what he always believed down deep, ever since his mother had abandoned his family: women weren’t to be trusted.