“Mom has her. They left after we talked this morning.” He crossed his arms. His anger hadn’t abated, but it had become focused. “Ruby Heyer’s dead. Did you know that?”
“Andrew did it,” Leigh said.
He didn’t look surprised because nothing about it was surprising. Of course Andrew had escalated. Of course he had killed someone in Leigh’s orbit. Walter had told her last night that it was going to happen.
He said, “Keely had to be sedated. Maddy is a wreck.”
Leigh waited for him to confess his actions, but then she realized that making Walter say the words was cruel. “It’s okay. I know you went to the police.”
His eyebrows furrowed. His mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “You think I dimed out my own wife to the cops?”
Leigh didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing.
“Fuck, Leigh. Do you really think I’d do that to you? You’re the mother of my child.”
Guilt washed away her steely resolve. “I’m sorry. You were so angry with me. You’re still so angry.”
“What I said—” He reached out for her, but then he let his hands fall away. “I said it wrong, Leigh, but you weren’t thinking. Or you were thinking too hard, assuming that everything would work out because you’re too fucking smart to let it go sideways.”
She took a shaky breath.
“You are smart, Leigh. God damn, you’re smart. But you can’t control everything. You have to let people in.”
He had stopped to let her respond, but she didn’t have the words.
He said, “What you’re doing right now, tearing shit down, thinking that you’re the only one who knows how to build it back up, that’s not working. It has never worked.”
She couldn’t contradict him. There were thousands of variations on this same argument they’d had over the years, but this was the first time that she accepted he was absolutely right.
She said out loud the mantra she had only ever said to herself. “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.”
“Some of it is, but so what?” Walter acted like it was that simple. “Let’s put our heads together and figure this out.”
She closed her eyes. She thought about the sweltering night in Chicago when Callie had brought them their gift. Before that fateful knock on the door, Leigh had finally relented and sat in Walter’s lap. Then she had curled into him like a cat, and he had made her feel safer than she had ever felt in her entire life.
She told him now what she had been unable to tell him then. “I can’t live without you. I love you. You are the only man that I will ever feel this way about.”
He hesitated, and it broke her heart all over again. “I love you, too, but it ’s not that easy. I don’t know if we’re going to get past this.”
Leigh’s throat worked. She had finally touched the bottom of his seemingly bottomless well of forgiveness.
He said, “Let’s talk out the problem that’s in front of us. How do we save you? How do we save Callie?”
Leigh brushed away her tears. It would be so easy to let Walter help carry the burden, but she had to say, “No, sweetheart. I can’t let you get involved in this. Maddy needs one of us to be her parent.”
“I’m not negotiating,” he said, as if he had a choice. “You told me Andrew has a fail-safe. That means someone else has copies of the videos, right?”
Leigh humored him. “Right.”
“So, who would that be?” Walter could sense her intransigence. “Come on, sweetheart. Who would Andrew trust? He can’t have that many friends. It’s a physical device—a thumb drive or an external hard drive. He makes a call, the fail-safe retrieves the device, releases it on the internet, takes it to the cops. Where would it be kept? Bank vault? Safe? Train station locker?”
Leigh started to shake her head, but then she found herself at the most obvious answer, the one that had been right in front of her from day one.
Both the primary and the backup server are locked in that closet over there.
She told Walter, “Andrew’s private detective, Reggie. He has a server. He bragged about the fancy encryption and how he doesn’t back up to a cloud. I bet he’s got it stored on there.”
“Is Reggie in on it?”
She shrugged and shook her head at the same time. “He’s never in the room when Andrew pulls his bullshit. All he cares about is money. Andrew’s his bank. He would follow through on a fail-safe if Andrew got arrested, no questions asked.”