Vero tossed the wet towels aside with a flourish as Steven lowered himself to the floor. Go! she mouthed to me, shooing me from the kitchen when his head disappeared under the sink.
Shit! This was not the plan.
I rushed to the coatrack and dug inside Steven’s pockets, scurrying up the stairs to my room with his phone. I thumbed it on as I grabbed the last handful of shower towels from my bathroom, tossing them down the stairs into Vero’s waiting arms. She carried them into the kitchen with a devilish grin.
I stole back to my room with Steven’s phone, pausing over the lock screen as Steven and Vero bickered downstairs. He was a creature of habit, I reminded myself, trying our old joint ATM PIN first. When that didn’t work, I tried the four-digit code to the garage. The home screen opened, revealing a menu.
Tools clanked against pipes downstairs, their argument building to a crescendo in the kitchen. Vero’s voice rang out, alerting Delia and Zach their father was here for a visit. Delighted screams tore through the house. The children’s feet thundered down the steps.
Scrolling frantically through Steven’s call log, I skimmed past the familiar names, pausing only on the incoming calls from women. There had been one outgoing call to Bree’s House, in the late hours of Thanksgiving night. Nothing else stood out to me in recent weeks.
I scrolled further back in time, to early October, when Bree had said the calls had been frequent, but most of the calls were to or from Bree—outgoing calls to Bree’s Cell, incoming from both her cell and her house, the calls coming and going at all hours of the day and night, interspersed with routine calls from Steven’s work associates, Theresa, and me—no unusual patterns of incoming calls I could identify. At least, nothing that jumped out as threatening or suspicious.
The cacophony grew louder downstairs, the children’s laughter escalating until it was almost frantic. I rushed down the steps, slipping Steven’s phone into his coat pocket on my way back to the kitchen.
As I rounded the corner, a shout of alarm erupted from under the sink. Steven sat up fast, smacking his head against the bottom of the drain as he reached protectively for his groin. Zach was climbing between his thighs, squealing with delight at the handful of Cheerios Vero had poured over Steven’s crotch. Steven lifted our son aside as he extricated himself from the cabinet, livid and dripping. Vero sat on the counter beside the running sink, wearing a remorseless grin. She shoveled a handful of Cheerios into her mouth as water flowed through the opening in the drain and the children stomped gleefully in the fresh puddles on the floor.
Every towel in the kitchen was soaked. I pulled the dishrag off the handle on the stove and handed it to Steven. Slowly, he wiped sink water from his face. A vein bulged in his temple, his skin an apoplectic shade of red as he bent over his knees.
“Vero, why don’t you go take the kids upstairs to dry off,” I suggested. “I’ll help Steven finish up here.” I was certain there would be a murder in my house if she and Steven were in the same room for one more minute. Steven glared at her as she jumped off the counter and led the children from the kitchen.
“Sorry about that,” I said, rushing to turn off the faucet.
Steven straightened with a groan, unfurling his hand and pressing its contents into mine. “This was stuck in your trap. Looks like a SIM card from a cell phone.” I stared down at the mangled SIM card Vero and I had dropped into the garbage disposal last month.
“Wow, that’s strange,” I said, tucking it away with a nervous laugh as Steven kicked aside a pile of sodden towels and eased back under the cabinet. “I wonder how that got in there.”
“Probably your damn babysitter. She’s going to destroy your disposal dumping that kind of stuff down there. And if she does, I’m not coming back to fix it.” I held the flashlight for him as he wrapped the disconnected pieces of the drain in purple tape and threaded them back together. “That girl’s a menace. She’s irresponsible, Finn.”
“She’s not irresponsible. She’s a big help to me and she’s amazing with the kids.”
“Case in point,” he argued, gesturing to the counter above his head, “she shouldn’t be storing all these cleaning supplies together.”
“We have childproof locks on all the cabinets.” He should have known, since he was the one who’d installed them.
“At the very least, you should have a decent fire extinguisher under here. That oven cleaner is nasty stuff. You’ll start a house fire if you’re not careful.”