“What’s plan B?” I asked, my voice trembling.
“Plan B is that you help me kill my husband,” Isabel said evenly.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Thursday, October 8
Selena didn’t skip a beat. “Absolutely not. I’m sorry, but no. No, no, no. I’m sorry your husband is a sociopathic monster, and I’m even sorrier I ever crossed paths with him—believe me—but I am absolutely not killing anyone. Surely you can figure out how to divorce him or leave the country and never see him again without doing all of . . . this.” She gestured with her hand wildly. “Divorce is literally what I do for a living. I can help you with that, and will do so gladly. But I’m not going to help you kill the guy.”
“This is too much, Isabel,” Kira agreed. “I know I made a huge mistake, and I want to help you get away from him, but you can’t honestly expect us to help you kill him. We’re not killers.”
I chimed in. “What if we just all come forward now? Tell the police everything that he’s been doing?”
Isabel shook her head. “It’s too late. The moment is over. It’s time for me to come back. I can’t risk getting in trouble for staging all of this. Besides, I see now that he’s capable of squashing the story, changing the narrative. I can’t risk that we try that and then it doesn’t work. You’d be in danger then, too.”
I knew she was right. If we tried to take down Connor with the truth and it didn’t go our way, he could easily come after us. He would come after us.
“Look,” Isabel said, “I know that the thing I’m asking you to help me with is big. But what it comes down to is this: he doesn’t deserve to be alive. He’s abusing the privilege of living by being so cavalier with the lives of others. I mean, look at what happened to Allison!
“If I could go back to when I was twenty-one and undo my choice of being with him, of course I would. But I can’t. And”—she cleared her throat and slowed her words—“as long as he is alive, he will be Naomi’s father. Even if we somehow managed to largely cut him out of our lives . . . she’ll be damaged by him. I know she will. And I can’t accept that. I simply need him out of the world. And I think together we can do it and do it right.”
Here she paused, looked around at all of us to see if she was making headway. It was scary for me to admit it to myself, but where I was concerned, she sort of was.
“Listen,” she said. “Think of your daughters growing up and meeting someone like Connor in a dark bar. Think of your sons growing up and being friends with him. Idolizing him. Trying to be like him. See, the moms’ group gave me the perfect way to get us together, but the truth is, I wanted you guys on my team not only because I had a way to get to you but also because, as moms, you have the best reason in the world to take down people like this man. You are all so strong—you might not even realize it, but you are.” I thought, with gratitude, of what she’d said to Tim on their phone call. And I knew she had meant it. “And I’m asking all of us to pool our collective strength. We can’t rid the world of all the Connors. But we can rid the world of this one. And we should.” She nodded emphatically.
There ensued a long pause in which, to the soundtrack of the surf washing the shore, everyone just sat around the table with all she’d said. I could’ve used a week, but it was clear we wouldn’t be afforded anything like that long to wrap our minds around it.
It was Kira who spoke first. “And if we say no? What then?” she asked, discernible fear in her voice.
This time, it was Vanessa who answered. “Please don’t make us stoop to threatening you,” she said flatly.
Isabel winced slightly at her words, making me wonder which one of them had really been leading this whole thing.
“It feels like you are, though,” Selena said, eyes narrowing. “Threatening us.”
“Look, I don’t like where this conversation is heading,” Isabel said. “I honestly have no intention of threatening you. That would make me no better than Connor. I just want you to say yes. So why don’t we fill you in on the plan? That might help. It’s foolproof, truly. I think you’ll feel comfortable with it. Vanessa, do you want to run them through it?”
“Happy to. As you all know, I’m a doctor.” She flipped her hair, and I wondered how many times she had mentioned that she was a doctor in the six weeks that I’d known her. A hundred, perhaps? At least. “I can access a drug that will freeze Connor’s muscles and stop the flow of blood to his heart. It’s used in surgery sometimes to help doctors work on specific organs. The dose we’ll give Connor will be much larger and will essentially simulate a massive heart attack. Then we’ll maybe push him down the stairs, for good measure, making it seem like the heart attack also caused a fall.” She shrugged, far too casually. “You really won’t need to do anything. We just want you there for the confrontation so he understands the magnitude of his misdeeds before he passes—we’d like this to be something of a catharsis for all of us, after all—and then maybe to help with a little staging and cleaning, after the fact. And of course, strength in numbers—it takes a village, right?” Vanessa smirked slightly and for a split second looked like an entirely different person. “We need to make sure he can’t overpower us. I have another drug to help us with that, too.” Jesus. “Having this be a group effort is more of a cautionary measure than anything; trust me, I’ll be doing the heavy lifting. And since it won’t even look like a murder, there’s nothing to get caught for, but even if there were, you’d never be the ones implicated.” She looked at each one of us, trying to gauge how we were digesting the plan.