But Anna wasn’t interested. She’d stopped listening, maybe even without hearing the start of the answer to her own question, and was instead staring down at her phone and tapping furiously at it.
“Anna?”
“Oh, dammit,” Anna said. “Adrienne, I’m sorry, I have to put out a fire, but maybe I’ll see you . . . you know . . .”
“Sure,” she said, and Anna looked relieved—at being able to return her attention to the so-called fire, or maybe just at not having to explicitly commit to attending a SoulCycle class with Adrienne, who she hardly knew and had probably only ever pretended to like.
Either way, that had been the end of it. She’d air-kissed at Anna, who had twinkled her fingers back in a twee little wave, and it was all over with no apparent suspicions aroused. Her next stop was back downtown, and she’d passed the drive in a sort of ecstatic fugue state, terrified but also strangely exhilarated by the surprise run-in. She had been totally unprepared for it, had been waiting the entire time for the inevitable moment when Anna realized that something was very, very wrong. Halfway to her destination, she’d been gripped by another wave of panic and had to pull over to examine her reflection in the rearview mirror, suddenly haunted by the horrifying possibility that she’d missed a spot, and that she’d been chatting away to Anna-from-SoulCycle with a fine spray of someone else’s blood prominently displayed on her face.
But of course there was nothing there. And Anna hadn’t noticed a thing. Whatever mark last night’s horrors had left, however powerful the sense that she’d woken up this morning as an entirely different person and everyone would know, it was now clear that she could still be, or at least seem, normal. The realization made her giddy.
I could get away with this.
Everything she had done since last night was predicated on this being true, but until now, she hadn’t truly believed it. Even though some people would be quick to point out that this wasn’t the first time Adrienne Richards had gotten away with murder, in the most literal sense of the word—but that had been different. Adrienne had been young, and dumb, and reckless, and the man’s death had been an accident. A very different thing, all told, from putting a shotgun under someone’s chin and looking at her face as you pulled the trigger.
There had been so much blood.
She shuddered and shook her head furiously, trying to obliterate the memory, or at least blur it out.
And yet, the other thought was still there in her head, impossible to ignore.
I could get away with this.
There was just one thing: it was definitely “I,” and not “we.” She was seeing things clearly now, and that included the unignorable fact that her husband was going to be a problem. Everything had happened so fast, there had been no time to consider the obvious pitfalls of choosing him as a partner in crime—and it wasn’t as though she had a choice, not when he had chosen her first. This whole mess was his fault, and here she was, cleaning it up. Not for the first time. Good little wifey, stepping in. There had been a time when she wanted to play that role, and then, eventually, “want” stopped having anything to do with it. Every marriage has its well-worn grooves. This was theirs. It was how things worked between them. The blood spatter had been still warm and wet on her cheeks as she turned to him and told him that it would all be fine, she would take care of everything. And she’d meant it.
But this, she thought, was the last fucking time.
The woman in the Louboutins showed her down the hall and through another doorway, the clicking of her heels suddenly hushed; the marble floor underfoot had been replaced by gleaming wood covered with a richly woven oriental rug in subtle shades of red and ochre. A small gold plate beside the door read, simply, richard politano, and then, beneath that, private clients. They passed through an inner waiting room—empty but for the rug and a few other pieces of tasteful, plush furniture—and then a second doorway, where her escort cleared her throat and said, “Adrienne Richards,” like she was a servant in a Jane Austen novel announcing the arrival of a noblewoman in the drawing room. There was a huge mahogany desk in the room, and a small man sitting behind it, who rose at the sound of Adrienne’s name.
“Mrs. Richards,” he said, smiling in the same practiced way as the woman in the Louboutins. He extended a hand, an exact half inch of shirt cuff showing past the sleeve of his perfectly tailored suit. “So nice to see you. It’s been ages.”
“It’s Adrienne, please,” she replied, matching his smile. “And it has been ages. I was trying to remember when I was last here.”