“Please sit,” he said, and I did, collapsing into the nearest chair. I took off the hat and sunglasses, still paranoid, maybe even expecting Geller to point and howl at me like the gangly guy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He did point, but at the empty chair beside me.
“Feel free to set your things there,” he said. His smile stayed in place, but softened. “It’s a pleasure to see you, Adrienne, although of course I’m terribly sorry it’s under these circumstances. I valued my relationship with your husband, and I intend to see to your case personally.” He pressed his lips together. “I understand Ethan may have been . . . found?”
“They said they don’t know for sure yet,” I said. “But Dwayne—the man I shot, who broke into my house—he said—”
“I understand,” Geller said. “I’m terribly sorry. We’ll need to discuss all that, of course, but let’s get the business end out of the way. My pre-trial fee has increased a bit since your husband’s case—”
“The cost doesn’t matter,” I said, and heard Adrienne’s voice coming out of my mouth. She’d said those same words to me any number of times, always with a carelessness that shocked me, it seemed so alien. But Geller just nodded. He scribbled a number on a slip of paper and slid it across the table to me. I counted the zeros, keeping my expression neutral. Pretending I wasn’t shocked at all to learn that the man in front of me cost as much as a three-bedroom house.
“Would you like me to write the check now?” I said.
He waved a hand in the air. “That’s all right. We have a lot of ground to cover. Tell me the whole story about what happened last night.”
And I did. I mean, I told him a story. Not a true one, but a good one. A fairy tale in which the beautiful princess wakes up alone in her castle in the middle of the night, the tip of an intruder’s knife hovering gently at her throat. Only with a crowd-pleasing modern update: in this story, the prince was gone, and the princess had to save herself with some quick thinking and a well-placed bullet.
He said Ethan was dead.
He said he wanted money.
He didn’t know we kept a gun in the safe.
I told the story. I told it well. I told it so well that even I believed me, and why not? This was exactly the kind of game I’d always loved best, that used to occupy me for hours and hours on those dusty summer days in the junkyard. I had always been so good at convincing myself that I was someone and somewhere else—and I had always preferred to do it alone. Other people always ruined it, poking holes in the fantasy until it fell apart. Other people always wanted to tell you why your story was wrong and fake and stupid, and that you were fooling yourself, and that no amount of pretending would ever change who and what you are. A princess? A hero? A happily-ever-after? In your dreams. Maybe after a million dollars of plastic surgery.
Kurt Geller listened while I talked, making notes periodically, mostly nodding along. When I finished, he tapped his pen against the paper where he’d been scribbling.
“When did you buy the gun?” he asked.
I frowned, feeling a flare of resentment at this expensive man, poking a hole in my story. Asking a question I didn’t know the answer to.
“I can’t think,” I said. “We owned it legally. That’s what matters, isn’t it?”
“And when you shot him, where was he standing? In relation to you, that is.”
“A few feet away. Between me and the door.”
Geller nodded. “Blocking you from leaving. Understood. And you shot him in the chest?”
I closed my eyes, saw Dwayne stagger forward. The hole in the front of his shirt, going red around the edges. “Yes.”
Another nod. “That’s good.” He looked again at his notes. “Before this, you’d been alone in the house for, what, nearly two days? You didn’t think to wonder where Ethan was, why he hadn’t called?”
“It’s not unusual. I mean, it wasn’t. He was away pretty often. Sometimes, especially if it was a short trip, he didn’t bother to keep in touch.” I hesitated. “And sometimes I didn’t want to hear from him anyway.”
The tap-tap-tapping of Geller’s pen against the paper stopped. He raised his eyebrows. I let the silence stretch between us for two beats too long. It made sense if I seemed reluctant to tell this next part, but I didn’t have to pretend to hesitate. I didn’t want to say it. Saying it meant I had to think about it, about the two of them together. I squirmed.