“Oh, but you’re on the Cape, right?” Diana said, and gave Daisy a look she couldn’t read, tilting her head as she smoothed her hair behind her ears. “I almost forgot.”
15
Diana
After Daisy gathered up her knives and cutting boards and departed, Diana locked the door and used the peephole to chart the other woman’s progress down the hall. When she was positive that Daisy was gone, she opened all the windows and lit a few candles guaranteed to eliminate unpleasant odors. She slipped off her silk blouse and pulled on the T-shirt she’d packed in her purse. Then she got to work.
She’d allocated twenty minutes on regular cleanup, reasoning that if Daisy came back up to retrieve a lost lipstick or spatula, she’d find Diana involved in normal-looking tasks: washing dishes and sweeping the floor, the things she’d be doing if she actually lived in this place. Which, of course, she didn’t.
She wiped down the counters, getting every last drip off the stovetop and the oven’s interior, and the refrigerator’s handles and shelves. She put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher. While it ran, she scrubbed every pot and pan and utensil that they’d used, drying them by hand and replacing them in their drawers and cupboards.
With those jobs completed, she felt safe enough to really get to work. She pulled a duffel bag out of the closet, and scooped the clothes out of the dresser and off the hangers, cramming them all inside. She’d brought the handful of designer garments she owned with her, borrowed more from her friends at the Abbey, and used a coupon to join Rent the Runway, which had supplied the rest of the high-end designer gear. Diana reasoned that even if Daisy spotted the Rent the Runway tags sewn into the clothes, she wouldn’t think it was strange. Plenty of high-earning businesswomen used the service, instead of just buying clothes outright. Diana had read a piece in the Wall Street Journal about it when she’d been preparing for this role.
The toiletries in the bathroom went into a zippered case, and the case went into the duffel. The empty wine bottle went down the garbage chute, along with the rest of the trash. The chicken stock went into a tote bag. The cookbook Daisy had given her went into her purse.
Two hours later, the apartment was as spotless as it had been when she’d taken the keys that afternoon. The superintendent had been squirrely—“if anyone comes by and wants to see the model unit, I’m screwed”—so she’d pressed an extra twenty dollars into his hand and sworn to him that she’d leave the place immaculate, and no one would ever know that she’d even been there, and that if someone did come, she’d make up a story about a magazine photo shoot.
Before she left, she triple-checked everything—the cupboards, the refrigerator, the bedroom, and the closet, looking to see that she had every single thing she’d brought in. When she was satisfied, she closed the windows, blew out the candles, slipped them in her bag, and slung the duffel over her shoulder, with the cooler dangling from her left hand. She locked the door behind her and dropped the keys off with the super at the front desk. “Same time next week,” she said.
Her Airbnb was less than a mile away. It, too, technically, was in Rittenhouse Square, but it was far less grand than the penthouse she’d borrowed. The layout reminded her of her cottage, as it had been when she’d first lived there: a single large room, with a half-sized kitchen on one end and windows on the other. As soon as she was inside, she locked the door behind her and sat on her couch, staring at the wall.
She thought about the kind of harm a person could inflict intentionally—through murder or robbery or rape—and about the kind that happened by accident, to people who weren’t the targets at all, but just happened to be proximate, or in the way. Undeserving, innocent people who suffered for the crimes of others. She thought about women and children whose only crime was wandering into the blast zone, or being the son or daughter of the wrong man. The son, or the daughter, or the wife.
The lady or the tiger, she thought. Truth or dare. Your money or your life. No matter what she decided, she suspected that the other Diana’s life, and the life of her daughter, would never be the same.
Part Three
Little Bird
16
Diana
Michael left flowers in a mason jar on her porch, daisies and lilacs that breathed their fragrance through the room after Diana set them on the kitchen table. She repeated the steps she’d taken the year before, opening the windows, setting down her bags; putting her groceries away in the kitchen, checking for new additions in the rows of water-bloated paperbacks, making sure the starfish was still propped up in the bookcase over her bed.