Rachel laughs at herself for wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt. She knows that if any of her friends were in this position, she’d scream at them to “wake up!” But somehow, when it’s your own marriage on the line, it’s not so clear cut.
“That’s what I’ve been dealing with,” he says. “Haven’t you ever asked yourself why she’s no longer working for me?”
“She just said that she had to leave because it all got too much,” says Rachel, reading between the lines.
“I got her fired,” says Jack bitterly.
“You fired her?” says Rachel, shocked at the admission. “You said she gave her notice in when she was offered the new job.”
Jack shakes his head.
“What grounds did you fire her on?” asks Rachel.
Jack sighs heavily. “She just wouldn’t leave me alone, but I could hardly go to the boss and complain that I was being sexually harassed by a woman, could I? He’d laugh me out of his office.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” asks Rachel.
Jack looks down as the advancing tide fills his footsteps as quickly as he leaves them. “Because you’d probably do the same,” he says.
Rachel likes to think she wouldn’t, but without knowing what she now knows, she has to admit that she might have.
“So … so what did you do?” she asks.
“I had to do some digging,” he says. “To see if I could find something, anything, that meant I could fast-track her out of the door, and out of my life.”
“So, what did you find that proved conclusive enough to fire her?” asks Rachel.
“She lied,” says Jack, bluntly.
Rachel tuts and shakes her head. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“She put down a fictitious job on her résumé,” Jack goes on. “I was determined to get something on her that would stick, and I did.”
“How did you find out it was fake?”
“I just called all the employers she said she’d worked for and they all stacked up, except one, who said they’d never heard of her.”
“So, there’s a gap in her career that’s unaccounted for?” asks Rachel.
“Two years,” says Jack.
“What could she have been doing that meant she had to make something up?”
“It doesn’t matter,” says Jack. “It gave me enough to dismiss her on the grounds of obtaining employment fraudulently.”
“But don’t you want to know why?” muses Rachel, feeling that they might be on to something; something big that could be the death knell for Ali’s hours-old marriage. “Aren’t you intrigued to find out what she’s hiding? Because she’s definitely hiding something.”
“I honestly don’t care,” says Jack tightly. “I just wanted to be rid of her and that gave me the chance.”
“But what if…？” starts Rachel, her mouth working faster than her brain. She pauses, waiting for it to catch up. “What if she was inside?” Her eyes widen as the possibility dawns on her.
Jack laughs. “What … prison?” he asks, his voice high-pitched.
Rachel nods. “It’s not too far beyond the realms of possibility, is it? Knowing what we now know about her—the lengths she’ll go to, to get what she wants.”
Jack’s eyes flit rapidly from side to side as he contemplates what Rachel’s saying.
“She might be a professional fraudster—a con woman who got caught out. Or she might have been convicted of stalking,” offers Rachel, warming to the theme. “They take that pretty seriously these days.”
“I don’t think so,” says Jack.
“She was driving the car when Maria was injured. If she’d been drinking, they’d have put her in jail and thrown away the key.”
“If she’d been in prison, we’d know,” says Jack.
“How?” asks Rachel. “You only checked her references when you wanted her out. Most people would do it when they were considering hiring someone in.”
“Nobody does that anymore,” says Jack, by way of defense. “You glean more from someone’s social media accounts than from talking to an employer who can barely remember them working there. The job she went to never bothered to ask me for a reference either.”
“So, it’s the blind leading the blind,” says Rachel. “No wonder she’s gotten away with it for so long. You’ve all allowed her to—and now she’s got her feet under the table of our family.” Her voice wavers as she thinks of Josh and what Ali might have seen or heard. “She could be capable of anything.”