The smug hotel manager is happy to see her go. He even calls her a car service, and there’s a black Lincoln Town Car waiting at the same back entrance where she was dropped off. The driver takes a good look at her ankle monitor, but politely says nothing about it until they turn down her street, where they see a huge swarm of people with cameras milling around.
Thankfully, the Town Car’s windows are tinted dark. If anything, the crowd is even bigger than it was the morning of her arrest. At least the yellow crime scene tape she saw on the news is gone. From the outside of the house, you’d never know anything happened. She has no idea what the inside is going to look like.
“Someone needs to tell them that the view is the other way,” the driver says, looking at her in the rearview mirror. “So. How would you like to do this? I’m assuming you don’t want them to get a shot of you with that ankle monitor on. If you want, I can pull straight into your garage, assuming you have a door that connects to the inside of the house.”
It’s clear he knows exactly who she is, but if it bothers him, it doesn’t show.
“That would be great,” Paris says. “I can open the doors from my phone.”
He pulls into the driveway and idles while Paris taps on her new iPhone, connecting to the home Wi-Fi. She spent the last two days at the hotel trying to set up her new phone like her old one, which the police still have. But the app doesn’t seem to be working. She’s logged in, but the actual hardware inside the house appears to be off-line. The police must have disabled the system.
“I can’t get the app to work,” Paris says, frustrated. “I’m sorry, but would you mind getting out and entering the code directly into the keypad? I promise I’ll give you a massive tip.”
“What’s the code?” he asks, turning around. She tells him the four digit number, and he gives her a wink. “I’d have done it for you anyway, but I got kids, so I won’t say no to the tip.”
As soon as he gets out of the car, cameras flash. She can hear her name being shouted. Paris! Paris! How does it feel to be home? Did you kill Jimmy for the money? The driver punches the code in quickly, and when he gets back in the car, he seems freaked out.
“Wow. Now I know how those Kardashians feel.”
It’s the second reference someone’s made to the Kardashians, and while Paris doesn’t appreciate the comparison, she’s pretty sure the Kardashians wouldn’t, either.
He pulls into the garage, parking between Jimmy’s Cadillac and her Tesla, then shuts the engine off. Without prompting, he gets out and presses the button on the wall. Slowly, the garage door closes, shutting out the noise along with the daylight. Paris exhales. The driver helps her bring everything inside the house. Since the hotel paid for the car service, she Venmos him a hundred bucks.
He grins and hands her his business card. “Call me if you ever need a personal driver. The way things are going, I’m thinking you will.”
She enters the house through the connecting door. Sticking only her hand out, she presses the button again to open the garage to let him out. When the garage door closes again, she lets out a long sigh of relief.
She’s home.
Nothing appears any different, although the house smells like bleach and citrus. Paris sits in her usual spot at the kitchen table. She can almost pretend things are normal. When she looks out the window into the backyard, she half expects to see Jimmy there, fiddling with his tomato plants, fishing leaves out of the pool with his net, barbecuing chicken on the grill.
But Jimmy isn’t here. Jimmy will never be here again.
His ancient Sony boombox is still in its usual place on the counter, and she picks through the neat stack of cassette tapes beside it. Her husband owned three portable stereos of the same vintage—one here, one in his office, and one in his bathroom upstairs. Not long after they got married, one of them had stopped working, so Paris bought Jimmy a brand-new stereo with a CD player instead of a cassette deck, Bluetooth, and an auxiliary plug for MP3s.
She discovered it on one of the garage shelves a few weeks later, still in the box. His old portable stereo was working again, because he’d made Zoe find a place that would repair it.
“Don’t be offended,” Jimmy said to Paris. “I’ve had these stereos since the eighties, and I’m attached to them.” He kissed her on the forehead. “Besides, technology sucks, kid. Always best to go old school.”
She wasn’t offended at all. Jimmy liked what he liked, and she didn’t marry him to change him.