I smiled at her. “Do I want to know what all this will cost me?”
“No.” She grinned back, hoisting herself up on the desk and looping her hands around my neck, pulling me between her open legs. “Do you like it?”
“I love it,” I whispered. “And I love you.”
“Forever?” she asked, tilting her head and waiting on my response.
“Forever,” I promised, surging forward and pressing my lips to hers, frantic to prove it.
CAT
I stood at the edge of the electronics store parking lot and watched as Neena pushed in a row of carts. She wore a bright-blue collared top with cheap khaki pants that flapped around her ankles. As I watched, she paused, tightening the hair in her ponytail before resuming her task.
When she passed by me, I called her name. She glanced over and then froze. Jerking her head from side to side, she looked around for help, then cautiously regarded me. “Don’t come closer,” she called. “You can’t come closer.”
I stepped forward, holding up my hands as every part of her tensed. “I’m not here to get you in trouble. I’m approaching you at your job, and the parking-lot cameras will prove it. This isn’t a violation of our protective order against you.”
“What do you want?” Her jaw trembled, and I looked away from the weak action, focusing on her brilliant blue eyes.
A year ago, I’d have found joy in her fear, but now, with everything I knew, I felt only guilt. Guilt over torturing a woman who was clearly mentally unhinged. Guilt over ruining her marriage with the one man who could live with her faults. She had set out to destroy my marriage, but I had succeeded in destroying her life.
“I want to give you this.” I held out the gold envelope, the paper limp with use, the document inside one I had read a hundred times. It hadn’t been just a will—it had also been a murder confession, twenty years in the past. “I never shared this with anyone, and I never will.”
The fight left her body, and she sagged against the closest shopping cart. Taking the envelope carefully, almost reverently, she held it against her heart.
“I found your childhood home and bought it. There is a deed in there that puts it in your name, along with the will. If you sign it and send it to my attorney, he’ll complete the paperwork. I think you should have it.”
“I don’t want that house,” she whispered. “You don’t know the memories I have in it.”
“Still ...” I shook my head. “It’s too risky, having someone else own it. All it takes is them deciding to put in a pool, and they might dig up his body.”
She studied me, and it was the first time we’d had eye contact since the night the intruder came. “Have you seen Matt?”
I don’t know what I expected. A thank-you for the generous gift. An acknowledgment of my covering up her crime. Something other than the hitch in her voice when she said his name. Was it possible that she loved him? Had ever? Still did?
“Matt moved to Foster City. I speak to him occasionally if he’s in town.”
The last time Matt had been in Palo Alto, we’d gotten drunk at a Mexican bar, and he’d confessed his undying love for Neena. He’d also told me the truth about her father, a truth that conflicted with the confession in her will.
They hadn’t been high school sweethearts. Instead, Matt had been Neena’s next-door neighbor—the chubby guy she’d never looked twice at, the social outcast who had listened to muffled sounds of her verbal and physical abuse, the guy who did nothing until the night he couldn’t help himself. The night he’d rescued her. The night he heard her scream for help and beat and strangled her father to death after he found the man drunk and naked on top of her.
In that night, he became her hero, and by the time they dug a hole and buried her father in her backyard, fresh rosebushes planted over the grave, he was in love, and she was tripping over herself with gratitude. Grateful enough to go to prom with him. Grateful enough to ride to school with him. Grateful enough to publicly date the chubby boy with the goofy hair until the point where she fell in love with him. Married him. Took his ring and his name and then slowly and methodically turned into the woman who would try to steal my husband.
I swallowed the bitter taste that still lay on my tongue and reminded myself that a decade ago, Neena had done the right thing. She’d met with an attorney and penned a confession that gave intimate details of the crime, put the full weight of the killing on her, and exonerated Matt completely. She gave Matt a copy for their tenth wedding anniversary and filed backup copies with her attorney. With this exchange, Matt’s copy was now back in her hands—probably the only thing she’d ended up with in the divorce.
“If you talk to Matt again, will you tell him that I love him?” She glanced down and flushed with embarrassment. “He changed his number. And when I call his business line, they won’t put me through. I just want him to know that I do love him. That I’ll—I’ll always love him.”
“Are you sure?” I gave an awkward laugh. “Neena, you never really seemed to like him, much less—” My voice fell off at the heartbreak on her face, and I think it was the most honest reaction I had ever seen from her. “Yeah,” I said quietly. “I’ll tell him.”
“Okay. Thanks.” She raised the envelope. “And, uh, thanks for this. Though you shouldn’t have taken it to begin with.”
I nodded and watched as she folded the envelope in two and pushed it into the back pocket of her khakis.
Leaning forward, she pushed at the handle of the cart, then paused. “It was you, right? All of it?”
I didn’t respond. I had planned, upon driving here, to lie if confronted, but now, looking in her eyes, I couldn’t.
She let out a low laugh, and her gaze darted away from me, back to the store. “I’d have done the same thing if I’d thought of it.” She glanced back at me and stepped forward, pushing at the long line of carts. “Bye, Cat.”