The Kept Woman (Will Trent 8) (25 page)

Sara looked at the time again. Not even a minute had ticked by. She weighed the consequences of waking up her sister. Tessa was in South Africa. It was two in the morning on her side of the world. She would panic if the phone rang so early. Besides, Sara knew exactly how the conversation would go. The first thing out of Tessa’s mouth would be ‘Show him how you feel.’

What she meant was that Sara should break down in front of Will, let him see that she was a basket case and couldn’t live without him. Which was a lie, because Sara could live without Will. She would be miserable, she would be devastated, but she could manage it. Losing her husband had taught her at least that.

But Tessa wouldn’t let Sara hide behind Jeffrey’s death. She would likely say something about riding a high horse into the lonely sunset. Sara would remind her that one of the things Will liked about her was her strength. Tessa would say that she was confusing strength with stubbornness, and then she would do what she always did: allude to what her family called the Bambi incident. The first time they had watched the film, Tessa had wept uncontrollably. Sara had mumbled an excuse about needing to study for a spelling test because she hadn’t wanted anyone to see her crying.

Tessa’s final point would be delivered in a tone reminiscent of their mother: ‘Only a fool thinks she can fool other people.’

On the contrary, Sara had made a career out of fooling people. If you were a parent with a sick kid, the last thing you needed was a doctor who couldn’t stop bawling. If you were a terrified patient, you didn’t want to see your doctor break down at your bedside. The skills transferred. There was nothing to be gained by turning into a mess in front of Will. It was a cheap way to win an
argument. He would comfort her, and she would feel horrible for manipulating him, and in the morning nothing would’ve changed.

He would still be in love with his wife.

Sara took a mouthful of Scotch and held it before she swallowed.

Was that the truth? Did Will really love Angie the way a husband loved his wife? He had lied to Sara about seeing her on Saturday. He was probably lying about other things. Death had a way of focusing your emotions. Maybe losing Angie had made Will realize that he didn’t want Sara after all.

There was no need for him to call or text if there was nothing left to say.

The dogs shifted. Bob jumped down from the couch. Billy followed. Sara heard a soft knock at the door. She looked at the door as if it could explain how someone had gotten into the building without using the intercom system. Sara was on the penthouse floor. She had only one neighbor, Abel Conford, who was on vacation for the month.

There was another soft knock. The dogs ambled over to the door. Betty stayed on the pillow. She yawned.

Sara put her laptop on the coffee table. She forced herself to stand up. And to not get angry, because the only reason the dogs weren’t barking was because they recognized the man knocking on the door.

She had given Will a key last year. It was cute that he’d still knocked on the door the first week after. Now, it was annoying.

Sara opened the door. Will had his hands in his pockets. He was wearing jeans and the gray Ermenegildo Zegna polo she had slipped in with his Gap T-shirts.

He saw the laptop. ‘You’re watching
Buffy
without me?’

Sara left the door open and went back to retrieve her drink. The loft was open-concept, the living room, dining-room and kitchen taking up one large space. Sara was glad to be able to put some distance between them. She sat down on the couch. Betty stood from the pillow. She stretched and yawned again, but didn’t go to Will.

He didn’t go to the dog either. Or Sara. He stood with his back against the kitchen counter. He asked, ‘She did okay? At the vet?’

‘Yes.’

His hands were gripped together the way he used to do when he twisted his wedding ring around his finger. The skin over the knuckles of his index and middle fingers was broken open.

Sara didn’t ask about the injury. She took another drink from her glass.

‘There’s a girl,’ he said. ‘She might know what Harding knew. What got him killed. That could get her killed.’

Sara feigned interest. ‘This is the Jane Doe you found in the office building?’

‘No, another girl. Harding’s wife. Daughter. Maybe. We don’t know.’

Sara drank her Scotch.

‘I cut myself.’ Instead of holding up his hand, he turned and showed her the back of his right leg. There was a dark patch of blood. ‘I slipped through some floorboards.’ He waited. ‘There’s a couple of splinters.’

‘If it’s been longer than six hours, it’s too late for sutures.’

Will waited.

Sara waited too. She wasn’t going to make this easy for him. If he was going to break up with her, then he had to be a man about it.

He said, ‘Have you had much?’ He paused. ‘To drink?’

‘Not nearly enough.’ Sara got up from the couch. She passed Will on her way into the kitchen. Her stomach wouldn’t like a second drink on top of the earlier glass of wine, but she poured herself one anyway.

Will stood on the other side of the counter. He watched her top off the glass. He had a physical aversion to alcohol. His shoulders squared. His chin lifted. She wasn’t even sure if he noticed. She had to assume it was muscle memory from all the drunks who had abused him when he was a child. As with most things, Will did not talk about it.

She asked, ‘Do you want one?’

He nodded. ‘Okay.’

Sara had seen him drink alcohol once, but that was under duress. She had forced a trickle of Scotch down his throat because he couldn’t stop coughing.

He asked, ‘Do you have gin?’

She leaned down to search the cabinet, which, until tonight, she hadn’t opened for months. Dust covered the foiled corks in the wine. There was a full bottle of gin in the back, but something told her that gin was Angie’s drink, and Sara was not going to toast her boyfriend’s dead wife in her kitchen.

She stood up. ‘No gin. There’s wine in the fridge, or do you want Scotch?’

‘That’s what I had before?’

She took down a glass and poured him a double. When he didn’t move to take it, Sara slid the glass across the counter. He still didn’t take it.

She said, ‘Amanda told me not to tell you, but there was a note from Angie.’

The color drained from his face. ‘How did she . . . ?’

‘You already knew?’

He opened his mouth again, but nothing came out.

Sara said, ‘I’m glad it’s out in the open. I wasn’t going to lie, or pretend that I didn’t know. That would make me the worst kind of hypocrite.’

‘How . . .’ He hesitated. ‘How does Amanda know?’

‘She’s in charge of the investigation, Will. It’s her job to know everything.’

He spread his hands palms down on the counter. He wouldn’t look at her.

Sara thought back to the crime scene bus, Charlie’s glee when he’d shown her the glowing
HELP ME
on the wall. Angie’s injuries had been severe, life-threatening, but she had stopped to write the words in her own blood, knowing that Will would see them. That Sara would see them. That everyone would know that Angie would always have her claws in him. She might as well have written
FUCK YOU
, S
ARA
L
INTON
.

Will asked, ‘Did you read it? The note?’

‘Yes. I’m the one who recognized her handwriting.’

Will kept staring at his hands. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘For what? You said it before: you can’t control her.’

‘What she said . . .’ His voice trailed off again. He sounded distraught. ‘It doesn’t matter. Not to me.’

Sara didn’t believe him. The fact of Angie’s death hadn’t yet sunk in. ‘It mattered to her. It’s probably the last thing she wrote before she died.’

He lifted the glass of Scotch. He threw back the drink, and then he almost coughed it all back up.

Sara pulled a paper towel off the roll and handed it to him.

His eyes were watering. He wiped the mess off the counter. He was sweating. He looked shaken. And he should be. Angie was dead. She had begged him for help. He hadn’t been able to save her, not this time when it really mattered. Thirty years of his life was gone. He was probably in shock. Alcohol was the last thing he needed.

Sara took the glass away from him and put it in the sink. ‘Wait for me in your bathroom.’ She didn’t give him time to respond. She found her glasses on the couch and walked down the hall to her office. She pulled down her medical bag from the closet shelf. She turned around.

She did not want to leave the room.

She stood by her desk, holding the bag, willing herself to calm down.

There was no way to fix this. She couldn’t stitch together their relationship like she could stitch together his leg. Talking around the problem was only delaying the inevitable. And yet she didn’t have it in her to confront him. She was frozen in place, terrified of what might come if they really talked about what had happened, what was coming next. Sara couldn’t guess the future. There was just a blank expanse of unknown. All she could do was stand in the darkened office listening to the blood rushing through her ears. She counted to fifty, then one hundred, and then she made herself move.

The hallway seemed longer than it ever had before. More like an arduous journey than a stroll. Will’s bathroom was in the spare bedroom. Sara had designated a separate area for Will for the benefit of their relationship. When she finally rounded the corner, he was waiting for her in the doorway.

She said, ‘Take off your pants.’

Will stared at her.

‘It’s easier than trying to roll up your jeans.’ She emptied her medical bag into the sink. She laid out the tools she would need. ‘Take off your pants. Take off your socks. Stand in the tub. I need to clean the wound.’

Will obeyed the orders, giving a slight wince when he peeled the jeans away from his leg. He had bled through the bandage, which was little more than an oversized Band-Aid. He stood in the tub.

‘Take off the bandage.’ Sara looked for a pair of gloves, then thought better of it. If Angie had given Will a disease, Sara already had it. She put on her glasses. ‘Turn sideways.’

Will turned. The leg was worse than she’d expected. This was more than a few splinters. He had a deep two-and-a-half-inch laceration down the side of his calf. Debris had crusted into the blood. It was too late for sutures. She would be sewing in an infection.

She asked, ‘Did you wash it?’

‘I tried in the shower, but it hurt.’

‘This is going to hurt more.’ Sara unwrapped the bottle of Betadine. She closed the toilet lid so she could sit down. She didn’t give him any warning before she blasted a steady stream of cold antiseptic directly into the wound.

Will grabbed the curtain rod, almost ripping it from the wall. He hissed air between his teeth.

‘Okay?’ she asked.

‘Yep.’

Sara jetted out a chunk of debris. He’d done a poor job of cleaning the site. Caked blood dropped onto the white porcelain tub. Will lifted up onto his toes. He had braced his hands on the curtain rod and shower head. His teeth were clenched. So much for the Hippocratic Oath. Sara had gone from being a caring doctor to a passive-aggressive bitch. She put down the bottle. Will’s leg was shaking. ‘Do you want me to numb you?’

He shook his head. His shirt had ridden up. He was holding his breath. She could see every single clenched muscle in his abdomen.

Sara felt the full weight of her transgression. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you. I mean, obviously, I did, but I—’

‘It’s okay.’

‘No, it’s not okay, Will. It’s not okay.’

Her words echoed in the bathroom. She sounded angry. She
was
angry. Both of them knew that Sara wasn’t talking about his leg.

He said, ‘I know why Angie took your lipstick.’

Sara waited.

‘She was trying to bully you. I should’ve stopped her.’

‘How?’ Sara genuinely wanted to know. ‘It’s like the note she left for you on the wall at the club. She knew that Charlie or somebody would luminol the area. That I would see it. That it would be a public thing. She does what she wants to do.’

‘The wall.’ Will nodded, as if that explained everything. ‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah,’ Sara agreed, which brought them right back to where they had started.

She wet some gauze under the tub faucet and used it to wipe off the Betadine. Will eventually lowered his heel. She scooped warm water onto his leg and foot, rubbing away the iodine stain. She’d made a mess of everything. Even the hand towel she used to pat him dry showed streaks of yellow-brown from the antiseptic.

Sara told him, ‘The hard part’s over. I can still numb you. Some of the splinters are deep.’

‘I’m fine.’

Sara took a flashlight out of the drawer. She found the tweezers from her bag. There were several tiny black splinters just below the surface of his skin. She counted three that were deeper, more like shards of wood. They would’ve been jabbing him every time he took a step.

She folded the hand towel and knelt on the tile floor so she could get at the splinters.

Will flinched before she touched him.

‘Try to relax the muscle.’

‘I’m trying.’

She made the offer again. ‘I have some lidocaine right here. It’s a tiny needle.’

‘I’m fine.’ His death grip on the curtain rod said otherwise.

This time, Sara tried to be gentle. As a pediatric intern, she’d spent hours sewing sutures onto peaches in order to train a softer touch into her hands. Still, there was no way to get around some types of hurt. Will remained stoic, even as she worked a piece of wood the size of a toothpick out of the open gash.

‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated, because she hated the thought of hurting him. At least she hated it now. ‘This one is really deep.’

‘It’s okay.’ He allowed a breath, but only so he could speak. ‘Just hurry.’

Sara tried to hurry, but it didn’t help that Will’s calf was a concrete block. She remembered the first time she’d seen him in running shorts. She’d felt a rush of heat at the sight of his lean, muscular legs. He ran five miles a day, five days a week. Most of the time he took a detour to the local high school, where he sprinted up and down the stadium steps. There were sculptures in Florence with less definition.