I hadn’t even known I was thinking those things until I said them. But in that moment, as heated and over the top as it was, I knew I’d hit a core truth about Graden. And about us.
At my last words, he physically drew back away from me and fell silent.
“I’d be willing to consider that, Rachel,” he said seriously, then looked me straight in the eye. “But I’d ask only that you return the favor: consider the possibility that you’ve got survivor’s guilt over Romy. And that means you can’t really let anyone into your life.”
The mention of Romy’s name shot a red flare off in my brain, ending the possible reentry of rational thought.
“Now you think you’re going to psychoanal-”
“Oh, so you can dish it out, but you can’t take it!”
He wasn’t wrong, but I’d had enough.
“You’d better go,” I said. I heard a quaver in my voice at the end that I didn’t like. I refused to break down in front of him. I pressed my lips hard against my teeth and held my body rigid.
Graden glared at me. “Finally, we agree about something.”
He walked to the door, then stopped, his hand on the knob. He blew out his breath and shook his head.
“I’m sorry, Rachel,” he said as he stood looking at the floor. “I thought we were going to be great together,” he added quietly, then left.
I was still shaking and cold with fury, and yet it was the leaden feeling in the pit of my stomach that scared me the most. A tiny voice from deep inside me asked, What have you done? I let the anger envelop and squash it. I opened the mini-fridge, poured myself a tall Russian Standard Platinum neat, and took it into the bathroom, where I drew myself a steaming-hot bath. I drank until I was warm and the water was cold. Then I got into bed. And cried myself to sleep.
38
I woke up at the obnoxiously early hour of six thirty a.m. with an aching throat and a monster of a sinus headache, the aftereffects of too much booze and too many tears. I crawled out of bed and rinsed my face with warm water. After a few splashes, the congestion started to clear, and I felt marginally better. But my brain still seemed foggy, so I doused my face with cold water-a painful but effective remedy. Then I threw on my robe and, although I had little appetite for food, ordered a bagel and cream cheese to soak up the acid of the large pot of coffee I intended to slug down.
The day was blustery, and a thin, stinging rain spattered against my windows. I appreciated the fact that the weather had decided to work with my mood. Though I still felt fully justified in my fury at the way Graden had violated my privacy, self-righteousness is a cold form of comfort.
And the one thing that really would’ve helped was the one thing I couldn’t have: the shoulders of my buds Toni and Bailey. I’d definitely have to explain why Graden wasn’t around anymore, but I couldn’t tell them the truth, because I’d never told them about Romy. It would’ve been different if it’d just been a fight. I would’ve made excuses for his absence until we made up. But this was a breakup, not just a fight. Graden had violated my privacy once, and that meant it could happen again. Like a crack in the windshield, the damage caused by this breach of trust would only spread over time. I couldn’t see a way to patch this up-ever.
A depressingly familiar isolation wrapped itself around me, bringing back the old feeling of inhabiting a separate plane, peering in through life’s window at a party to which I’d never be invited. My throat tightened, and hot tears sprung to my eyes as the memories of my childhood after Romy’s abduction flooded through me.
Abruptly I shook my head to stop the thoughts. Enough. I wasn’t that little girl anymore. I had a new life, wonderful friends, and a career I loved. And I detested self-pity parties. I resolutely swallowed and blinked until I’d forced back the wave of emotion.
Luckily, it was only Wednesday. That meant I’d have three days to dive into work and put some buffering between my breakup with Graden and the now-unclaimed “freedom” of the upcoming weekend-a looming black hole of unwanted solitude that offered too much time to ruminate on my once-more single state and, more important, the reasons that led to it…again.
Stop it. I tightened the belt on my robe and deliberately picked up the Bayer file and flipped to my to-do list, then called Bailey.
“Since when are you up and at ’em this early?” she asked.
Without even thinking about it, I defaulted into white-lie mode. “Since I went to bed early. Want to know what I had for breakfast too?”
“No,” Bailey said flatly. “It’s too early to be that bored.”
“I’d like to get back out to the scene and see who else has surveillance cameras on the sidewalk,” I said. “See if we can get a different angle on the stabbing.”
Bailey agreed to come by and pick me up at eight fifteen, and I pushed out my room service cart and headed for the shower. I’d finished dressing and still had an hour to kill. Since the meeting with the prosecutor, Larry Gladstein, I’d found my thoughts returning again and again to Lilah. I wasn’t quite as sure of her guilt as Larry was, and even he couldn’t explain why she did it. Whether she was guilty or not, I needed to know who this woman was if I was going to track her down. I started my own private to-do list entitled LILAH. Engrossed, I lost track of time-until the jangling of my room phone made me jump out of my chair. I looked at the clock: eight twenty. Rats. I picked up the phone. “I’ll be right down,” I said.
“Or I’m leaving,” Bailey said, and hung up.
By eight thirty, she had found a parking space next to a fire hydrant. It was early, so there were other legal spaces to park, but Bailey’s devotion to her job perks bordered on the religious.
“Am I right about you saying Detective Stoner never got to any of these places?” I asked as we got out of the car.
“Sort of,” Bailey replied. “He did get to the Subway, but the camera wasn’t working.”
“The bank video come in yet?” I asked.
“No,” she replied. “But any day now.”
I looked up and down the street. “Okay, we got the check-cashing place already. That leaves the dry cleaner, the liquor store, and the travel agency.”
We decided to hit the dry cleaner first and work our way down the street.
An older heavyset woman with crooked red lipstick and hair that’d been dyed a metallic rainbow of blond hues stood behind the register, talking on her cell phone in what sounded like Russian. A bell tinkled as we opened the door, and she looked up. She said something into the phone before addressing us. “Yes?” she said, her tone annoyed. “You have something to pick up?” she asked impatiently in a heavy Russian accent.
I guess business was so good she could afford to treat customers like a nuisance. Glad to be able to disappoint her, I replied, “No, we’re here on a murder investigation.”
This information impressed her not at all. She gave us a stony expression. “What murder investigation? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I reminded her.
“Hmmph,” she replied. “I can’t tell you anything. I was working, I don’t have time to be looking all around. Anything else?” she asked in a tone that heavily suggested her preferred answer.
“Yes,” I answered. “We’d like to see the footage on your surveillance camera from that day. So maybe you should tell your friend you’ll call back.”
“You have some ID?”
We flashed our badges.
The woman exhaled heavily and all but rolled her eyes, but she signed off with her friend and motioned to us. “Follow me.”