The first is from Somers. It reads only:
Jesus, Clare.
The next message is from Malcolm’s number. It is a long note that arrived in her in-box last night, shortly after she was arrested. Clare locks the screen and looks up at Germain.
“Am I free to go?” she asks.
“You’ve got a few minutes until she gets here,” he says. “The airport’s over an hour away. You want a coffee?”
“No,” Clare says. She is being stubborn, she knows. Petulant. But all she wants is a moment to gather herself before Somers arrives. Germain taps at a file folder squared on the center of his desk.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about what you told me yesterday morning. Zoe Westman’s rogue husband hiring you to work as a PI. That’s some story, especially in light of last night’s events.”
Clare says nothing.
“You know,” Germain continues, “I feel like I’ve gained a decent sense of this Malcolm guy since I took over the case. Orphaned when he was fifteen with tons of money left behind, boarding school, college, a PhD, world travel. Must be nice, right? Then he bought himself some rambling oceanfront house in a rich suburb. Ripped it down and had this masterpiece glass box built. Do you know how much the houses up there cost?”
The angled sunlight through Germain’s office window is blinding. Clare’s eyes ache. Germain opens the folder and spins a large photograph so Clare can see it. It depicts Malcolm and Zoe’s wedding, the two of them flanked by the Westmans, the ocean behind them. Clare swallows. Why does this photograph stir anything in her?
“The guy never smiles,” Germain says, tapping at the photograph. “This is his wedding day. I mean, come on. You can’t smile for your bride?”
Donovan said the exact same thing of Malcolm yesterday. He never smiled.
“Some people don’t smile in pictures.”
Germain eyes her. “Yeah? Anyone I interviewed, every old interview from the case that I’ve read, has Malcolm Hayes pinned as this quiet guy with a dark side. The kind of guy who can’t break a smile at his own wedding. Like, a don’t-fuck-with-me kind of dark side. A perfect fit for the Westman family business.”
“Yeah,” Clare says. “Feels like a lot of bad shit went down with the Westmans. The cold-blooded murder of the patriarch, a couple of women vanishing, including one of the Westman daughters. And yet only one guy’s in jail. Donovan Hughes. And for what? Tax fraud? That feels a little thin. Like maybe some people haven’t been doing their jobs.”
Germain doesn’t flinch. “I’m doing my job, Clare. Trust me.”
The back of Clare’s neck is coated in a cool sweat. She looks down to her phone again.
“Are you hungry?” Germain asks. “We could have breakfast once Detective Somers arrives.”
“I’d rather not,” Clare says. “I’d rather wait for Somers in the lobby. If I’m free to go.”
Germain masks any disappointment in her response with a smile. He stands when Clare does. Clare’s phone is warm in her hands. Without another word she ducks out of his office and winds her way back to the elevator.
In the atrium, Clare finds a row of chairs close to the entrance. She sits and sends Somers a text:
I’m out. Waiting for you by the main door.
Clare grips her phone in both hands and looks down to the screen. There’s a metallic taste in her mouth, her teeth coated with film. She unscrews the cap to the bottled water Germain gave her in his office and drains it in a few long gulps.
Open the email, she tells herself. Open Malcolm’s email. But she doesn’t.
The atrium is busy with the comings and goings of a shift change, fresh-faced officers arriving just as the haggard overnight crew leaves. A group of uniformed cops stands in a close huddle adjacent to where Clare sits, laughing at a video playing on one of their phones. What if it is the video of her in the bar? The thought fills Clare with dread. This is a regular Thursday morning to them, the air cooler than it was yesterday as September tends to bring, the weekend arriving soon. Clare feels a stab of loneliness. But for whom? For what? Friendship? Camaraderie? She’s known so little of that in her life beyond her childhood friend Grace and, perhaps more recently, Somers. Is she lonely for a life she never had? For all the things she believed she’d experience in her life—a happy marriage, a decent job, a family—and then hasn’t? Clare’s phone pings again. Somers writes:
Twenty mins
Clare’s legs tingle. She is still wearing the black shirt she put on last night. Her jeans feel pasted to her legs. A young boy sits with his mother on a nearby bench. He makes eye contact with Clare as he runs a toy car along the seat. When she smiles at him, he stares back for an unnatural stretch, the toy unmoving in his hand. His mother’s face is streaked with dry tears, her gaze trained on the double doors at the far end of the atrium. She is waiting for someone to be released. Clare closes her eyes.
From the beginning this case has felt fundamentally different from the first two Clare worked on; she is more assured in her choices, less anxious. But the anger isn’t subsiding. In fact, it comes in taller waves now, mixed with sadness and frustration. In the jail cell, Clare had moments of feeling bowled over by it. She thinks of Kavita and Charlotte in the bathroom last night, how mad she’d been at them for snorting lines, for caving to an urge Clare has herself worked so hard to resist. It unsettled her how badly she’d wanted to join them, how little, when faced with it,
