Clare tugs at the neck of her T-shirt and bares the skin of her shoulder. She adjusts her bra strap to give Malcolm a clear view. The circle that marks where the bullet pierced her is still pink and smooth but no longer painful to the touch. Not a wound but a scar. Malcolm frowns.
“This is rather anticlimactic,” Clare says, her whiskey already finished.
“What is?”
“Well, I feel kind of ripped off. Like I was robbed of the gotcha moment. Because I’ve been looking for you, you’re the person I’m supposed to be searching for. Then you just show up? Walk into a bar like some kind of punch line.”
“You gave me no choice,” Malcolm says. “I warned you to stop, Clare. And you didn’t.”
“You could have just warned me and been done with it. Coming here puts you at risk too.”
“Maybe,” Malcolm says. “Maybe it came down to seeing you again, or not seeing you again. Which one could I live with?”
It bothers Clare, the way her heart thuds in her chest, the way the whiskey takes hold. Now that he’s in front of her, Clare is keenly aware of how hard she’s been trying to conjure him in his absence. Trying to remember what a room felt like when Malcolm was in it.
“There’s a video of Jack Westman’s shooting, you know. Charlotte Westman was filming when her father was shot. The video never saw the light of day, or at least the cops never saw it.” Clare snaps her fingers. “But then, boom! It gets emailed to me. Do you know anything about that?”
Clare detects some shift in his expression. A flicker of disbelief.
“Do you know who sent it?” Clare asks again.
Nothing.
Clare unfolds the photograph of Grayson and lays it out for Malcolm. She watches him study it just as Charlotte had done, his expression sad, resigned.
“The shooter was your friend,” Clare says. “That’s quite the plot twist.”
“I knew nothing about it.”
“Then who the hell did?” Clare lifts the empty tumbler and drops it with a clank on the glass tabletop. “Somers and I went to the coroner today and read Jack Westman’s autopsy report. The guy was chock-full of cancer when he died. But I have a feeling you knew that. Did he hire you to plot his own death?”
“Oh my God.” Malcolm throws his head back in exasperation. “Do you actually believe that could be true? Do you think that little of me, Clare? That I would help plot my father-in-law’s murder?”
Malcolm falls silent when the bartender approaches. He sets down their drinks and hovers a moment too long, gauging the tension. After he walks away, Malcolm edges his chair as close to Clare’s as he can. He leans until their foreheads nearly touch and drops his voice to a whisper.
“Listen to me, Clare. I will tell you anything you want to know. I swear to you, I’m here to help you, not to hurt you. I did not kill Jack Westman or plot to have him killed. I never hurt Zoe. Ever. If anything, I let her get away with far too much for too long. I’ve screwed up a lot of things in my life, but these things—they are not on me. I’m not the bad guy. Do you understand that?”
Clare says nothing. I’m not the bad guy. Somers has uttered much the same to Clare, Donovan Hughes too. How easy it is to deny culpability when the truth remains shrouded. And Somers and Malcolm are the two people Clare wants so badly to believe, to trust, the ones she wants desperately to have the right instincts about.
“I deserve the whole truth,” she says.
“I know you do,” Malcolm says.
“So tell me, then. What happened here? What happened to Jack Westman?”
“It should have been open-and-shut,” Malcolm says. “As far as I knew at the time, he was murdered in cold blood while celebrating his wife’s birthday. I wasn’t there because Shelley, Charlotte’s daughter, she was sick and I offered to stay back with her so Charlotte could go to dinner. I got a call around ten from Charlotte, frantic. They were on their way to the police detachment. She told me her father had just been shot in the head in the middle of a crowded restaurant. The shooter made a clean getaway.”
“And you knew nothing about it?”
Malcolm raises a hand. “I swear I didn’t.”
“And Charlotte didn’t say anything about who shot her father?”
“The only version I had for the longest time was the one she and Zoe gave me. And their stories jived. A man walked in while they were eating dessert, fired three bullets at Jack, and ran. There was chaos after that. Both said they couldn’t identify the shooter. Their stories jived with everyone else’s too. Grayson vanished from Lune Bay around the same time, but that was par for the course with him.”
“It never occurred to you that there was a connection?” Clare asks.
“No,” says Malcolm squarely. “I wish it had, but it didn’t. I knew Grayson was good for nothing. But I didn’t peg him as a cold-blooded killer. Then, Charlotte started to… unhinge. She accused me of plotting her father’s death, of trying to get Grayson out of her life. She told me about her dad’s cancer, how he wanted to die on his own terms. I had no idea what she was talking about.” Malcolm gestures to the scar on his arm. “She was out of her mind when she did this to me. That’s when she accused me of hiring Grayson to shoot her father. It was only then that it clicked. That I understood. Grayson was the shooter and Charlotte knew all along.”
“But Zoe hired him.”
“I believe she did. Yes.”
“To kill her father,” Clare says, incredulous.
“You don’t know Zoe, Clare. What she’s capable of.”
“But you should have known, Malcolm. You were married to her.”
Malcolm sips at his whiskey, watching Clare overtop his glass. He’s considering what to say next.
“When Zoe
