Matthew Zola. My heart’s enemy. And yet somehow still my heart.
I had never imagined it was possible to love and hate someone at the same time. But here I was.
“So, how was it in there?” Eric asked as casually as if he was wondering about the weather.
“Manageable.”
He nodded knowingly. “I heard things…about Rosie’s.”
I stiffened at the use of the common moniker for the center where female detainees and short-term sentences were housed here on the island. Like the peeling pinkish paint that covered the squat building, the name covered all multitude of sins quite inadequately.
“Barney was able to negotiate for a solitary cell,” I said. “Instead of the dormitory. I mostly just…stayed there.”
No one had argued. Such were the kinds of allowances people like us got. Unfair, perhaps, but at the same time, we were greater targets. During the few times I’d been forced to mingle with the rest of the prison population, I’d received a total of forty-two threats that would have undoubtedly come to fruition had I spent my nights with the rest of the women in my wing. But given my high profile, my assault wasn’t something the ailing prison, with its already questionable reputation, could afford. Solitary became a forced luxury.
Eric nodded. “I had the same. It’s something, I suppose.”
“I suppose.”
I wasn’t going to detail the fears that had prevented me from sleeping more than one or two hours in a row during my time here. Especially after the third night, when a guard, unaware of my status, crept into my cell and had just slipped his hand under my thin blanket when the warden took his own stroll through our wing. The guard vanished as fast as he had appeared, but it didn’t stop me from wondering what he might have done otherwise. Two nights later, I didn’t have to wonder anymore. I could hear others’ responses to him, their hoarse whispers loud and clear only a few doors away.
Begging like that stays with you. Not for pleasure, but for mercy. I doubted the word “please” would ever sound the same again.
I rubbed absently at my knee. My skin had been crawling for days. I wasn’t entirely sure I hadn’t contracted lice, though I hadn’t found a thing.
“Well,” Eric said as the car finally turned onto the Queensboro Bridge. Somehow, we had already made it through Queens. The Manhattan skyline loomed. “Where to?”
I knew what he meant. There was no way I was returning to my Lexington Avenue penthouse. Calvin’s lawyers argued that by leaving it the way I did (jail or not), I had effectively ceded residency rights until ownership was settled. I didn’t care enough to fight it. For the last decade, that foppish hatbox of an apartment had been its own jail cell. I wanted to be as far from the Upper East Side as I could. Right now, I wanted to put this entire city behind me and pretend I’d never seen a single cement square of it ever.
But I had a few more things to tie up. First and foremost was ridding myself and my daughter of the man who had been nothing but an abusive leech. Second was providing the testimony in a criminal trial that would ensure he could never harm us again.
No small tasks. But I’d had plenty of time—the past fifteen days, in particular—to prepare myself. For now, there was the waiting.
I sighed. “The Waldorf, I suppose. Or the Plaza. It doesn’t really matter.” Eric could take me to the nearest shelter for all I cared.
“A hotel? I figured Aunt Violet’s. Or maybe Long Island.”
I shuddered. “Mother’s?”
The idea of the overwrought townhouse where I had grown up myself honestly hadn’t even occurred to me. Nor had our family’s massive Long Island estate, despite the fact that my horse and the stables there would probably do me good. Unfortunately, both places involved my mother, who would probably be too doused in gin and chardonnay to bother giving me the appropriate amount of space or support. Meanwhile, the cooks, maids, butlers, and all the other household staff would be happy to earn an extra dollar by offering anonymous interviews to the tabloids. I hadn’t been in the papers this much since I was a teenage debutante; the paparazzi had been incessant in the month following my sentence. It was the one way Rosie’s had offered some reprieve.
“No,” I said. “I think a hotel will be best.” Another cell. Another version of solitary, perhaps. But at least this one came with a concierge and room service.
Eric was quiet as the car stopped in the traffic entering Manhattan. “Well, there is another option, if you want it.”
The world outside my window seemed like a gleaming ice cube. Or maybe that was just me, living inside the warped glass of a fishbowl. “Oh? What’s that?”
“Well, Jane sort of mentioned that if I didn’t bring you home, she’d make kimchi with my testicles.”
I turned. “She—what?”
Eric’s wide mouth quirked into an impish smile that only his wife and her peculiar sense of humor seemed to be able to bring out of him. “What can I say? She’s taken a shine to you.” He lifted a hand, then hovered it awkwardly over my shoulder before pulling it back, seeming to remember my earlier reticence to being touched.
Do you know how long it’s been since someone held my hand?
Unbidden, a memory flashed through my mind. I asked Matthew that very question the night we met, lonely and aching for someone’s, anyone’s touch. For a moment, I allowed other memories with him to wash over me like a cool rain. The fleeting rendezvous in the hotel, the woods,
