Owen timed it out in his head. If the first stage took two weeks, and the second anywhere from three to six weeks, he was looking at about two months from start to finish. And for most of the time, he’d be in the hospital.
As he had predicted, there’d be no opera performance in his future. No final orchestra recital. No chance at first violin. Likely no prom either.
“We’ll get you a tutor,” his mother said. “That way, you’ll still be able to graduate on time.”
Owen smiled again. The timing did permit him to attend graduation. Of course, that would only be true if he didn’t die before then.
Haley sat at the bar at Sant Ambroeus, an upscale Italian restaurant on Madison Avenue. In her previous life, she would stroll past the bar area, take a table inside the restaurant, and order the Dover sole. But now the bar was as far as she dared go. For one thing, she could no longer afford the prices at the tables. For another, she was here not for the food, but the view.
In the morning, her order was a cappuccino. In the afternoon it was a martini, extra dirty. Usually more than one.
It was somewhat disconcerting that this morning the barista nodded when she took her seat. He was about her age, but not handsome enough for Haley to think his gesture was a come-on. More likely, he remembered her as a regular.
Sant Ambroeus was the ground-floor tenant of the building where James worked. By sitting at the bar, Haley had an unobstructed sight line to Madison Avenue, which allowed her to see her ex-husband enter and leave his office.
These stalking measures did not always bear fruit. Far from it. Haley estimated that she saw James less than half the times she visited. Then again, he never spotted her, which was more important.
At 10:15 a.m., Haley finally got the payoff for which she had been so patiently waiting. James was wearing a tie, which he did only when he was meeting a client. Her heart skipped a beat when he stopped directly in front of Sant Ambroeus. She thought that maybe he had seen her, but he was instead checking his look in the window’s reflection, which gave her a few extra seconds to stare.
A man quickly approached, placing his hand on James’s shoulder. It took a moment before Haley realized that it was Reid Warwick. He wasn’t wearing a tie, but his wolfish grin suggested that money was on his mind.
James had always said that Reid was fun to have a drink with, but he’d never do business with him because he didn’t trust him. Then again, he’d also told her that he’d love her until death parted them, forsaking all others, so James was hardly the gold standard of reliability. Still, she couldn’t help but connect Reid’s phone call from the other night—the deal he said was going to net him “a few mill”—with his sudden presence at James’s place of business this morning.
So that’s the call that made you smile, huh?
Quickly, another thought hit her: What if they’re planning something criminal? And what if she could find evidence that led to James being locked up?
That was another fantasy of hers. Most often, she imagined killing James. Sometimes it was an elaborate, Rube Goldberg kind of torture device. Or she played the part of Goldfinger, with James strapped to a table and a laser slowly moving up between his legs while he begged for his life.
“Do you want me to say I love you, Haley? That I love you more than Jessica?” he’d scream out.
“No, James,” she’d respond. “I want you to die.”
But other times the fantasy was far simpler. Just a gun, a short speech about how she was evening the score, and then James’s shocked expression. She even had one that involved sex, like in that Sharon Stone movie when she plunged an ice pick into a man’s back as he climaxed.
But putting James behind bars was the best. In that fantasy, she’d come to visit him in the pen. He’d be expecting Jessica when the guards shouted, “Sommers! Visitor!” But as he approached the glass divider separating inmates from their visitors, he’d see her face behind the glass partition.
“Surprised?” she’d say on her end of the phone.
“Wh-what are you doing here?” he’d respond.
“I came to see how prison’s treating you. I figured it was the least I could do, seeing that you’re in here because of me.”
Then she’d stand and, like a badass, turn her back on him, and walk away. She wouldn’t look back while he screamed silently from behind the partition.
During the divorce, she’d told her lawyer to look into tax issues or anything else that might put James in criminal jeopardy. “That’s not in your interest, Haley,” David had told her. “In fact, it’s the last thing you want. James will spend all of your joint assets on lawyers. Or he’ll settle by paying the IRS money that otherwise would be marital property.”
She didn’t care. At the time, she hadn’t needed James’s money; she only wanted him to suffer. In the end, her lawyer and his battery of forensic accountants never found anything shady about James’s business dealings.
Dr. Rubenstein knew about her stalking . . . kind of. After a few months of therapy, Haley mentioned that she sometimes sat at the bar at Sant Ambroeus in the hope of catching a glimpse of James but was quick to add that she also liked their coffee, and besides, she and James often had gone to that restaurant when they were married, so it had sentimental appeal for her too.
“Tell me
