Prior Bad Acts

“So it’s about my failure to make money,” he said, moving a step closer to her. “Is that it?”

“Don’t try to make this about money. You haven’t been plugged in emotionally for years, you don’t care about anyone’s needs but your own-”

“I’m selfish?”

“Yes.”

“And how many years were you working eighty-hour weeks, Carey, never home, always too tired-”

“We were supposed to be partners,” Carey said. “Yes, I had a career. You had one too, once upon a time. And you can’t tell me I haven’t been supportive of that. I’ve been your biggest cheerleader. Even in the last few years, when you couldn’t get arrested, let alone get a film made, have I even once tried to discourage you?”

He looked away.

“Do you have any idea how exhausting that’s been, David? To have to carry your fragile ego around like the world on my shoulders?”

He rolled his eyes. “Well, I’m so sorry to have been such a burden on you!”

Carey looked away from him and crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t want to argue with you, David. There’s no point in it. We’re done. It’s over.”

“Oh, Her Honor the Judge has spoken and passed sentence,” he said sarcastically. “I don’t even get to mount a defense.”

“How could you possibly defend what you’ve done?” Carey said, incredulous. “Fucking prostitutes every time I turn my back. How do you defend that? Paying out thousands of dollars a month for sex, for flowers and gifts, for four-star hotel rooms and an apartment I don’t even want to know what for, or who for. What can you say that could make any of that okay?”

He looked at her with narrow-eyed suspicion. “How do you know all of that?”

“I looked it up. For God’s sake, David, I’m surprised you didn’t dedicate a file folder just to your deviant secret life.”

“You went in my file drawers?”

“To look at our financial records. Am I supposed to have to get a warrant for that? You didn’t even bother to try to hide any of it. Your list of favorite escort agencies was in the drawer where we keep checkbooks and stamps. You had to know I would go into that drawer. You probably wanted it to happen, wanted me to find you out, because you obviously don’t have the balls to tell me yourself.”

He held his hands up in front of himself. “I don’t need this. I don’t need to be lectured by you, Ms. Perfect. Perfect daughter, perfect mother, perfect lawyer, perfect everything. What a fucking hypocrite! You think I don’t know you slept with someone else too?”

Carey took a step back as if he’d slapped her.

“Yeah,” David said with malicious glee. “You’re not so perfect after all. So don’t stand there and look down your nose at me.”

“Once,” she said. “Once. Because I was overworked, overstressed, and all I was getting from you was a shitload of whining that I wasn’t here to serve your every need.”

“Right. It’s my fault when you’re unfaithful, but it’s not your fault when I am?”

“There’s no comparison,” Carey said. “One night I turned to a man I knew and trusted because I needed comfort. You open the yellow pages and pick a number. And you say it’s just abusiness transaction. That’s beyond sleazy.

“Can you at least tell me you used protection?” she asked. “That you didn’t put me at risk? That you wouldn’t put your daughter at risk if she needed a transfusion or a kidney?”

“No,” he said with a smug look. “I didn’t. I wanted my money’s worth.”

Carey slapped him across the face as hard as she could. She’d never struck another human being in her life.

“You son of a bitch,” she said, glaring at him. “Get out. Get out of this house. Get out of my life. Just go!” she shouted, pointing toward the door.

“It’s my house too.”

“The hell it is. And if you think for one minute you’re getting anything out of this divorce, you are sadly mistaken.”

“Yeah,” David sneered. “It’s all for you.”

“For me and for Lucy.”

“You can’t keep me from seeing my daughter,” he said.

“You don’t think so? A Family Court judge is not going to be impressed with your hobbies, David.”

“I have been a very good father to Lucy,” he said, his voice trembling, tears coming to his eyes. “Whatever I have or haven’t been to you, Carey, you can’t say I don’t love my daughter, or that she doesn’t love me.”

Carey closed her eyes and sighed. “No, I can’t say that.”

“You can’t possibly believe I would ever do anything to hurt Lucy in any way. You can’t just cut me out of her life.”

“No,” Carey said with resignation. “I won’t do that.”

She didn’t really know what she would or wouldn’t do. Thinking about David’s having been with prostitutes made her want to never let him touch Lucy as long as he lived. Her misgivings about the twenty-five thousand dollars made her want him to be out of both of their lives forever. But now was not the time to say any of that.

In all the years she had known him, she had never known David to be violent in any way. But she didn’t know this man in front of her. He wasn’t the man she had married. He wasn’t even the man she thought she had been living with.

She thought of Kovac. Despite what she had told him, he was probably standing in the shrubbery, ready to smash the window in if he so much as imagined anything going wrong.

“I can be there before you hang up the phone.”

She thought of the two officers in the squad car out front.

Lucy was her ace. David wouldn’t do anything to her here and now, because he couldn’t get away and because he would never see his daughter again if he went to prison. Lucy’s guardians were Kate and John Quinn, a victim advocate and one of the country’s leading experts on the criminal mind. They would never allow David to be a part of Lucy’s life again.

And that knowledge only gave credence to the notion of her husband’s having paid someone else to do the dirty work for him.

“I guess I loved you once,” he said quietly. “I don’t know how we got here.”

“Please go now, David,” Carey said, surprised by how much what he had just said hurt her. “I guess I loved you once…”

“I could just stay in the guest room,” he said. “I don’t want Lucy to wake up and have me just be gone.”

“I’ll tell her you had to go away on business. I can’t have you here, David. I don’t trust you.”

“You don’t trust me not to do what?” he asked, his anger rising again. “That’s Kovac telling you he thinks I paid someone to have you attacked. How could you possibly believe that, Carey? You know me better than that!”

Carey stared at him. “I don’t know you at all. I don’t know who you are. The man I married would never have done any of the things you’ve done. I have no idea who you are.”

“So that’s what you think of the man I am now?” he asked aggressively. “That I would pay someone to kill you? That I might kill you in your sleep myself? Jesus Christ, Carey.”

“You have to go now, David,” she said. “I can’t have you here. I don’t want you here. Don’t make me call the officers in from their car to remove you. It’s not like you don’t have someplace else to go.”

“You are un-fucking-believable!” he shouted.

“Please keep your voice down. Your daughter is asleep upstairs.”

Muttering curses under his breath, David grabbed the external hard drive from his computer and stormed out of the room and up the stairs.

Carey followed him, afraid she had pushed him too far. Her heart in her throat as David approached Lucy’s bedroom, she was struck by a fear that David might try to take Lucy with him. But when he stopped at the door to the room, it was only to look in on their sleeping child.

He was red in the face, fighting tears, breathing hard as he turned away and stalked down the hall into the