CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 21

CAT

Tom Beck’s full report on Neena was thirty-two pages thick. I settled into the end of our couch, a cappuccino in hand, and flipped over the embossed cover page.

The first few pages were sad but unsurprising.

She’d been poor, even more than I’d been. A small-town beauty queen whose mom had run off when she was ten, her dad following suit seven years later. She’d won the town’s sympathies while wearing the crown of . . . I squinted at a grainy photo of a young Neena with a crown and a sash, the newspaper caption barely legible. The . . . Strawberry Queen. Amusing. Not surprising she omitted that from her wine-charity board application. It looked like she’d lived with her aunt and uncle until graduation and then gotten married to Matthew Ryder.

From that point on, things grew boring. I quickly flipped through the pages of home deeds, credit card balances, and credit scores. All average. The medical-history section was where things got interesting.

I’d known she’d had some work done, but my mouth still dropped open at her list of surgeries. Arm lift. Butt lift. Tummy tuck. Breast augmentation. A second breast augmentation. Cheek implants. Brow lift. Eye job. Chin implant. Ear reshaping. Rhinoplasty. Neck tuck. Labia and vaginoplasty. She was Frankenstein’s monster, and I flipped quickly through the rest of the report, hoping for a before photo of the petite blonde. There wasn’t any other than the newspaper clipping, and I returned to the medical-history section of the report.

Below the cosmetic surgery list was a section marked OTHER SURGERIES. I ran my finger down an appendectomy, wisdom-teeth removal, a broken arm, sprained ankle—my nail stilled on the last item, and I scanned the details, focusing in on the date.

Eight years ago. An abortion.

It had been three days, and all I could think about was Neena’s aborted baby. All those probing questions when she knew I was struggling with my fertility. Eight years ago, she had been pregnant. Pregnant! Pregnant, and given it up. Was her story about Matt’s prostate cancer even true? And if it was, that just reaffirmed my belief that she was a cheater. I pulled our lunch from the fridge and yanked open the lid to the lobster pasta salad. William’s phone dinged, and I jerked my head to the side in time to see him silence the notification, his attention on the paperwork before him. It sounded again, and I reached across the kitchen island and grabbed it, unsurprised to see her name on the screen. Two new texts.

Brought some of my cookie dough bombs into the office. Hungry?

Are we still on for three?

I bit back the desire to ask why Neena was texting him. They had a standing meeting schedule. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at three. There wasn’t a need to verify it. No need for chitchatty little texts at all hours of the day. He was growing more and more comfortable with her, and my nerves were fraying with every single ding of his phone.

Their encroachment into our lives had passed any level of social norms. Matt and Neena seemed to be everywhere we were, all the time.

You’ve got a box at the 49ers’ stadium? We loooovve football.

Oh, how funny to run into you at the market. Join us for lunch!

Sorry to pop in, but we accidentally bought extra wine that happens to be your favorite!

We’re eating some nasty healthy crap for dinner. Why don’t you guys come over and pretend to like it?

Okay, so that last one wasn’t verbatim, but I’d read between the lines. Add in Neena and William’s new biweekly runs, and I couldn’t turn around without seeing her ridiculous face. And now, with him home for lunch, she was still interrupting us. I flipped his phone to silent and tossed it back onto the counter. “I’m exhausted by her. I swear to God, I’d just like one day without seeing her face or hearing her ridiculous laugh.”

“Who?” William flipped to the next page, his pen skimming over the lines of a contract.

“Neena,” I snapped.

“When did you become so vicious?”

“Excuse me?”

“There’s nothing wrong with her laugh. Or her outfits, or whatever else you feel the need to bitch about.” He scrawled his signature along the block at the bottom of the page and dotted the i’s in his name with a little more intensity than needed.

I turned away, pulling plates from the cabinet and shoving them onto the counter. “So you’re defending her now?”

“I just don’t understand why you’re so hostile toward her. She’s doing the best she can. She’s not like you, Cat. She doesn’t have everything in life.”

I let out a strangled sound. “I’d love to know what that means.”

He abandoned the contract and stood, rounding the edge of the counter. Leaning against the marble, he attempted to pull me away from the food and against him. “It means that you’re beautiful.”

I resisted, standing before him, my arms crossed.

“And she’s not. You don’t have to work, and she does. You’re the queen of this social circle, and she’s excluded from it. It’s got to be hard on her, trying to compete with you—with us and our world.” He closed the gap between us, hugging me despite my crossed arms, the awkward positioning of our bodies breaking my stern composure as he tried to jiggle my arms loose.

A smile cracked across my features, and he took advantage of the break and gave me a kiss on either cheek.

I forced a scowl back into place and pushed away from him, my mind turning over Tom Beck’s report and wondering how much of it to share. “Giving me compliments doesn’t excuse the fact that she has no boundaries. Coming by here and asking you to get a bird out of her house? She doesn’t know how to shoo?”

“She was petrified, Cat. When we were in the room with it, she was trembling.”

I snorted. “Oh, please. And wanting to carpool to work? It’s called a loaner car. I called the dealership. They have plenty of loaners there. She had to specifically decline one, and why would she do that?” I smacked my forehead. “Oh, right. Because she wants to spend time with you. She’s a snake, William. A snake!” I inhaled sharply, unsure of why I was suddenly screaming. I turned back to our lunch and ticked through the necessary menu items, then reached for an avocado from the bowl.

“Cat.”

I ignored him, pulling a knife free of the block and halving the fruit on the stone cutting board. She had been pregnant. Hadn’t she realized what a blessing that was? She could have an eight-year-old child by now, but she didn’t. She had thrown it away, and I couldn’t even manage to wrangle up a miscarriage. I felt a sob push up my throat, and I swallowed it down, blinking hard to keep the tears at bay.

“Please ease up on her.”

I stacked the quarters and ran the knife tip over their lengths, slicing through the avocado’s flesh. I gave myself a moment, then spoke. “I don’t want you running with her again.”

He coughed out a laugh of incredulity. “Wow. You’re that insecure about this? You want me to fire her, too? Is that what you want? Should we move to a different house?”

I pinched pepper pieces together and worked the knife furiously against their strips, cubes of red and green flying along the cutting board.

That blonde bitch had backed me up against a wall, and I hated it.