CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR ARSÈNE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

ARSèNE

I avoid going back to my apartment after my rendezvous with Bumpkin. Staying in the city, in proximity to the scene of the crime, would be a mistake of epic proportions. Instead, I opt to stay at the Scarsdale mansion, working remotely, at a safe distance from her.

One of us needs to make logical decisions here, and that someone isn’t the charming, strongheaded woman I left in a Hell’s Kitchen apartment. Winnifred is lovely, in the same way a piece of art is—enticing beyond my comprehension. Better left for someone else to appreciate. I have nothing to offer a woman in the romance department. Even if I had, she’d be an unsuitable partner. And I am, after all, a man who prides himself with following reason.

I don’t make my way back to my apartment until the end of the week, when I finally decide to drive back to the city. I saunter into my building, dipping my head in acknowledgment as I pass Alfred at the reception.

“Mr.?Corbin, there’s a parcel waiting for you.” He raises a finger before I get into the elevator. He crouches down behind his desk and produces a small cardboard thing. I take it.

“Did I have any visitors while I was gone?”

“No, sir.”

“Good.” Fantastic, even. Bumpkin got the message. No calls. No unexpected drop-ins. Good girl.

I make my way up the elevator, enter my apartment, and fling the parcel onto the dining table. Probably work-related shit. It can wait.

I forget about it for the next few hours while I catch up on emails and get a phone call from Riggs, who is in Naples sampling more than the Italian food, and from Christian, who for some reason has appointed himself as the designated responsible adult and asks how I’m doing like he is my mother.

It is only shortly before I go to bed that I’m reminded of the parcel waiting in my dining room. I pick it up and rip it open carelessly. The first thing to drop out of it is a sequence of sheets .?.?. ultrasound pictures?

Confused, I turn over the package and glance at the sender’s address for the first time. Winnie Ashcroft. I turn over one of the ultrasound pictures.

First scan. 6 weeks. G + P = PJ!

Well, then. Turns out, there was something interesting lurking in the Ashcroft household after all. Where did she find it? And why on earth am I so indifferent to the idea of Grace being pregnant with Paul’s baby?

Paul’s baby.The meaning of the words sinks into me now. Grace had always insisted we use condoms. I guess she didn’t extend this rule to Paul. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be so sure about the father’s identity.

So Grace wasn’t against forgoing contraception. She was against forgoing contraception with me. Perhaps the idea of a Corbin sperm swimming inside her repulsed her.

Wondering about the timeline of this entire shit cluster, I examine the pictures more carefully. I see the timestamp printed on the bottom of the ultrasound page. Three weeks after Italy. After Grace was emotional, distraught, not herself.

Three weeks after she’d asked the driver to pull over so she could throw up in the bushes and made me wonder if she genuinely did give a damn about Doug dying.

The pieces fall together. Including the period in which she must’ve lost her baby. First, she’d disappeared. I thought it was because of the will, but it was because she was going through loss and grieving. Then, she came back unexpectedly the night Riggs was supposed to crash at my house, waiting for me, eager to please, to entertain, to win me over. A decision had been made then. Paul wasn’t a safe bet anymore. Maybe he decided to stick it out with Winnifred, after all.

After I’d kicked Riggs out, when we tried to have sex, Grace had been in pain. The sex was awkward at best, and I wanted to stop. There were blood traces on the condom. She claimed it was stress. It wasn’t. The truth was, her body was healing from trauma.

I’m more disturbed by the fact I’d had sex with a woman shortly after her miscarriage than I am about how close Grace had been to leaving me.

So. Grace wanted to leave me and have another man’s child.

This leaves me with the mysterious USB. The last piece of the puzzle. Bumpkin did well by sending these here. I’m surprised she didn’t try to hand deliver them herself.

You told her not to. You specifically said you’ll never see each other again.

Plus, my inner mentor is proud that she decided to ditch a deadbeat like me. This is exactly what I wanted her to do. Start putting herself first.

I shove the USB into my laptop. An array of videos appear in quick succession. I click on the first one. On the screen pops the face of a youthful-looking, tired-yet-happy Patrice Corbin.

What. The. Fuck.

It takes me a full minute to get over the initial shock and focus on what’s happening in the video. By then, I have to replay it. Patrice gurgles and smiles at a surly-looking baby—supposedly me—before putting me to her breast. Baby-me sucks hungrily, one fist curled around a lock of her raven hair to ensure she is not going anywhere. She strokes my head—it is full of black straight hair—and laughs softly.

“Oh, I know,” she says in French. “Your meal is not going anywhere, and neither am I.”

Something weird happens inside my body. A rush of nostalgia, or maybe of déjà vu. An awakening. Clicking open another video, I see baby-me wobbling around in nothing but a diaper in an apartment I don’t recognize. I’m guessing it is the apartment Patrice had rented in New York. The one she supposedly lived in by herself.

My mother runs after me, giggling. There’s a conversation in French in the background, possibly between members of her family, who must be in town. When she finally catches me, she flings me in the air and blows raspberries over my belly, and I laugh, delighted, my chubby arms reaching to hug her.

Another video. This time at the Corbin mansion. I’m about three and helping Patrice wrap Christmas gifts. We talk in length about butterflies and boo-boos. Every so often she stops, puts a hand on my arm, and tells me, “You know what? You’re so smart! I’m so glad I have you.”

Another video. Mom and me on a ski trip. I try to eat the snow. She pours juice concentrate over it. I brighten up, and we eat it together.

Another video. We’re making a cake. She lets me lick chocolate off the whisk.

At a swimming lesson, we wear matching swimsuits—me in trunks, she in a bikini—same lobster pattern.

Flying a kite. I bump into a bench, fall, and start crying. Patrice rushes to me, sweeps me up, and kisses my knee better. We choose a superhero Band-Aid together. It’s the last Spider-Man one, so she suggests we go to the pharmacy together to get some more.

Who took these videos? Who was behind the camera?

I sit back, rubbing at my temple. Though I have no memory of any of those things happening, now that I’ve seen these videos, blurred pieces of my past click together into a bigger, more elaborate puzzle. I do remember the Manhattan apartment, cramped and out of style. I remember going to Calypso Hall with my mother when I was very little. Remember being carried in her arms often.

I remember her fights with my father, though unlike his relationship with Miranda, there wasn’t a lot of screaming and no hurling objects at one another. Patrice was quiet and fierce and knew exactly what she wanted. And what she didn’t want—my father.

I remember her to be good. Kindhearted. A free spirit. Not absent, uncaring, and disinterested. And I remember the day she gave up, packed us a bag, and moved us to Manhattan. How she apologized to me ten thousand times as she secured me in my car seat and said, “I know you deserve better. You will get better from me. I promise. I’m just figuring it out.”

Tipping my head back, I close my eyes and grimace, the rush of memories moving through my body like an earthquake.

My mother wasn’t a thoughtless monster. She was full of passion, fun, and compassion. And my father had resented her because all those positive traits were never directed at him. He chose Miranda, and Patrice chose to move on. The mere idea of her moving on without him, not fighting for him, made him deliver the ultimate punishment—he’d poisoned me against her. Tarnished the one thing she valued. My good memories of her.

It takes me a couple of hours to go over all the videos. I watch them on loop, in a trance, inking every single moment into memory. When I’m done, I save all of them to my Dropbox and remove the USB.

I wonder why, of all places, this thing has found its way to Paul’s. I guess the content of the package I received today was Paul’s little Grace shrine. Grace was in possession of this USB and decided to keep it somewhere I’d never find it. That couldn’t have been her apartment. I had the keys.

Why hadn’t she given it to me?

The answer is clear. She didn’t want me to have it because a part of her loathed me enough to deny me this peace of mind. My thinking Patrice was an awful monster worked to her advantage. The more broken I was, the less I expected of her. My expectations from the fairer sex were so low that I’d readily accepted a woman who tried to kill me when we were teenagers.

Grace never loved me. I always knew that, deep down, but this USB is the final blow.

The surprising part is that I never loved her either. As I sit here, in front of a mountain of evidence of her affair, it is clear to me that this asshole Christian was right.

I was obsessed with her.

I mistook fixation for affection. But wanting my stepsister had very little to do with Grace as a human and a lot to do with proving something to myself. That I’d won, after all. The endgame—the biggest game of all—wasn’t something I could afford to lose. Funny thing is, I lost it, anyway. And survived to tell the tale.

The only thing I ever wanted from Grace was her full and complete submission. Not her body. Not her love. Not her babies.

This explains everything. For instance, why I felt cheated and robbed more than heartbroken when Grace passed away. Like the universe had fucked me out of a perfectly good deal. My business sensibilities had been affronted. I’d invested time and resources in that woman, and it frustrated me when I didn’t see a return.

The proximity to Bumpkin didn’t make matters better. Seeing the woman turn inside out as she mourned her husband only highlighted the fact I really didn’t care all that much for my fiancée.

Hold up. Rewind. Shit, shit, shit.

Winnifred.

She knows that Grace was pregnant. How must she feel, after struggling with her own infertility?

Glancing at my watch, I see it’s already well past eleven. I call her anyway. She’s up till late, what with her show schedule. Still, she doesn’t pick up. I send a text message. Answer me.

Nada.

I call again. It occurs to me that something very bad could’ve happened between the last time we saw each other and now. Why did she send the package? Why not bring it over so we could both hate on Grace and Paul over a bottle of wine, like civilized people, before fucking each other’s brains out?

Sure, I told her not to, but since when does this woman listen to anything anyone has to say? Least of all me.

What if Bumpkin is in trouble?

The thought unsettles me more than it should. I grab my keys and head to the parking lot, taking the stairs three at a time. The elevator may take several minutes, and time is of the essence.

I try to call her as I drive toward her apartment. The call goes straight to voice mail. It’s like the time I went to identify Grace at the morgue all over again, but somehow, a thousand times worse. I’m appalled by my reaction to Winnifred not answering me, how out of proportion it is in comparison to the way I felt when I went to look at my fiancée’s dead body in the middle of the night, all calm and collected.

I park in front of her building and run up the stairs, convincing myself the entire time my sense of responsibility stems from everything we’ve been through together, and not, Science forbid, because I’ve developed those pesky things called feelings. I just want to be on the safe side. The woman is obviously distraught after hearing about her dead husband’s love child. I’m just being a Good Samaritan.

You? A Good Samaritan? Riggs’s voice chuckles in my head as I fling myself over the banister to save time. If the world depended on your good intentions, it’d have detonated a thousand times over.

When I get to her door, I pound on it with both fists. Hysterical is not my most attractive look, but I’m not here to chase tail.

“Bumpkin!” I roar. “Open the goddamn door before I kick it down.”

Tonight may or may not end in my arrest. I will never live it down if Christian releases me on bail.

“Winnifred!”I rap the door again. I can hear movements coming from behind nearby doors. People are probably peering out through their peepholes, trying to gauge how much danger I pose to their beloved neighbor.

“Answer!” I slam my shoulder against her door with a growl.

“The damn!” I thrash into it again.

“Door!”

Finally, I hear a door creaking open. Unfortunately, it’s not the one I’m assaulting. A woman appears on the other end of the hallway. She is wearing a green face mask and has rollers in her hair.

“As much as I appreciate the romantic gesture—and don’t get me wrong, I totally do, unless you’re here to collect drug money—Winnie’s not here.”

“What do you mean, not here?” I spit out, panting. The Seagull should’ve ended two and a half hours ago.

She tightens her bathrobe over her waist. “I saw her leave maybe a couple days ago with a suitcase.”

“A couple of .?.?. what?” I jeer. “She couldn’t have. She’s in a goddamn show. My show. I pay her a salary. We have a contract. She can’t leave.”

“Well, she did.”

“That’s impossible,” I insist. “Where’d you get this dumb idea?”

“Don’t shoot the messenger.”

Then don’t tempt me.

“I wonder why she left, though. You seem like such a great boss.”

“The little, reckless, egotistical, sh—”

“Stop it right there.” The woman lifts a hand, shaking her head. “Don’t finish that sentence. That girl you’re talking about is one of the kindest women I’ve ever met. You know, the other day I caught her asking our neighbor for a cup of sugar. The woman is a single mother and works two jobs to keep her kid in this school district.”

Blinking slowly, I ask, “So fucking what? She asked a single mother for a cup of sugar, you wanna give her a Nobel Prize for it?”

The woman reddens under the neon-green mask slathered on her face. “So I asked Winnie why she did that. Winnie’s a responsible human, and she bakes. There’s no way she needed sugar. You know what she told me?” She licks her lips. “She told me that every now and then, she goes downstairs and asks her neighbor for something small and cheap so that the neighbor would always feel welcome to ask Winnie for things too. Food items, toothpaste, soap. This was her way of making sure our neighbor knows they’re on equal footing. I don’t know what your story is with this woman, but I can tell you she is not egotistic. She’s an angel on Earth, and if you lost her, well, I’m inclined to believe you deserved it.”

I never had her in the first place.

I make my way downstairs, head pounding, heart thrusting. The lady has some nerve to just up and leave the city as though she hasn’t any responsibilities. How dare she? This is my theater. My show. My business.

And you care about this business since .?.?.??Christian taunts in my head.

“Shut the fuck up, Christian,” I murmur aloud, pouting myself out to the street like a goddamn teenybopper.

I scroll through my contacts until I find Lucas Morton’s number. He is the director. He’ll know where she is. Lucas answers on the third ring.

“Yes?”

“It’s Arsène.”

There’s a pause before he answers, “Mr.?Corbin .?.?.?? Is everything—”

“Where’s Winnifred Ashcroft?”

“Oh, goodness.” He sighs in a don’t-get-me-started way. “Finally, someone to talk to! She bailed. Skipped town. Her agent just called me out of the blue two days ago. So unprofessional. Penny had to step in and work every night. We should sue her!”

“Where’d she go?”

“How would I know?” he cries out. “She just wrote us a text saying she was going away for a while. Where is ‘away’? What is ‘a while’? This is what I don’t like about working with actors. They’re prone to dramatics. What’re you going to do about it? This is a real problem. You know how difficult it’ll be for me to train someone else now? I don’t have time to find and teach—”

I hang up the phone on him, and I’m back in my car, calling Christian now.

Because Christian has Arya.

And Arya knows Winnifred, and her agent.