Chapter Fifty-Nine Maya

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Maya

August 2023

An hour later, I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, trying to piece together what exactly happened last night.

A noise makes me startle, and when I look up, Nate is standing at the door, holding a paper bag and coffee. My arms prickle at his sudden appearance. Why hadn’t I heard him open the door?

“Nate,” I inhale. “We need to talk.”

“Huh?” Nate’s voice is loud, distracted. He taps his phone, silencing the music. Removes an earbud.

“Last night…I thought it might have been a nightmare, but I definitely heard someone scream. Kai heard it too.”

“What happened?” Nate is putting his headphones away into the case and fiddling with his phone. My jaw clenches in frustration.

“Nate.” I grab his arm. “I think someone could’ve been hurt.”

He takes a seat on the bed next to me and softens his tone. “What do you want me to do? Call the police?”

“Where were you last night?” I ask, unable to keep the suspicion out of my voice. The next words rattle out of me before I can stop them. “Nate, you were gone and—the scream. It sounded bad, like someone was hurt. And I was scared it could’ve been you. I went to look for you in the woods. But you weren’t there. And I thought I saw someone…Matthew…Lila.” My lungs hurt, and my head is throbbing with a massive headache.

“Woah, slow down. What do you mean, you saw Lila?” Nate studies my face. He’s taking me seriously now, I think for a brief moment, before I realize that it’s not concern for what I saw, but rather, for my sanity.

I blink back at him. Before I’d said it, it seemed to make sense in my head, but now I realize how impossible it sounds. “I don’t know, I just…last night is such a strange blur, it’s like I can’t grab hold of it.”

“Did you take anything?” he asks.

Oh—the pill Kai gave me, to help you get back to sleep, the Ambien, of course. And mixed with all of the alcohol I’d had at the reception, no wonder it had made me hallucinate. Shame floods my cheeks.

“I’m not making it up,” I say softly. Am I losing it? Am I actually losing my mind?

A loud banging on the door startles me.

—

Daisy bursts into the room muttering something about Matthew and last night, but she’s talking so fast and so frantically she doesn’t make any sense.

“What happened? Are you okay? Are the girls okay?” I say, my chest tightening.

Daisy turns to me with the look of someone who has seen something horrible. She’s breathing hard. “It’s Matthew,” she says, between heaving breaths. “He’s dead.”

It takes me a moment to make sense of her words. Matthew is dead? I glance at Nate, who shakes his head and looks away. I can’t comprehend it. Is this a good thing? Just yesterday, I’d wanted this so badly, in fact, imagined myself doing it. So I should feel happy, or at least relieved…this should mean it’s all over now.

And yet.

“Did the police—did something happen?”

Daisy shakes her head. “He was still here when I left to check on the girls.” Her voice cracks. “They found his body this morning—he was stabbed.”

—

Everything after that is a blur. My head feels full, a noise buzzing like static, as questions spiral. Who killed Matthew? And why now? Why right before the police would have arrested him? Just a little bit longer, and he wouldn’t have been a problem anymore.

I couldn’t eat after Daisy told us what had happened, but it’s now past noon and I’m starving, so I make my way to the main house in search of food. With all the commotion, we decided that it would be better to keep Dani away with the au pair a while longer. I don’t want her overhearing any of this.

My hand is shaking so badly I can hardly pour myself a glass of water in the kitchen. I tip the cold water to my lips, gulping it down. The touch of a hand on my shoulder makes me jump, and the glass slips from my hand and lands with a crash on the floor. I bend to pick up the pieces. “Oh god, I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t worry.” Margaret helps me, a strange expression on her face. “I take it you heard about Matthew?”

I nod.

“Well,” she says, “I can’t say I’m sorry about it. He deserved it.” She moves over to the sink and begins washing the dishes. She dries a plate and puts it back in the cupboard.

My throat is suddenly dry, so I pour myself another glass of water, while Margaret flits around the kitchen. She wipes down the counter with a rag and tidies a stack of Architectural Digest next to a vase of hydrangeas.

“The detectives will be here soon,” Margaret says. “You all right?” She dries off a knife and sets it back in the knife block.

All the knives are there.

I blink hard. “I’m not sure what they expect to get from us,” she continues, fixing her gaze on me. Her sharp green eyes are intense against her pale skin. “After all, we don’t know anything, do we?”

—

When I return to the pool house, I find Nate gone, a note in his handwriting on the nightstand: Went to pick up Dani. Why would he want to bring our daughter here, where a man’s been murdered?

Uncomfortable in the silence, I turn on the TV to find an anchor reporting the local news. “A forty-five-year-old man’s body has been found in Greenwich, Connecticut, at the edge of Bedford Road on Monday by a local resident.” The hairs on the back of my neck rise. “The office of the chief medical examiner has stated that the cause of death was multiple stab wounds. The case remains under investigation.”

Multiple stab wounds? The edge of Bedford Road—that’s just around the corner from the St. Clairs’. A metallic taste fills my mouth, and I’m suddenly so dizzy I have to grab the dresser to steady myself.

I shut it back off. Sink onto the bed.

What had happened last night? Where was Nate when I woke up? My husband may be reactive, but he would never kill someone. If he gets anywhere near her again, I’ll kill him. No. He didn’t mean it. People say things they don’t mean all the time when they’re angry. They also do things they don’t mean to do…

I inhale sharply and start packing up our clothes. I’m folding Nate’s sweater when I stop cold. Nate’s reaction when Daisy told us Matthew had been killed—it wasn’t the look of someone hearing the news for the first time. It was the look of someone who already knew.

Outside the window, coming from the main house, two figures are approaching, headed my way—Detective Gary and Detective Simmons.