Chapter 28

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Carlotta

I tapped the pen against the dressing table as I paused to think. It occurred to me that William had an office and I didn’t. It had never bothered me before. I had my studio, and for all of William’s faults, if I had told him at any point that I wanted an office, he’d have had designers and decorators in within days to create one for me. I had never wanted an office before because I had no real need for one. The odd bits of paperwork I had to deal with were done in William’s office, but it felt like too much to write this in there. Like it would be the final insult to a man I had once loved.

It felt wrong to be doing this at all, really. I was sitting here in my marital bedroom, writing a statement for Detective Del Rey that told the whole truth about what had really happened that night, a statement that put William very much on the hook for murder. I was going to tell the whole story, even the part about how Candy hadn’t jumped from our bedroom window, how William had pushed her. But I wanted to be fair about the statement, and I fully intended to include that the only reason William had pushed Candy in the first place was to save my life. I thought that was the least I could do when I was condemning him.

I still wasn’t entirely convinced that I was doing the right thing by writing this statement at all, but I knew after I had poured it all out on the pages that if I changed my mind, I could burn it and no one would ever have to know I’d even written it. I didn’t think I would do that, though. At that point, I just wanted the truth to come out and this whole fucking thing to be over.

Besides, the more I thought about it, the more I knew I was doing the right thing. William might have saved my life, but immediately after that, he seemed to be hell-bent on ruining it. He had left me to stew in a fucking jail cell filled with someone else’s vomit last night. And he had told Detective Del Rey a pack of lies about me, about what had happened.

I felt like I had stood by William through everything, and he had done nothing but treat me like utter shit. I was starting to think that handing over this statement would be easy.

The priest’s words still came back to me sometimes, how by telling the truth I was setting William on the path to redemption. But honestly, I was past the point where I even cared that I was breaking my wedding vows. Because I certainly wasn’t the one who had ruined this marriage.

William had been the one to break our wedding vows first, long before I would have even contemplated it. He had cheated on me God knows how many times; he had treated me like the hired help... no, actually worse than that. At least he would have been civil to the hired help. Then when he saw a chance to perhaps save his own skin, he hadn’t hesitated to throw me under the bus with the police.

Well, fuck him. It took two people to make a marriage work, and I was fed up of trying to do it alone. It also took two people to break a marriage, and ours had been broken by William and that fucking little skank .

I didn’t think for a second that Candy deserved to die for what she had done, but I was definitely starting to see that William deserved to do time for what he had done. To me, to Candy, to Lord knows how many others. The man was toxic. It had just taken me way too long to realize that for myself.

When I started writing my statement, I had taken the same vow I knew I would have to one day take in court. I had vowed to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God, and that’s exactly what I was doing. If William didn’t like that, then perhaps he should have thought through his actions before he had killed Candy. Or even better, before he had brought her into our lives at all.

A pang of guilt went through me at the thought that William should have thought through the consequences of his actions before he killed Candy. If he had thought twice, there was no doubt in my head that I’d be the one who was dead, and Detective Del Rey would have had a very different case on his hands.

I laughed then, a bitter-sounding laugh, when I realized something else. Whichever way this had gone, William would have gotten off scot free if it wasn’t for my attack of conscience. The police would never be able to prove one way or the other which of us had killed Candy without some seriously compelling testimony, and most likely, a confession from one of us. Any half-decent lawyer could create reasonable doubt when there were two people present at the scene of a murder, no forensic evidence present on the victim, and no other witnesses to the crime. And if I had been the one to die, then the forensic evidence would have proven Candy to be the killer and William could have played the grieving widower for a while, lamenting on how he didn’t act quickly enough and it was all his fault, and then just moved on with his life without either me or Candy to hold him back.

God, he was such a bastard sometimes, and so damned cunning.

I was almost to the end of my statement now, which meant the worst bit was still to come. The bit where I explained how William had pushed Candy. How she had stumbled backward and crashed through the window. And how William and I had shared a look of utter horror for a moment. I would have to include what came next, too. The part where a still-drunk William had lain on the bed, saying he needed a moment, and passed back out pretty much as soon as his head hit the pillow. The part where I didn’t call nine-one-one but instead got back into bed beside William, knowing he wouldn’t remember any of this tomorrow, and telling myself I wouldn’t, either. And if I did, I would lie through my teeth, saying I didn’t remember a thing.

There was no way I could word this in a way that made me come out of this thing looking good but panicking and covering up for someone were surely better than murdering someone. That was the hope I clung to. I was a terrible person. I had done a terrible thing, but I was no killer.

I sighed. A long, drawn-out sigh of resignation. William had made the bed for us both, and now we both had to lie in it, surrounded by the fallout of our own shit.

I forced myself to clear my mind and focus only on the statement. I stopped tapping the pen against the chest of drawers, which I was using as a makeshift desk, and went back to scribbling furiously. As much as this part was painful to write, that pain didn’t slow me down. In fact, the words poured from me easily, and I thought maybe this was kind of like therapy in some ways, getting it all out of me. All of the pent-up hurt and anger, and at the heart of it, the truth.

I had barely gotten started on the part about how the story really ended when I heard William coming up the stairs. I quickly gathered my papers together and pushed them into my bottom drawer, fanning a few scarves out to cover them just in case he happened to go into the drawer for something before I had a chance to move the sheets of paper. I dropped the pen in the drawer too and pushed it shut.

William’s tread didn’t sound like he was stumbling around, and I figured he must be at least reasonably sober at this point. By the time he burst into our bedroom, I was totally composed, sitting in place on the stool and applying my lipstick in the mirror.

My composure didn’t last long. William might not have been falling about drunk, but it quickly became clear to me that he was in a rage about something or other. I opened my mouth to ask him what was going on, but before I even formed the words, William grabbed me by the top of my arm, dragging me from the stool.

“What the fuck?” I demanded, snatching my arm away from his hand and rubbing it with my other hand. Red marks had sprung up all over my arm, ugly red fingerprints where William had gripped me so tightly .

“Downstairs, now,” William said. “We need to talk, and we need to do it right fucking now.”

His voice came out low and level, cold and calm, although I could hear the anger beneath the calmness. If he was yelling and shouting, I would have known how to handle him, but this was different, and for the first time, I felt icy fingers of fear caressing the back of my neck as I looked at my husband, his face twisted in anger, and I realized that I didn’t really know him at all.

All I knew in that moment was that angering him further would have been a bad idea. I glared at William, not wanting him to know that he was scaring me—he’d love that—but I did as he said, giving him a wide berth as I moved around him and headed down the stairs.

William followed close behind me, and when I reached the lounge door, he gave me a hard shove, pushing me into the room. I was starting to feel angry as well as afraid now. How dare he push me about like this? Who the fuck did he think he was? What the hell was I even supposed to have done to him to get him this worked up? It’s not like he could know about the statement I was writing, and I certainly hadn’t done anything else to warrant this level of anger from him .

I whirled around, ready to give William a piece of my mind, but the sight of the icy cold fury in his eyes caused my words of anger to dry up in my mouth and I found myself backing away from William instead of confronting him.