Chapter 9: Noon
Jessica came through the front door at eleven fifty-seven.
She was pulling off her jacket when she heard voices in the kitchen.
She turned, pushing her hair back, and walked toward the sound.
She stopped in the kitchen doorway.
David was at the table.
Marcus was beside him.
Jasmine was across from them both.
On the table between them was Marcus's phone, the photograph still visible on the screen.
Jessica looked at the phone.
Then at David.
Then at Jasmine.
"Marcus," she said.
Her tone was warm, cautious, beginning to construct something.
"I didn't know you were visiting."
"Sit down, Jessica," David said.
She stayed in the doorway.
"David, whatever Marcus has told you—"
"Sit down."
She sat.
David turned the phone toward her.
"Tell me how you knew Anne," he said.
Jessica looked at the photograph.
Her expression moved quickly through three or four calculations that she controlled almost perfectly.
Almost.
"We met casually," she said.
"A neighborhood event, years ago.
I barely knew her.
It wasn't something I thought was relevant."
"You told me you'd never met her."
"I said I hadn't known her well.
David, it was one conversation at a street fair.
It didn't—"
"You said you'd never met her," David repeated.
Quietly.
Precisely.
"Those were your exact words."
Jessica's hands were flat on the table.
"I didn't think it mattered."
"You didn't think it mattered," David said.
He looked at her with an expression Jasmine had never seen on her father's face before.
It wasn't anger.
It was something older and colder than anger.
"What else didn't you think mattered?"
Jessica straightened slightly.
"I don't know what he's told you," she said, nodding toward Marcus, "but Marcus has had a problem with me since before we were married.
He's never accepted—"
"Robert Hale," David said.
Jessica went still.
"Robert has given a written statement," David continued.
"Gary Flint has agreed to give one as well.
Marcus has both of their contact information." He paused.
"Is there anything you want to say before I make some calls this afternoon?"
Jessica looked at Marcus.
Then at Jasmine.
For the first time since Jasmine could remember, Jessica's face did something uncontrolled.
A small tightening around the eyes.
A breath that was slightly too shallow.
Then she looked back at David and her voice dropped to something private and urgent.
"David.
We have a life together.
Whatever mistakes I made before you — before us — that has nothing to do with what we are now.
You know me."
"I thought I did," David said.
"You do." She reached across the table toward his hand.
He moved his hand away.
She sat back.
"I want you to pack what you need for a few days," David said.
"You and Tyler.
I've already called a locksmith for Monday morning." He looked at her steadily.
"My lawyer will be in touch by end of week."
Jessica's composure cracked cleanly down the center.
"You are making a serious mistake," she said.
Her voice was different now — harder, stripped of the warmth she'd kept in it since the doorway.
"I have documentation going back two years.
About your finances.
About decisions you made that—"
"I know," David said.
She stopped.
"I spoke to my accountant this morning," David said.
"For two hours.
We went through everything.
Whatever you think you have — we've already looked at it." He stood up from the table.
"I'm going to ask you one more time to pack your things."
Jessica stood too.
For a moment she was very tall in the kitchen doorway, her jacket still half-on, her face stripped of every careful layer she'd spent two years building.
"You'll regret this," she said.
"Maybe," David said.
"But not today."
She left the room.
They heard her on the stairs.
David sat back down.
He put both hands on the table, palms flat, and stared at the surface for a long moment.
Jasmine reached over and covered one of his hands with hers.
He didn't speak for a while.
Then he said, quietly, to no one in particular:
"She sat with Anne at a street fair.
She watched our family.
May you like
And then she waited."
He said it the way you say a thing you have to say out loud before you can begin to leave it behind.
