Violet broke the silence. “Maybe the other girl has the right idea. Maybe justice is control.”
Casey slowly blinked. She’d considered this. It was certainly better than what she’d tried already. Hearing Violet say it out loud made it feel real, close. Possible. “I think—”
Violet threw up a hand to stop Casey, hearing an angry, unfamiliar male voice erupt from downstairs. “You’d have respected me like a good wife!”
Polly
She’d been so distracted by her conversation with Bess, so delighted to have someone to talk to after that disconcerting meeting with Norah, that she hadn’t locked the door behind Barney when she let him back in. Calvin just opened the door with the turn of a knob, strolling in like he lived there, with that shit-eating grin on his face and a gun in his hand. Barney, the dumb-ass dog, got up and went to greet Calvin, his long-lost master. With his free hand, Calvin reached down and scratched Barney’s ears as Barney wagged his tail. The traitor.
“Calvin, what are you doing here?” She yelled as if she were startled, but really it was so that Bess would hear her. Bess had just stepped into the bathroom, so Polly didn’t know if he realized anyone else was there. She hoped Bess heard her yell, hoped she knew not to show her face. She hoped it also alerted the two girls upstairs, and that they were smart enough to sense the danger and stay out of sight. She would handle this herself. She would keep everyone safe as best she could.
“I got tired of waiting for you to come home,” he said.
She thought of lying, but she figured if he was there, he knew the rest. She had banked on him never finding out she had a daughter. She wished she knew how he had found out, but she wasn’t going to ask and anger him further.
“I had to come here,” was all she said in response.
“Not with our money you didn’t,” he countered.
“You were spending it without my per—” No. Permission would be the wrong word choice. That would set him off. “Without my consent.” She swallowed. “It’s my money, too. We should be discussing where it’s going.”
“Then you should’ve stuck around and discussed it,” he sneered, punctuating the sentence by jabbing the air with the gun, like dotting an exclamation point.
“I had to leave in a hurry. I was needed here.”
He looked around at the setting, the sheer domesticity of it. The flowers on the table, the dinner heating in the oven. The plates on the counter. The two glasses of wine. Two. He knew someone else was here. “Where’s your friend?” He gestured to the wine, drawing a line in the air between the two wineglasses. “Is it a male friend, or a female one?” He sniffed the air as if to discern perfume or cologne in the air.
“Female. She had to leave.” Polly pointed toward the front door, insinuating that Bess had gone out the front as he had come in the back. “She had to take her daughter to soccer.” She hoped she looked believable. Thankfully Bess and Casey had walked the food down, and Polly had moved Norah’s car into the garage weeks ago, so there was no car in the drive to disprove her statement.
He gestured at the glasses of wine. “She shouldn’t drink and drive,” he said. As if he were the bastion of sound judgment and good decisions.
“It wasn’t much. She forgot, actually. She just ran out of here real quick as soon as she remembered.” She was still talking loudly, hoping the others in the house heard and figured out that someone was here. Someone dangerous.
But Calvin didn’t seem to be listening. Instead he moved out of the kitchen and farther into the house, his eyes darting around as he took it all in. The fact that Bess hadn’t returned encouraged her. Polly hoped she’d heard. She hoped the girls had heard. She hoped she could get rid of Calvin quickly, appease him, distract him, whatever it took. She squeezed her eyes shut as if when she opened them he would be gone; this would all be a terrible hallucination. She’d never been much of a drinker, and this would prove why she should stay away from the stuff. The worst thing about it was that she and Bess had been having such a nice time. She’d actually been having—as strange as it was on the heels of that hard encounter with Norah—fun.
She watched the back of her husband’s head and wished she had a gun in her own hand. She’d shoot him dead right that moment. For the first time since he’d walked in, she wondered if she would survive this, if he would decide to let her live. She felt her pulse rate pick up, felt the fear rise in her throat like bile.
“I’ll give you the money,” she said. “If that’s what you really want. I’ll give it to you right now. You can just take it and go.”
He turned around. “You make it sound so nice, sweetheart. So civil.” He smiled coldly at her. “But if it was that easy, you’d have already done that. You wouldn’t have taken our money and run off and left me with no explanation. You would’ve answered when I called you.” His voice grew louder. “You wouldn’t have lied to me all these years that you didn’t have a child when you most certainly did. A granddaughter, too.” He narrowed his eyes, held the gun up, and roared, “You’d have respected me like a good wife!”
“I’m sorry, Calvin.” Her voice sounded small and weak. She cowered, afraid of the wild energy rolling off his body and the darkness he seemed to have ushered into the room with him. She wished she had the strength to stand up to him, to not be paralyzed by the threat of his anger paired with that gun. But she knew this: she had to live. Because if she died, Violet would have no one. She couldn’t let that happen. She’d rather placate him and lose some dignity than have her granddaughter find her lying dead in her den. The child had experienced enough.
“I’ll give you the money. I’ll give you all of it. I made a mistake,” she said evenly and calmly. “I reacted badly to the news about my daughter. I wasn’t thinking straight. I’ve been consumed with things here. I haven’t handled it well.” She could hear herself begging, and she hated it. But she had to do what she must do. Pride, in this case, really would go before a fall. A fall she wouldn’t stand back up from.
He yelled at her again. “You think you can just buy me off? You think that you can hand me money and make up for the disrespect you’ve showed me? You and your whore daughter?”
At that moment, she heard the footsteps on the stairs, four feet running. She dropped her head in defeat. If Violet and Casey showed their faces, things would only get worse. But she couldn’t stop them. Once they saw the gun, they would realize the danger. Once they saw the gun, it would be too late. She thought again of Bess, hoped that wherever she was, she was calling the police. But then she remembered, Bess had left her phone on the island, right beside her wineglass. And Norah didn’t have a house phone that Bess could go to.
At the sound of the girls’ arrival, Calvin turned toward the stairwell with a smirk, the gun pointed. “Hello,” he said. “Which one of you is Violet Ramsey?”
Casey stepped forward without missing a beat. “Me,” she said. “I am.” Violet looked at Polly with questioning eyes. Polly gave her a barely perceptible shake of the head. Just go with it, she willed her granddaughter while silently thanking Casey for doing such a brave—albeit crazy—thing.