Her eyes are glassy with tears.
He shakes his head and stands up. “Jess, I’m going to make sure you get safely home,” he says.
“Lydia, I’ll come back tomorrow morning. We can call the police together then.” He pauses. “If you bring up the video, I’ll tell them I gave Jess the key to our house and she was picking up something for me.”
I stand, leaving the present by my chair, at the precise moment Dr. Shields crumples to the floor.
She is splayed on the carpet, looking up at Thomas, the white fabric of her dress bunched around her legs. Tears stained black by mascara run down her cheeks.
“Good-bye, Lydia,” I say.
Then I turn and walk out of the room.
CHAPTER
SIXTY-NINE
Tuesday, December 25
Of all the losses incurred tonight, the only one that matters is Thomas.
Your job was to test him so that he could be returned to me. Instead, you took him away forever.
Everything is gone now.
Except for the present you left behind.
It is the size of a book, but too thin and light to contain one. The shiny silver wrapping paper is like a carnival mirror, contorting my reflection before tossing it back at me.
A single tug unfurls the red bow. The paper yields to reveal a flat white box.
Inside is a framed photograph.
Even when pain seems to have crescendoed, there can be yet another peak. Seeing this picture pushes me onto that jagged edge.
Thomas is asleep on his stomach, a floral comforter rumpled around his bare torso. But the setting is unfamiliar; he is not in the bed we shared.
Was he in yours, Jessica? Or April’s? Or yet another woman’s?
It no longer matters.
Whenever insomnia gripped me throughout our marriage, his presence always provided comfort. His solid warmth and steady exhalations were a balm to the ceaseless churning of my mind. He never knew how many times I whispered, “I love you,” as he slept on peacefully.
A final question: If you truly loved someone, would you sacrifice your life for theirs?
The answer is simple.
A last note is recorded in the legal pad: a full, detailed, and accurate confession. All of the questions Mrs. Voss sought will finally be answered. Thomas’s involvement with April is left out of the note. It may be enough to save him.
The sheets from the legal pad are left on the table in the foyer, where they will be easily found.
Not too many blocks away from here is a pharmacy that remains open twenty-four hours a day. Even on Christmas.
Thomas’s prescription pad is retrieved from his top dresser drawer; he kept one at home in case of an after-hours patient emergency.
It is completely dark out now; the endless sky is devoid of a single star.
Without Thomas, there will be no light tomorrow.
I write myself a prescription for thirty Vicodin pills, more than enough.
EPILOGUE
Friday, March 30
It seems as though the young woman staring back at me in the reflective glass should look different.
But my curly hair, black leather jacket, and heavy makeup case haven’t changed over the course of the last few months.
Dr. Shields would probably say you can’t judge someone’s internal state by their external attributes, and I know she’s right.
True change isn’t always visible, even when it happens to you.
I shift my makeup case into my left hand, even though my arm doesn’t ache like it used to when I worked for BeautyBuzz. Now that I’ve been hired as a makeup artist for an off-off-Broadway show, I only have to lug it to and from the theater on West Forty-third Street. Lizzie was the one who got me the interview for it; she’s the assistant costume designer.
It isn’t a Gene French production. His career is over. I was never forced to make the moral choice of whether to tell his wife that he was a predator. Katrina and two other women went to the media with their own stories of how he’d abused them. His downfall was swift; behavior like his is no longer allowed to slide by without repercussions.
I think on some level I knew why Katrina was reaching out to me, but I wasn’t ready to stand up to Gene then. There’s not much I’m grateful to Dr. shields for, but at least because of her, I’ll never be anyone’s prey again.
I lean closer to the glass, pressing my forehead against the cool window, so I can see inside.
Breakfast All Day is crowded, with nearly every red-leather upholstered booth and counter stool claimed, even though it’s nearly midnight. Turns out Noah was right; a lot of people crave French toast and eggs Benedict after a Friday evening out.
I don’t see Noah, but I picture him in the kitchen, measuring almond extract into a mixing bowl, a dish towel tucked into his waistband.
I close my eyes and silently wish him well, then keep walking.
He called me the day after Christmas, when I was in Florida with my family. I hadn’t learned about Dr. Shields’s suicide yet; Thomas didn’t give me the news until later that night.
We talked for nearly two hours. Noah confirmed that Dr. Shields had gotten to him outside of Thomas’s office. I answered all of his questions, too. Although Noah believed me, I knew even before we hung up that I wouldn’t hear from him again. Who could blame him? It wasn’t just that I’d slept with Thomas; too much had happened for us to have a fresh start.
Still, I find myself thinking about Noah more than I’d expected.
Guys like him don’t come around all that often, but maybe I’ll get lucky again someday.
In the meantime, I’m making my own luck.
I glance down at the time on my phone. It’s 11:58 P.M. on the last Friday of the month, which means the payment should have landed in my checking account by now.
Money is vitally important to you. It appears to be an underpinning of your ethical code, Dr. Shields wrote about me during my first computerized session. When money and morality intersect, the results can illuminate intriguing truths about human character.
It was easy for Dr. Shields to sit back and form judgments and assumptions about my relationship with money. She had more than enough; she lived in a multimillion-dollar town house and wore expensive designer clothes and grew up on an estate in Litchfield. I saw a picture of her on a horse in her library; she drank fine wine and described her father as “influential,” which is code for wealthy.
The academic exercise she engaged in was completely removed from the reality of an existence spent living from paycheck to paycheck, where a veterinarian’s bill or an unexpected rent hike can cause a financial domino effect, threatening to demolish the life you’ve built.
People are motivated to break their moral compasses for a variety of primal reasons—survival, hate, love, envy, passion, Dr. Shields wrote in her notes. And money.
Her study has been terminated. There will be no more experiments. The file on Subject 52 is complete.
Yet I still feel linked to Dr. Shields.
She seemed omniscient; as if she could see inside of me. She appeared to know things before I told her, and she drew thoughts and feelings out of me that I didn’t realize I possessed. Maybe that’s why I keep trying to envision how she would record my final encounter with Thomas, the one that occurred several weeks after her fatal overdose.
Sometimes at night, when my eyes are closed and Leo is snuggled up next to me, I can almost picture her graceful cursive, forming the sentences on her yellow legal pad, as her silvery voice floods my head, flowing along with the arcs and loops of the words.