“Jesus,” said Ethan. “The way he stands there, for all that time. It’s so … my God.”
“I know it is,” said Christina. She would get her confession today. She could feel it. She would play this footage to Stan Delaney and she would not say a word or make a sound for the entire length of the video. She would watch him watch himself bow his head over his wife’s body. She knew he was not a churchgoer, but she knew he’d been brought up Catholic, as had she, and she recognized the stance of a man in prayer, a man who longs to confess his sins.
Tonight she and Nico would go to meet their parish priest to discuss the holy sacrament of marriage, and she would try not to think about the fact that Joy and Stan Delaney had once made the same vows that she and Nico would make next s
pring. She would not think about a young Joy Delaney or Polly Perkins promising their husbands to have and to hold, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health, until death do us part, until you carry my body out to the car in the dead of the night and dispose of it somewhere it will never be found, until I speak too loudly, until I spend too much money on a new iron, until I hold back your career for the sake of our family, until I kiss another man at a party, until I displease you in some way I cannot yet imagine.
“Christina?” said Ethan.
“Sorry,” said Christina. “What were you saying?”
He said, “Nothing really. Just that I didn’t pick it. That first day we interviewed him, I knew he was hiding stuff from us, but when he looked at that photo of his wife, I thought, No way did he do it. He loves her.”
“I never thought he didn’t love her.” Christina adjusted her engagement ring so the diamond was centered again on her finger.
But she’d always known he’d killed her.
That was the cruel knowledge that she would carry down the aisle on her wedding day along with her bridal bouquet of white roses and blush-pink gardenias: it was possible for both things to be true.
Chapter 55
VALENTINE’S DAY
Stan Delaney had always known that women had the power to draw blood with their words. It was his mother’s favorite hobby: to knife the soft, stupid, defenseless egos of her husband and her son.
Don’t tell the boy he’s going to play at Wimbledon one day, he’s dumb enough to believe it. The two of you are as dumb as dog shit.
Not every day, just most days. Not when she was drunk, when she was sober. That’s when she got nasty.
She’d jab her finger at the side of her head and smile her beautiful smile at her husband and say, The lights are on, but nobody’s home, isn’t that right, my love?
Stan’s father had no arsenal of clever words with which to defend himself. He quailed and recoiled. He smiled stupidly as if his wife had made a joke that was too clever for him. He shut down and went silent. He took it and took it.
He took it and took it until one day he didn’t take it anymore.
Fourteen-year-old Stan ran to his mother where she lay crumpled and still on the floor, and it was good that he did that. He could always tell himself that his first instinctive response had been to run to his mother, to put his body between her and his father, but he also could never forget the first tiny, terrible, traitorous thought that came into his head:
She deserved it.
So faint, so tiny, he sometimes pretended he’d imagined he thought it. It happened so fast, but it also happened so slowly, and it was so long ago, who knew what he’d really thought at that moment? You couldn’t rely on memory. It was an unreliable source.
* * *
Stan was just like his father. He’d always known it. Not clever and quick like his mother. Not clever and quick like his wife. Not good at school. Thick as a brick. Not the sharpest tool in the shed.
* * *
At the age of seventy, he felt his wife’s flesh beneath his hands as his father’s colossal rage and humiliation, his pain and hurt, ballooned within his chest and exploded behind his eyes.
Chapter 56
NOW
“I think they’re going to arrest my dad any day now,” said Claire Geer’s ex-husband, his eyes on the early-morning glitter-blue of Sydney Harbour. There was a croissant flake on his lower lip, and something so childlike and anguished about the way he said “my dad.”
They sat side by side, with takeaway coffees and almond croissants in white paper bags, on a park bench overlooking the ferry stop where Troy had kissed her for the first time. She wondered if Troy remembered this, if he’d even deliberately suggested this location for that reason. Surely not. He had big, terrible things on his mind right now.
Claire reached over and moved the crumb from his lip with her fingertip. “Why do you think that?”