Ex Games

Chapter 26

Prologue

First and foremost, his parents love me. But on top of that, his colleagues love me. The wives and girlfriends love me. I “keep them young.” At their galas, I dress like Jackie O but dance like J. Lo. I don’t tell any of them that the dinners I host are inspired by the Pinterest board of some girl named Maggie in Wisconsin.

I keep all of his secrets. I dig for dirt when he asks for it. I cook, I massage, I dress like I live in the pages of Elle. Like he so desperately needs me to, I make all of his friends jealous. Because I, after years of his styling and molding, am the perfect little Stepford girlfriend. I am as much a part of his good image as he is.

And so he’ll never let me go.

No matter how hard I scream and claw and kick and fight, he won’t ever let me go. He cheated on me. After four years – and three living together in his Chelsea duplex – he cheated on me with his hedge fund colleague’s nineteen-year-old daughter. He spent four months sleeping with her. He recorded video of their trysts, which carried on in a suite at the downtown W. In one of the shaky, breathy clips, she told him that she loved him. Hugging a white sheet to her chest, her blue eyes gazing into the camera, she blew a kiss with her pink lips and said, “Jackson Kinsley, I love you to pieces.” Gabrielle Winter was her name.

No. Not was – is.

Gabrielle Winter is her name. After all, you can’t really call a girl dead when her body has yet to be found.

Chapter One

It’s been three weeks since the Gabrielle incident and I’m not yet ready to let Jackson touch me. I hate sleeping in the same bed as a man whose hands caressed another woman’s breasts just five weeks ago. I hate feeling his lips graze my shoulder in the night because I know from the videos that those lips have trailed every last inch of her skin. I hate that I have to act like everything is utterly normal in front of his friends.

But worst of all, I hate that he thinks I killed her.

I hate that he has evidence that makes it look quite clear that I’m in fact a murderer. More than any of it, I hate that I gave Gabrielle a reason to leave him that panicked, breathless voicemail on the night of her disappearance.

“She’s here, Jax! It’s Lara – she was pounding on my door and she – Jax! Oh my God – no! Get out of my apartment, you crazy bitch! Jax! Help me, get here now!”

There are a hundred things I’ve done in my life that I’ve wished to take back but God, does that visit to Gabrielle’s apartment take the cake. It was

the kind of rash decision that I’d never made even once before in my twenty-six years. But several life-shattering discoveries had led up to the moment, the time line of which went some something like this:

On Sunday, I’d returned from my trip with Sloane to Easthampton. I’d slipped quietly into my apartment hoping to surprise Jackson but instead, I found him sitting on our leather sectional, watching a video of himself on our fifty-inch flat screen. A video of himself and a girl I recognized from the charity circuit. Lyle Winter’s daughter, Gabrielle. Wasn’t she just a freshman at NYU? Didn’t she normally dress in wild prints and feather headbands? Why in God’s name then was I watching her peel off a sophisticated set of black lingerie? More pressing than that, why was my boyfriend recording video as she did so?

Somehow, for several seconds, I toyed with denial. This is not what it looks like, I told himself. That isn’t Gabrielle. Maybe that isn’t Jackson either.

But then I saw a close-up of his promise ring – an identical match to the one I wore on my own right hand, that he bought for me two years ago, when I said I wasn’t ready to be engaged. I heard his voice. The one that said “goodnight” to me for the past four years straight. My stomach dropped and my body went cold. I stood motionless behind Jackson, who was jacking off to it all, too lost in his own pleasure to realize that I was standing right there in the same room. Too busy reliving some sordid night to notice me standing just two yards behind him, shattering into a million little pieces as the camera set on a tabletop to catch him groaning as he entered her.

It sounds insane but I stood there for another fifteen minutes or however long it was for me to get through the rest of their recorded romp. I was paralyzed. In disbelief.

Just the week prior, Jackson and I had been in Connecticut visiting his family. His mom had pouted at me for having no answer regarding when I wanted to have kids since she certainly couldn’t rely on his jet-setting brother, Jacob, to ever settle down. Jackson laughed and said that whenever I thought of a time for kids, he’d clean out my gift-wrapping room and get to work on building a nursery. We bantered about why my “ribbon storage” should be converted instead of his “brandy room,” where he brought the boys for cigars after dinner. He laughed and said that it would be cruel to subject our infant child to a room in which the walls had spent years absorbing smoke. I said, “Fine, you’re right,” and his mom took it as my tacit agreement to soon give her grandchildren.

During the car ride back to Manhattan, Jackson ran his hand through my hair. “You know I would never pressure you to have kids before you were ready, right?” he asked. “Same goes for the engagement. I know you’re mine, I know you love me. I’m happy to wait for everything. They’re worth the wait if they’re with you. But only you.”

“You’ll survive your mom’s nagging till then?” I teased.

“As long as you’re taking it with me.”

That night, while I showered, I overheard him on the phone with his mother. “I know you want her to have Grandma’s ring but I want her to have her own. Lara’s different, Mom. She’s special. And we’ve been through too much. Whatever I get her will be the start of our own story. And we’ll pass it down only if she wants to.”

The speech had me. Coming out of the shower, I had stared at my promise ring and finally considered trading it in for one more permanent. It was the first time in our four years together that I felt finally ready. So for a week, I wondered how I would break the news to Jackson. After all, telling him I was ready was as good as proposing to him myself. It was a big deal for me. So I decided to do what I always did when in need of advice: go on a weekend trip with my best friend. While in the Hamptons with Sloane, we brainstormed over cocktails, giggling like we were thirteen again.

“Remember in eighth grade when you broke up with Josh Twersky because he stole eight dollars from your wallet?” I asked. “And then you said we had to grow up to have millionaire boyfriends so this never happened again?

Sloane laughed so hard she may or may not have dribbled champagne onto the front of her Pucci dress. “Millionaire boyfriends who had to be best friends too,” she reminded me with a snort. “We were such idiots.”

“Well.”

“We were prophetic idiots,” Sloane corrected herself. And then we laughed, downed the rest of our drinks and decided to cut our trip short to return home to our boyfriends, Jackson Kinsley and Caleb Weiss, founders of Kinsley Weiss Capital Management, and the billionaire friends who proved our teen selves to have been less silly and unrealistic than everyone thought.

It had been too good. The perfect kind of girls’ weekend that reminded me how truly blessed I was and how I couldn’t possibly be luckier. On the ride back home, I decided that Sloane was right: the best way to tell Jackson was just to tell him – to just surprise him in our apartment, plant a kiss on his lips and tell him that I was finally ready to be his wife.