The Perfect Wife

But not people like you and Tim. Not strong, unselfish, principled people. Good people.

If that’s what you are.

“Awesome,” Nathan breathes. He’s looking at the numbers flying across the screen. “I can literally see your mind working.”

“What do you mean?” you say sharply.

“Don’t worry—I can’t read your thoughts. Just see you’re thinking hard.” He glances at the printout you’re still holding. “Going to take that to the police?”

“I haven’t decided.” But already you can see how tricky that would be. The police will reopen the investigation. You don’t know if it’s legal to fake your own death, but you suspect that if they do find Abigail Cullen-Scott alive and well, at the very least there’d be a charge of wasting police time.

More to the point, Tim will know what you did. That you walked out on your marriage. Your disabled son. And him.

You remember what Mike said, that time he came to see you. Remember how fragile he still is, would you?

You can’t hurt Tim like that. At least, not yet.

“If you take that printout to the cops,” Nathan says slyly, “they’ll confiscate the iPad. And there’s more on it, I bet.”

Abruptly, you reach down and pull the cable out of your hip. “Hey!” he protests. “That should be properly ejected—”

“How much more?”

“I’m not sure.” He gestures hungrily at the cable, now dangling from his laptop. “Hook me up again, and I’ll start another batch tonight.”

“No,” you say, taking a step back. “Unscramble some more, and then I’ll see about letting you plug it in again. Nothing gets nothing in this world—remember?”

SIXTEEN

(FEEL FREE!) was probably Abbie’s highlight as our artist-in-residence. People would say to her, “How’re you going to top that?” and she’d just smile and shrug. “Something’ll come,” she’d reply. “It always does.”

But as the weeks, then months, went by, the smile faded. Someone suggested she could do a whole series of putty statues, and she just sighed and said, “Maybe I should,” as if they’d suggested she get a job in an insurance company or something. There was talk of a project making 3-D busts of our heads that came to nothing. It was ironic that, because of the time lag with social media, the height of her viral success with the pictures of (FEEL FREE!) coincided almost exactly with Abbie herself going through a lean period.

We felt disappointed, initially—we’d gotten used to the regular entertainment of her artworks; they lightened the mechanical drudgery of our lives—but we also felt protective of her. Why should she feel obligated to amuse us, like a magician pulling yet another balloon out of his pocket at a party, or a musician playing his greatest hit for the thousandth time? She was an artist, our artist, and her function was lofty and holy.

Plus, she was the founder’s girlfriend. Their romance had started to make headlines, at least on local websites devoted to tech-valley gossip. For her twenty-fifth birthday, Tim hired the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus to sing “Happy Birthday” outside her bedroom window. Then he took her wing-walking, followed by a trip in a private jet to Lanai, Larry Ellison’s Hawaiian island, for a couple of days’ surfing.

But he was still the founder, and work came first. Most nights he’d still be in the office until ten P.M. or even later. And along with the amazing shots on social media of the two of them standing by the edge of a live volcano on Hawaii, there were also darker, more disturbing whispers. Someone spotted Abbie in Slim’s late one night with a bunch of musicians, clearly wasted. Somebody relayed an incoherent conversation they’d had with her in Mezzanine, covered in sweat. She showed up to the office less frequently. And if she did put in an appearance, it was generally in the afternoon, while Tim was always in by seven.

So when she stopped turning up altogether, we all jumped to the same conclusion. We assumed she’d dropped us, and probably Tim, too. “Seen Abbie recently?” became a question we no longer even asked one another, because the answer was always the same. It was as if she’d vanished.

Her six-month-residency end date came and went without being marked, or even mentioned.

It was about three weeks after that that the news flashed around the office. Abbie was coming back! The residency had been extended! No—not extended: resumed. Unbeknownst to us, Abbie had been on sick leave. After that was taken into account, she had twelve weeks left to run in her contract, and would be back with us for at least that length of time.

We did the math: She had been out sick for just over ninety days. We quickly turned to the internet. A link went around to an article headed: “Study Shows Optimal Time for Residential Rehab Is 90 Days or Longer.” Someone else checked the company’s health insurance. Rehab was a co-pay, which meant hefty bills for the individual. But somehow we doubted Abbie had picked up the bill herself.

And then, a few days later, in she strolled, her old self again, the very picture of sun-kissed Californian health—the facility she’d been in had encouraged outdoor work, she explained; the way she told it, it was like a cross between a mental asylum and a kibbutz. She was quite open about having been in rehab. “I had a problem, and when Tim realized, he sorted it,” she said gratefully. It turned out she’d crashed his Volkswagen, and the cops had taken a blood test at the scene. As part of her plea bargain, Tim’s lawyer told the court she was checking into rehab. Meanwhile, Tim simply identified which rehab facility had the highest documented long-term abstinence rate, and that’s where he sent her. Of course.

So then it was just a matter of following in Tim’s footsteps. We put rehab California best long-term into a search engine and came up with Moving On, a small treatment center in Napa Valley that looked, from the pictures, more like a boutique hotel than a detox facility. There was a kidney-shaped swimming pool surrounded by sun loungers and parasols, a restaurant with a vegetarian chef, a gym…The place even had its own vineyard, although the version of its flagship Cabernet served to guests was alcohol-free. The website was coy about charges, but elsewhere on the net they were described as twenty-five hundred dollars a day plus extras.

Some of us had a preconceived notion that places like that were little more than fancy spas. But then we dug a little deeper. The reason Moving On had such high success rates was not the pool, or the gym, and certainly not the alcohol-free wine. Moving On treated addiction with chemical aversives—specifically, apomorphine and succinylcholine. Apomorphine, we read, was administered by injection as the patient prepared to ingest a small quantity of recreational drugs, such as a line of coke. It produced overwhelming nausea followed by involuntary vomiting; over time the two became inextricably linked in the patient’s mind, so that even looking at cocaine induced a feeling of nausea. Succinylcholine was similar but different: It caused immediate paralysis to every muscle in the body, including the muscles of respiration. The subjects believed themselves to be asphyxiating—indeed, they were asphyxiating. The drug wore off in under a minute, but the terror it induced was so severe that its use in CIA interrogations had been banned, even during the Bush era. That rehab had been no vacation for Abbie. And indeed, when we looked at her a little more closely, we realized she wasn’t quite her old self: There was something brittle, something forced about her cheerfulness now. Nor did she dance on tables, or even slip outside for roll-your-owns and gossip in the parking lot. She was as clean as the day she was born.

“I owe Tim everything for helping me sort myself out,” she told Morag in the break room. “I’ve even stopped craving nicotine.”

“I made her better. I fixed her,” Tim told Mike in the same location, a couple of days later. “Anyone would do the same for someone they really loved.”

44

You’re still in shock when Tim gets home that evening, tired but triumphant. Renton’s money has come through. Although he doesn’t actually say the company is saved, it’s apparent from the relief written across his face.

In the circumstances it’s easy to pretend your own day has been uneventful. You don’t tell him what Nathan found on the iPad. Instead you mention you met Lisa.

He frowns. “Not my biggest fan.”

“She was okay. She was just upset about seeing me on TV like that, with no warning. But I think we’re good now.”

“That’s nice,” he says, a little absently. He’s flicking through emails on his phone. Sometimes there are over a hundred he hasn’t had time to look at in the office.

Is that why you did it? Did you feel ignored?

Everything Tim says or does now is going to prompt the same question, you realize. Is that the reason you ran away? Was that what you found unbearable?

He looks up and sees you staring. “Sorry, babe. I’m being rude.” He puts the phone down.