The Kept Woman (Will Trent 8)

Sara opened the door. Will had his hands in his pockets. He was wearing jeans and the gray Ermenegildo Zegna polo she had slipped in with his Gap T-shirts.

He saw the laptop. ‘You’re watching Buffy without me?’

Sara left the door open and went back to retrieve her drink. The loft was open-concept, the living room, dining-room and kitchen taking up one large space. Sara was glad to be able to put some distance between them. She sat down on the couch. Betty stood from the pillow. She stretched and yawned again, but didn’t go to Will.

He didn’t go to the dog either. Or Sara. He stood with his back against the kitchen counter. He asked, ‘She did okay? At the vet?’

‘Yes.’

His hands were gripped together the way he used to do when he twisted his wedding ring around his finger. The skin over the knuckles of his index and middle fingers was broken open.

Sara didn’t ask about the injury. She took another drink from her glass.

‘There’s a girl,’ he said. ‘She might know what Harding knew. What got him killed. That could get her killed.’

Sara feigned interest. ‘This is the Jane Doe you found in the office building?’

‘No, another girl. Harding’s wife. Daughter. Maybe. We don’t know.’

Sara drank her Scotch.

‘I cut myself.’ Instead of holding up his hand, he turned and showed her the back of his right leg. There was a dark patch of blood. ‘I slipped through some floorboards.’ He waited. ‘There’s a couple of splinters.’

‘If it’s been longer than six hours, it’s too late for sutures.’

Will waited.

Sara waited too. She wasn’t going to make this easy for him. If he was going to break up with her, then he had to be a man about it.

He said, ‘Have you had much?’ He paused. ‘To drink?’

‘Not nearly enough.’ Sara got up from the couch. She passed Will on her way into the kitchen. Her stomach wouldn’t like a second drink on top of the earlier glass of wine, but she poured herself one anyway.

Will stood on the other side of the counter. He watched her top off the glass. He had a physical aversion to alcohol. His shoulders squared. His chin lifted. She wasn’t even sure if he noticed. She had to assume it was muscle memory from all the drunks who had abused him when he was a child. As with most things, Will did not talk about it.

She asked, ‘Do you want one?’

He nodded. ‘Okay.’

Sara had seen him drink alcohol once, but that was under duress. She had forced a trickle of Scotch down his throat because he couldn’t stop coughing.

He asked, ‘Do you have gin?’

She leaned down to search the cabinet, which, until tonight, she hadn’t opened for months. Dust covered the foiled corks in the wine. There was a full bottle of gin in the back, but something told her that gin was Angie’s drink, and Sara was not going to toast her boyfriend’s dead wife in her kitchen.

She stood up. ‘No gin. There’s wine in the fridge, or do you want Scotch?’

‘That’s what I had before?’

She took down a glass and poured him a double. When he didn’t move to take it, Sara slid the glass across the counter. He still didn’t take it.

She said, ‘Amanda told me not to tell you, but there was a note from Angie.’

The color drained from his face. ‘How did she . . . ?’

‘You already knew?’

He opened his mouth again, but nothing came out.

Sara said, ‘I’m glad it’s out in the open. I wasn’t going to lie, or pretend that I didn’t know. That would make me the worst kind of hypocrite.’

‘How . . .’ He hesitated. ‘How does Amanda know?’

‘She’s in charge of the investigation, Will. It’s her job to know everything.’

He spread his hands palms down on the counter. He wouldn’t look at her.

Sara thought back to the crime scene bus, Charlie’s glee when he’d shown her the glowing HELP ME on the wall. Angie’s injuries had been severe, life-threatening, but she had stopped to write the words in her own blood, knowing that Will would see them. That Sara would see them. That everyone would know that Angie would always have her claws in him. She might as well have written FUCK YOU, SARA LINTON.

Will asked, ‘Did you read it? The note?’

‘Yes. I’m the one who recognized her handwriting.’

Will kept staring at his hands. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘For what? You said it before: you can’t control her.’

‘What she said . . .’ His voice trailed off again. He sounded distraught. ‘It doesn’t matter. Not to me.’

Sara didn’t believe him. The fact of Angie’s death hadn’t yet sunk in. ‘It mattered to her. It’s probably the last thing she wrote before she died.’

He lifted the glass of Scotch. He threw back the drink, and then he almost coughed it all back up.

Sara pulled a paper towel off the roll and handed it to him.

His eyes were watering. He wiped the mess off the counter. He was sweating. He looked shaken. And he should be. Angie was dead. She had begged him for help. He hadn’t been able to save her, not this time when it really mattered. Thirty years of his life was gone. He was probably in shock. Alcohol was the last thing he needed.

Sara took the glass away from him and put it in the sink. ‘Wait for me in your bathroom.’ She didn’t give him time to respond. She found her glasses on the couch and walked down the hall to her office. She pulled down her medical bag from the closet shelf. She turned around.

She did not want to leave the room.

She stood by her desk, holding the bag, willing herself to calm down.

There was no way to fix this. She couldn’t stitch together their relationship like she could stitch together his leg. Talking around the problem was only delaying the inevitable. And yet she didn’t have it in her to confront him. She was frozen in place, terrified of what might come if they really talked about what had happened, what was coming next. Sara couldn’t guess the future. There was just a blank expanse of unknown. All she could do was stand in the darkened office listening to the blood rushing through her ears. She counted to fifty, then one hundred, and then she made herself move.

The hallway seemed longer than it ever had before. More like an arduous journey than a stroll. Will’s bathroom was in the spare bedroom. Sara had designated a separate area for Will for the benefit of their relationship. When she finally rounded the corner, he was waiting for her in the doorway.

She said, ‘Take off your pants.’

Will stared at her.

‘It’s easier than trying to roll up your jeans.’ She emptied her medical bag into the sink. She laid out the tools she would need. ‘Take off your pants. Take off your socks. Stand in the tub. I need to clean the wound.’

Will obeyed the orders, giving a slight wince when he peeled the jeans away from his leg. He had bled through the bandage, which was little more than an oversized Band-Aid. He stood in the tub.

‘Take off the bandage.’ Sara looked for a pair of gloves, then thought better of it. If Angie had given Will a disease, Sara already had it. She put on her glasses. ‘Turn sideways.’

Will turned. The leg was worse than she’d expected. This was more than a few splinters. He had a deep two-and-a-half-inch laceration down the side of his calf. Debris had crusted into the blood. It was too late for sutures. She would be sewing in an infection.