“You told him about Alejandro?” Olivia asked.
“No. I had enough sense not to mention Carmen’s brother.”
“Ah,” Olivia said. “But part of you wondered if Alejandro was a decoy.”
Elise took a drink of her soda. “It certainly did seem to be a huge coincidence that he and Carmen were together, and that Alejandro and I were...were friends.”
“How was Kent during all this?” Kathy asked.
“He seemed calm, but he wasn’t. He made me a drink and he was shaking so much that he spilled half of it.”
“And he put pills in it,” Olivia said softly.
Kathy gasped.
“He did.” For a moment, Elise’s jaw clamped shut. “I was pacing back and forth and yelling so I didn’t see him do it. I wanted to grab something and hit him with it. He had no idea how much I was planning to give up for him! I had such a deep sense of loyalty that I hadn’t... I never...” She swallowed. “Anyway, I was so angry that I couldn’t see or hear much. When he handed me a drink, I gulped it. It was almost straight vodka and I hadn’t eaten all day. It went straight to my head. I was so dizzy that Kent pushed me toward the bedroom and I fell down on the bed. He left the room.”
Elise stood up, paced for a moment, then looked back at them.
“As soon as my head stopped whirling, I got up, went to the door, and opened it. Kent was on the phone. I heard him say, ‘She knows.’”
“And that’s when reality hit you,” Olivia said.
Elise nodded. “I finally, at last, saw that my husband was never going to really love me.”
“It was about love,” Kathy said. “You weren’t angry about money or even another woman, but about love.”
“Yes. That’s true.”
Again, Olivia squeezed Elise’s hand. “That’s when you wanted oblivion, so you took a pill.”
“Yes, but only enough to calm me so I could think,” Elise said. “There was a bottle of Kent’s prescription sleeping pills on the bedside table. He said that the stress of his job kept him from sleeping.”
“Maybe it was his guilty conscience,” Olivia said.
Kathy grimaced. “Or worry about how to afford everything.”
“That’s more likely,” Elise said.
“You took a pill.” Olivia’s voice was encouraging. “But you didn’t know that Kent had already given you some.”
Elise nodded. “When I felt sleepy, I was glad. It was all horrible, but at the same time it was a relief. I thought about how in the morning I’d contact a lawyer.”
“Would it be Tara?” Kathy asked.
Elise smiled. “She certainly would know the meanest, most soulless lawyer there was. When I drifted off to sleep, I was almost happy.”
“You were thinking about Alejandro,” Olivia said.
“I was hoping about Alejandro. Maybe he didn’t know about his sister and my husband. But then, he and his brother had said things that suddenly made sense. Had everything between us been to distract me? Or could it have been some huge, cosm
ic coincidence that my husband and I had fallen for two people from the same family?”
“Or just old-fashioned proximity. They were both there, near you two,” Olivia said. “I can attest that youthful hormones tend to guide people, not wisdom. What happened when you woke up in a hospital?”
“Kent was holding my hand and he’d been crying.”
“Out of fear of going to jail?” Kathy’s voice was angry.