Mystery/Thriller Paperback Stack

Chapter Two ~ Sophia

Tuesday the 16th of May, 2017

Park Avenue ~ New York City

His fingers are cold as he runs the zip up the back of my dress. I wonder how they can be so icy when we have just spent the past hour wrapped in a haze of sweaty sheets and steamy breath, but I remind myself that his hands are always cold. Even when they’re inside me. 

I needed a shock to my system, though. A glass of ice water to the face. 

The day his hands warm up is the day I’ll have to leave him.

“Lovely dress,” he says, eyeing me in the full-length mirror. But he isn’t looking at the tight fit of my black cocktail dress—he’s looking through it, underneath it. He’s seen the scars that lie beneath. He knows the hell this body has been through in the past few years, and he’s here anyway. 

He knows about everything that lies beneath this perfect Park Avenue wife façade. 

Well, not everything, but certainly more than Drew knows. More than Drew will ever know.

My mother’s sharp English accent slides through my mind, always coming at me without warning.

A husband doesn’t need to know the darkest secrets about his wife. That would spoil his perfect image of her. 

The perfect old hag was right about a few things, after all.

“Thank you,” I tell him before applying my rose-colored lipstick.

He slithers up behind me, reaches a hand around my shoulders, placing it square on my heart. “Why not red? I never see you in red lipstick.”

“Not my style,” I reply.

He grins at me in the mirror. “I like your style.”

“I know you do.”

His frigid hand lingers over my beating heart and I wonder if he knows that it only beats this fast for him. That it’s never beaten this quickly for anyone, not even in the early days of my romance with Drew.

His hand falls ever so slowly from my chest before he walks over to the nightstand—Drew’s nightstand—and retrieves his watch. “Where are you going tonight, looking like such a goddess?”

I can’t help but grin. “A former student of mine has a book release party tonight. Some memoir she wrote about her affair with a married man.”

“How original,” he says, catching my eyes in the mirror.

At this, we both have a laugh.

And then, we slide our wedding rings back on. 

At the door, he kisses me for longer than he should; he’s already late for dinner with his wife.

“You’ll tell me when you have news?” he says, not letting go of me. He’s worried. I can see it in his eyes.

“Of course,” I say before giving him a gentle push out the door. “I’m sure there won’t be any news, though.”

I’ve never been less sure, but I have to pretend. If not for him, then for myself. 

As is our routine, he leaves my place fifteen minutes before I do, which gives me just enough time to lie on the white chaise in the salon and catch my breath. I always lie here after he leaves, gazing out the floor-to-ceiling windows in the Park Avenue penthouse I share with my husband, and I breathe. 

Inhaling the view of the Manhattan skyscrapers. 

The heavy gray clouds. 

The darkness of a city I know so very well.

Exhaling the scent of another man. 

Each time I breathe out, I pause to see if there is any guilt in my exhale, but I haven’t found any yet. It’s been a year and a half, and still, not an ounce of guilt.

Perhaps my heart is as cold as my lover’s hands. I’ve actually convinced myself that I’m just having him over for an afternoon coffee. If Drew ever found out, that’s what I would say.

“Darling, don’t be silly. It was only a coffee.”

But Drew is in Paris, so he wouldn’t find out. He won’t find out. 

He spends two weeks out of every month in Paris for work. He’s asked me to join him, but I refuse to go because I can’t leave my teaching position at New York University. Because I’m writing my next book. Because I have a life here in New York. Because I have galas and book signings and literary events and luncheons to attend. Because I don’t like to fly.

I’ve given him a million bullshit reasons, but there is only one reason I will never again go to Paris. A reason he will never, ever know. 

My hand instinctively runs over my stomach. I can feel my heart beating all the way down in my abdomen.

Mocking me with its relentless thumping.

The clouds just on the other side of the glass begin hurling drops of rain over the city. It used to rain like this in London when I was a little girl, and I’ve always loved it. That powerful sound when the drops hit the glass, the way they wash away the dirt, the lies, the secrets that hide behind the windows.

At least when I was a little girl, I could pretend that it would all be washed away.

I know better now.

* * *

I inhale. 

I hold my breath.

When my exhale finally explodes, I wonder who my husband is having over for coffee this afternoon. I wonder if she lets him see her scars. I wonder if he keeps fucking her anyway.