We Are Us

Chapter 48 New York City

My stomach dips as I eye the dozen or so reporters and cameramen gathered on the sidewalk outside the door to our building. “Can you please use the underground entrance?” I ask the driver.

Once Sadie and I are crammed into the elevator with all of our luggage, waving off help from a porter, I lean my head against the mirrored wall. “I keep expecting to wake up and discover all of this is just a bad dream.”

“Well, if anyone can make lemonade out of lemons, it’s you, Pops.” The blasé tone of her voice scratches at my frayed nerves and I wonder if I’ve finally reached the limit to Sadie’s empathy. She put her life on hold when mine fell apart and taking care of me has to be getting old by now.

But her words reverberate inside our small enclosure, taunting me. Sadie has no idea what loss—true loss—really is.

I do. It is like a vacuum, ripping out your hair, shearing off your fingernails, stealing your screams. No end in sight. Just unrelenting, unimaginable pain.

Until the very moment I held my dead babies in my arms, I believed marrying Tucker would shield me from the worst life could throw at me.

I’d been such a fool.

Lemonade, my ass.

“I’ve buried two children. My husband, soon to be an accused criminal, is either missing or dead. And I might just be blamed for it. Those are not lemons, they’re tragedies.”

The elevator comes to a smooth stop and we maneuver our luggage into the quiet apartment. Isla left on a vacation of her own while we were in Florida and won’t be returning for a few days.

I drop my bags at the door to Tucker’s office. It’s the one room in our apartment that had always been off limits to me. Tucker never explicitly said I couldn’t come in, but just the way he always closed the door, even when it was just the two of us, told me I wasn’t welcome.

In his office at Stockton Capital, Tucker has an enormous executive desk and an entire wall fronted by bookshelves. Here, Tucker has another desk, but it is smaller, with narrow drawers. No bookcases, just one file cabinet disguised as a decorative chest beneath the window.

Gathering up my nerves, I sit in Tucker’s chair and reach for the handle of the top drawer.

It doesn’t budge. Neither do the other four.

Locked, all five of them. I want to scream in frustration as I look for the key. It isn’t taped inside the kneehole or to the back panel of the desk. It isn’t hidden beneath the rug or in the damp soil of the potted orchid. The chest is empty, too.

Finally, I seize the letter opener from the top of the desk and jab it into the front of the top drawer. The wood around the lock splinters with each frenzied thrust, until the mechanism finally gives way, but my triumphant smile lasts only an instant before discovering it is as empty as the chest.

The weight of the blade in my hand feels welcome and familiar as I attack the remaining locks, the jabbing motion activating a deep-rooted muscle memory that makes me envision my husband. Is this what I did to Tucker?

But furniture is not soft like skin, spongy like muscle. Each time the steel tip makes contact with the metal lock, or the mahogany wood, it reverberates through my arm, making my bones and joints cramp with pain.

Empty.

Empty.

Empty.

Empty.

Five locked drawers, not a single thing inside any of them.

My sister chooses that moment to poke her head through the door. “Have you discovered all of your husband’s secrets yet?”

I grind my teeth to prevent saying something I’ll regret and stalk off to the master suite. I need some space from her.

I still can’t get my stitches wet, so I cover my head with a plastic shower cap and face the hot spray without turning my back toward the water. I feel battered and bruised—even more emotionally than physically.

I’ve spent years trying to fuse the disparate parts of me into one cohesive identity and, for a while, I thought I’d been doing a good job. But today I am like a demented child’s toy. Barbie’s body with a GI Joe’s head, missing a limb and naked save for permanent marker all over me.

I am too overwhelmed to be outraged. Too exhausted to be embarrassed. I want to lather myself with every product in my shower, but I feel too fragile, too certain that scrubbing my skin might erase it entirely, inch by inch.

By the time I get out of the shower and dress in an oversized sweater and faded yoga pants, I just want to make a cup of tea and get into bed.

Deciding to do exactly that after I retrieve my bags from where I dropped them outside of Tucker’s office, I pull up short at the sight of Wren standing in the middle of the room, surveying the mess I made with undisguised horror. “What are you doing here?”

Wren spins around at the sound of my voice. “Me?” Her hands flap wildly at the empty drawers hanging from Tuckers desk like loose teeth. “What have you done?”

If there is a silver lining to Tucker’s disappearance, it is that I no longer have to put up with Wren in my life. “Get out,” I say coldly, pointing toward the front door.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Leave you in the apartment that Tucker’s money bought, with everything he’s given you.”

Before I can respond, she yanks at an already open drawer and turns it over, feeling along the bottom and sides. Finding nothing, she tosses it aside and moves on to the next drawer.

“What the hell are you doing?” I could try to stop her, but I’m just as interested in anything Tucker left behind as she is.

Wren still hasn’t answered when Sadie appears at my side. “What is she looking for?” she whispers, the two of us now staring at Wren as if she’s an exotic animal at the zoo.

“I have no idea.”

“Should I call security?” Wren moves on to the chest in front of the window, but when the last drawer bangs down on top of the rest, she is still empty-handed.

“No,” I say, then direct my next words to Wren. “Whatever you’re looking for, it’s obviously not here.”

“It has to be,” she mutters, as much to herself as to me.

“This is ridic—” My tongue goes still as Wren grabs the painting hanging behind Tucker’s desk and takes it off the wall, revealing a safe.

Sadie drags in a quick breath. “Holy shit.”

We both take a few steps closer, peering over Wren’s shoulder as she taps a code into the keypad. “Come on, come on,” she grumbles, her first try failing. But on her second, there is an audible click, and she yanks at the rectangular metal door inset into the wall.

The safe isn’t empty. Wren reaches for the stack of folders inside, flipping through pages and letting them fall to the floor in a stream of paper. “Fuck!” she screams once, then again. When she turns around, her face is red and blotchy, her eyes glassy and unfocused, the pupils blown. She looks like a drug addict who’s just discovered the pharmacy she’s broken into doesn’t stock narcotics.

“Wren…” I say tentatively, not sure how to approach her right now.

She is shaking as she walks toward me, grabbing my shoulders with both hands, her long fingers like talons digging into my skin. “What have you done, Poppy? Where is Tucker’s laptop, where are his papers?” There is a delirious look in her eyes I’ve never seen before, like she’s come unhinged.

I shake her off, though I can still feel the bite of her nails when I reclaim my personal space. “I don’t know. I haven’t taken anything.”