Page 69

He’d already asked her this as they walked from the museum to the hotel room he’d rented, less than half a mile away.
“I told Rachel I’d be back around dinnertime, but I can call her. She has some new boyfriend she’s into, and I can tell that she’s not exactly thrilled that I’m here for the weekend.”
“Just tell her you ran into an old boyfriend and you’re the happiest you’ve ever been.”
“I should. I could. But I don’t know, she went to my wedding, she knows Bryce. I don’t want anyone to know about this except for me and you.”
“No, I know. It’s for the best.”
“I’ll call her, though, and tell her that I’ll be back closer to eight. She’ll be fine with it. And I can come back here tomorrow.”
“I’ll be here, waiting for you.”
“Can I ask... What’s happening with your girlfriend?”
“Finito. We broke up. I did it as soon as I came back from Ohio.”
“You were living together, right?”
“Yes, but just renting. She had a friend who was looking for a roommate so she moved in with her. I’m still in the same place. I can’t afford it, so I need to start looking around myself.”
“What did you tell her?”
He rubbed at an eye. Wendy knew that he didn’t want to talk about it, but part of her really wanted to hear what had happened. She waited.
“It was awful,” he finally said. “It’s still awful. I told her that I just felt too young to settle down, that I wanted to experience life as a single person, that it had nothing to do with her.”
“Cliché. Cliché. Cliché.”
He snorted through his nose. “Yeah, right. She didn’t buy it. She was convinced, she’s still convinced, that there’s someone else. And she just wants to keep talking about it, going over what went wrong. I think what it comes down to is that she can’t understand how I was in love with her once and now I’m not. I keep thinking that maybe it would have been easier if I was just cruel to her, told her I had a one-night fling and that I was never that into her in the first place. Then I’d just be the asshole ex-boyfriend. But I tried to be kind about it, and now she wants to keep getting together so we can rehash the whole thing.”
“You can’t help what you are,” Wendy said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, being nice, not being an asshole.”
“I guess,” Thom said, then rolled over onto his side, propping himself on an elbow. “But I am an asshole. I did cheat on her. And I lied to her about it. And if you only knew the dark thoughts I have about your husband...”
“Oh, yeah, like what?” She moved onto her side as well.
“Oh, you know, stuff like how we should murder him for all his money.”
Wendy surprised herself by how much that made her laugh. “My thoughts exactly. How would we do it?”
“Well, you’d have to be the brains behind the operation. I would be the muscle, of course. You tell me how we’d do it.”
“As you can imagine, Ihavegiven this lots of thought.” She realized she was talking a little too loud, in order to sound theatrical, so she lowered her voice and continued. “Bryce is a perfect murder victim for many reasons.”
“Because he’s Bryce,” Thom said.
“Yes, number one, because he’s Bryce. Number two, he is a creature of habit. He pretty much does the exact same things every day, at least Monday through Friday. On the weekends it’s a little different, but only because he drinks all day instead of just all night.”
“So what’s his routine?”
“He gets up at seven in the morning and heads to the gym. He’s there for an hour, mostly in the steam room, I suspect, and then he goes to work. He eats lunch every day at the same Chinese restaurant. In the afternoon he calls me to check in, and to tell me that some friend of his, Dougie or Shroom or Big Dan, is in town and he’s going to grab a few beers with him. I tell him fine, and he stumbles home at around eleven, hammered and incoherent.”
“He drives home?”