Page 122 of All These Beautiful Strangers

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, but my voice sounded small and mousy, weak. Even I didn’t trust what it said.

For a moment, his face was perfectly still, and then, in a flash, it became a twisted mask of pain.

He threw his glass of scotch against the wall behind me. There was a pop as the glass broke, and then a thousand tiny pieces shattered around us. I flinched.

“Alistair—” I said, in shock.

He grabbed the hair at the nape of my neck and yanked my head back.

I screamed as the white-hot electric pain tore through my scalp and I dropped the bag.

“Peter Hindsberg,” he said.

He knew. He knew about the private investigator. He knew about the money. He knew everything. But how?

“Show me every place you defiled our marriage,” Alistair said. “Was it here, in this room?”

He tugged on my hair and turned my head toward the dining room.

“Or maybe there, on that table?” he asked.

“You’re hurting me,” I said. Tears stung my eyes.

And I scrambled to make sense of it. Peter? He thought that Peter and I had—?

He tugged me a few paces to our right and pushed my face down hard into the couch cushions. My nose flattened against the rough gingham fabric. I couldn’t breathe.

“Or maybe here, on this couch?” he asked.

Then he ripped me up from the couch and turned me around to face him, his hands on my shoulders. I gasped for breath and clambered back away from him, out of his grasp.

“I didn’t,” I coughed, my throat raw. “I didn’t. I didn’t. I swear I didn’t.”

I lost my balance and I fell. My shoulder hit against the side of a bookcase and sang with pain. I crumpled onto the floor, sobbing. My vision blurred. I clamped my hand to my injured shoulder. When I drew it back, I saw blood.

When I looked over at Alistair, he was crouching, his hands to his temples.

“Why did you do this?” he asked, again and again, under his breath. “Why?”

And I didn’t know who he was talking to—me or himself.

When he looked up at me through his hands, I saw that he was crying.

When I woke in the morning in our bed, there was a dull ache in my shoulder. I opened my eyes and looked down at the bandages Claire had given me last night in her kitchen, her boys fast asleep upstairs.

“I fell,” I had told her over and over again. “I fell.”

But I knew she knew.

She had driven me home after, had insisted she stay the night on the downstairs sofa, even though Alistair’s car was gone from the driveway and there wasn’t a trace of him in the house.

My head was still groggy with painkillers. It was difficult to make out a coherent thought.

Someone rattled the door handle to my room. I had locked it the night before—a small part of me was afraid that he would try to return in the night. I cowered back in my bed, pulling the covers more tightly over me.

Go away, I wanted to say, but the words got caught in my throat.

“Mommy?” a voice called out.