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Opal

“I’ll...I’ll go get us something to drink,” said Marina, and she ran up the stairs. Lilah waited until she was gone, and then sidled up to Opal.

“I think she pushed him down the stairs,” whispered Lilah, glancing after Marina. “On purpose.”

“Of course she pushed him down the stairs on purpose,” said Opal in her normal speaking voice. “That woman’s got balls. I didn’t expect it of her.”

“You’re not frightened?”

“Why should I be? She’s not pushing us down the stairs. And if she wanted to keep us captive, too, she would’ve locked the door.”

The door above them was open. That seemed to make Lilah feel a little better.

“We need to call the police,” said Lilah.

“You want Marina to go to jail? A mother of three?”

“We don’t know her. We just met her today.”

“She hasn’t told us her side of the story yet. We don’t know what made her push him.”

“You can’t just go pushing people down the stairs. They could die.”

“If she’d wanted to kill him, she wouldn’t have asked us to come over,” Opal pointed out.

“She asked you to come over, not me.”

“Regardless. Be sensible. If she were attempting murder, she wouldn’t want witnesses.”

“I just think we should call the police and let them deal with it.”

“Listen,” said Opal. “I get it. You’re scared. But Zander—Zachary—is the bad guy here. Not Marina, or either of us. The three of us are his victims.”

“I don’t know,” said Lilah. “Am I a victim? I thought that he loved me.”

Opal huffed impatiently. “He lied to you and stole your money.”

“I have a lot of money to spare. I would have given it to him anyway, if he’d asked.”

Lilah gazed at Zander with soft, foolish eyes.

“He’s broken your heart,” said Opal. “And isn’t your heart the most important thing you own?”

“That doesn’t mean that he deserves to be hurt.”

Opal had a different opinion. But instead she asked something she’d been curious about, since finding out about Lilah.

“Did he ever hit you?”

“What? No! He would never!”

Opal decided to let it lie. “Like I said, I think we should hear Marina’s side of the story first. There’s plenty of time to call the police later.”

“Did he hit you ?”

“That’s not relevant.” She turned away to look at the shelves of wine. There were a lot of bottles down here. This whole house, with its antiques and its location and its gardens, had to be worth millions. No wonder Zander was worming his way in.

“Did you love him?” Lilah asked suddenly.

“Why do you care?”

“I need to know. Did you love him?”

Despite herself, Opal remembered the day she’d married Zander Bolt. She hadn’t thought about it for a long time—good riddance to bad rubbish—but looking at the photographs this afternoon had actually stirred some memories.

Her bouquet had been roses and jasmine. Her dress had been silk. All her life, she had been contemptuous of vapid girls who dreamed about their wedding day, as if they had no higher ambitions than to give up their identity to some man in exchange for a veil and a princess dress. In her opinion, marriage was either a business transaction or a life sentence. Her parents’ had been the latter; Zander and she had agreed that theirs would be the former. Meld their resources, present a united front, grow their enterprises together. She’d proposed to him, as a matter of practicality, and there were no fireworks or champagne.

So she’d expected to approach her own wedding day with a healthy dose of cynicism. But when she’d started down the aisle of the registry office (on the arm of no man—her father was long dead by then and she was no one’s to give away), there had been a moment where she’d caught Zander’s eye and he had smiled at her.

And her heart had fluttered. She remembered it as if it had been yesterday.

It had been her biggest mistake. Because of it, she would end up broke, and someone would end up dead.

“I loved him,” she said. It was the only plausible explanation of why he’d got away with it.

Lilah nodded. “That’s good enough. Okay. I won’t call the police right away.” She squatted next to Zander and wiped off the little bit of blood that was on his forehead.

“Why do my past feelings for Zander have anything to do with it?”

“Because if you ever loved him, really loved him, then you’ll want to make sure he is all right. Even if you think that he victimized us. You won’t want to make any choices that will hurt him in the long run. So I won’t call the police until I’ve heard the whole story.”

Opal opened her mouth, and closed it again. Maybe this wasn’t the ideal time to shatter Lilah’s romantic illusions.

Instead, she also squatted down next to Zander and began going through his pockets. Keys, wallet. No phone.

“His phone’s not in his pocket,” she said. “Where is it?”

Lilah stood. “He doesn’t carry it in his pocket. He always turns his phone off when he’s with me. Often he leaves it at home, or in the office. I thought it was because he didn’t want to be distracted.”

“More likely it was because he didn’t want you to see what he was really up to.”

Marina came back down the stairs and gave each of them a juice box. They had cartoon characters made up of fruit on the sides. Opal’s was Bertha Blackcurrant.

“I thought you meant a drink drink,” said Opal.

“Oh. Sorry. I’ve got kids—”

“You keep telling us. It’s odd that you find it more acceptable to push a man down the stairs and tie him up while there are children in the house than to have an alcoholic drink.”

“You’re welcome to, I mean—” Marina gestured around at the extensive wine cellar. “Take your pick.” She poked the attached straw into her own box.

“That food upstairs,” said Lilah. “It wasn’t for us. You had a date.”

“I had a date with Xavier,” Marina confirmed. “Zander. Zachary. Whatever his name is. I hadn’t planned it; he’d said he had an unexpectedly free evening and asked if I wanted to meet.”

She sat down on a large cardboard box labeled “Jars” and stared at the unconscious Zander. She looked exhausted. Opal and Lilah stayed standing.

“Why did you push him down the stairs?” Lilah asked.

Opal expected Marina to feign surprise, or to deny that she’d done it and pretend that he’d fallen naturally. But instead Marina said, “I’m not sure. I thought about it, but it was more like a fantasy than a real thing that I was going to do. Like, ‘This guy needs to be taught a lesson.’ In an abstract sense. But then I bought the pickles especially, so maybe I really did plan to do it.”

Opal wasn’t sure how the pickles fitted in, but she waited while Marina took a deep drink from her juice box and carried on.

“I was mostly going on autopilot. That’s what you do sometimes, when you have small children. You can’t think about everything all at once, because you’d go nuts, and also you are tired most of the time so you physically can’t think of it all. So sometimes you go through your day and it’s not until the kids go down for their naps that you realize that you can’t remember what you’ve been doing. Somehow the kids got fed and the dishes got washed and the laundry got folded, but you can’t remember doing any of it. And you’ve let their childhood slip away without even noticing.”

She seemed to go into a reverie.

“But Zander?” Opal prompted gently.

“He was the thing, you know. The one thing that made me feel as if I were actually alive and living in the moment, for myself. I was never on autopilot with him. I felt like me, for the first time in years. And...it was all a lie.”

Marina looked up at both of them.

“So yes. I wasn’t sure if I was going to go through with it, but I suppose I did plan to push him. I gave him pickles to hold so he couldn’t grab the banister.”

“So you’re mad at Zander,” said Opal. “Fair enough, the bastard deserves it. But you made a date with him, even though you agreed not to see him until we’d had a chance to talk about what our plan was, going forward.”

“There was a plan going forward?” asked Lilah. Opal waved at her to say they’d discuss that later.

“I’m sorry,” said Marina. “I know. And you were right. It’s a complicated situation and I should not have done something impulsive and stupid and illegal and then involved the two of you in it without your consent.” She took a breath. “But the thing is...the thing is. I’ve followed the plan for most my life, never hurt anyone, and where’s it got me? And also, when I pushed him down the stairs...it felt good.”

A silence fell.

“It felt good?” Lilah said at last. “You hurt someone and it felt good? Are you literally crazy?”

“I’m not the one who slapped a random mother of three in a McDonald’s and called her a hussy, so.”

“I apologized for that!” Lilah turned to Opal. “This is all your fault. If you hadn’t told us about Zachary, none of this would have happened.”

“You’re blaming me?” said Opal. “For telling the truth?”

“We would never have known. We would have gone on living our lives, being happy.”

“He’s been lying to you. How can you be happy if you’re living in a fictional world?”

“I’ve lived in fictional worlds all my life and it’s been absolutely fine!”

“Then you’re an idiot,” said Opal. “Although frankly this does not come as a surprise. And you .” She pointed at Marina. “You have to stop apologizing so fucking much.”

“Sorry,” said Marina, and then she put her hand over her mouth.

Opal threw her juice box away. It landed on the unconscious body of her ex-husband and bounced onto the flagstone floor. “Screw this,” she said, turning away.

“What are you doing?” asked Lilah and Marina, more or less at the same time.

“I’m getting a real drink.”

She perused the shadowy shelves, which were stacked with wine bottles lying on their sides. She wasn’t a wine drinker, as a rule; it had too much sugar and she hated the way the scent of it oozed out of her pores the next day. If she wanted a drink (if, on the very rare occasion, she wanted to get drunk, as falling-down-comatose drunk as her dad used to get), she drank vodka on ice.

But she was in a wine cellar, and when in Rome. If she was going to drink wine, she was going to have the best one she could. She figured that Marina owed her an expensive drink at the very least after pulling her into this mess.

Opal reached for the oldest-looking bottle on the shelf, one coated thickly with dust, with cobwebs spinning from the wax seal over the cork. She pulled it out, and in that moment two things happened at once.

Behind her, Zander moaned.

And in front of her, with a faint rattle and clank, the wine rack slid to one side, exposing a heavy wooden door with a hatch in it.