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Opal

While marina was gone, Opal and Lilah found a couple of pairs of yellow latex gloves under the kitchen sink and together, they cleaned the used dueling pistol and wiped it down for prints. Lilah’s color had come back and she looked a lot better, but neither of them seemed inclined to speak.

They had a lot to think about. Opal couldn’t stop seeing those two bodies lying together on the floor: the skeleton, and Zander. One so dry, and one so...wet.

She shook her head and stood up. She needed to be active, to be moving around. “I’m going to gather up all the rags and cleaning equipment I can, are you all right to finish this?”

“Yes, I’m enjoying it,” said Lilah absently, polishing the engraved silver grip with a soft cloth. Opal had to admit that she was pretty impressed. Before this morning, she would’ve expected Lilah to fall to pieces.

There was something else different about her, too, other than Marina’s bright scarf around her neck, and watching Lilah’s hands in the yellow rubber gloves, she realized what it was. “Where’s your engagement ring?”

“I got rid of it yesterday. I didn’t feel right wearing it anymore.”

“How’d you get rid of it?

“I left it at my father’s grave. But I think now that I’ll have to go back and get it, if it’s still there. I don’t want anything that Zachary touched anywhere near my father.”

Opal left Lilah in the kitchen and went to rummage around the cupboard. She was not a reflective person, by nature. In fact, she preferred to think as little as possible and focus on action, instead. But something about seeing the man you had married with his head blown off made you reconsider your life choices.

She still had her wedding ring. It was wrapped in tissue, wrapped in a sock, inside the toe of a pair of stilettos that she never wore any more. She had tried to throw it away. She had got as far as standing on the Millennium Bridge with it in her hand, but somehow, she couldn’t. So, she’d brought it home and hidden it out of sight and out of mind, where she wouldn’t have to think about the ring or what had stopped her from throwing it.

It wasn’t as if it was worth anything. Typical of Zander, it looked expensive—a white gold band covered with diamonds—but the diamonds were fake and the gold was plated. If their marriage had lasted longer than a few years, her ring finger would have turned green.

So why had she kept it?

The cupboard was full of hat boxes, rainboots of all different sizes, actual fur coats, and a full-sized dressmaker’s mannequin without a head, which was too human for comfort. She pulled them out and left them in a heap behind her. Right in the back, she found a cardboard box containing a mess of tools, with an old-fashioned feather duster poking out of the top. As she was dragging the box out of the cupboard, she thought, I kept his ring because I couldn’t bear to be free of him .

And right then, she sat down on the parquet floor and burst into tears.

It was a messy cry, the sort of cry she hadn’t had in years, maybe never; the kind like a storm that hit from outside, where she wailed and snot came out of her nose and the tears fell and she couldn’t do anything but double up in pain and weather it.

She couldn’t bear to be free of him. And now she was, and it hurt, and she didn’t know why.

“Shhh.” Lilah was beside her, an arm around her shoulders. “Shh, it’s okay. You’re going to be all right. You’re strong.”

“I’m only strong because of him,” Opal sobbed, and that sent her into another paroxysm of sobs that were half a scream, another storm that she could not fight against, only survive.

It passed, eventually. And she realized that she was still sitting on the floor and Lilah was sitting beside her, holding her, stroking her back, making comforting noises.

“It’s okay,” said Lilah, and Opal pulled away, wiping her face on the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Lilah gave her a cotton handkerchief. “It’s all right. You loved him. It’s bound to hurt.”

“It’s not okay,” said Opal. She blew her nose.

“You asked me before, so I’m going to ask you now. Did he hit you?”

“Yes,” said Opal. Though she had never said this to anyone before. She had tried her best never to think about it.

But now, sitting on the parquet floor next to a heap of fur coats, she told Lilah.