Page 58

Three months later

I am standing in the middle of my empty master closet. It looks so sad with bare shelves and abandoned hanging rods. I had moved into this place when it was fully furnished. This is my first look at the stripped-down version. It’s a little unnerving.

My things are in suitcases ready to be loaded out.

The plastic, makeshift ring Will had given me is looped around my left ring finger.

Widows, I had learned, wear their wedding rings on their right hands, so I switched my diamond ring in accordance with polite society.

But when I was alone in the house, I had taken to putting on the well-worn cocktail straw, reliving the memory of when he slipped it on.

I’m wearing it now to make sure it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle of moving day.

It was an easy decision to sell this house. Too much water under too many bridges for this to ever be a happy place for me again. Este still hasn’t forgiven me, but I’ve reminded her that I’m leaving the neighborhood, not Winter Park.

Of course, I had toyed with the idea of leaving town altogether. I daydreamed about shedding my second-wife-turned-widow-turned-vigilante reputation. But Este is here, and she’s my family now. There is no way around that.

I just can’t stay in his house. This is one of the last things that was Will’s, but it was never mine.

My mother says she’ll come visit me in the new place as soon as they get to Istanbul.

She’s booked a flight and everything. I wonder if Paolo’s time in Ramona’s orbit is running down. I guess we’ll see.

I didn’t hear Mia come in until she quietly knocked on the doorframe of the closet. “Oh, hey,” I say. “You’re here.”

“Yeah.”

Mia and I both stare at the boxes we’ve filled with Will’s clothes, waiting to be donated. It’s awful to think about.

I nod to a shelf behind Mia. I had let her choose anything she wanted before someone came to haul away what used to be his. She’s here to pick up a tie and a few soft, worn T-shirts.

Mia can’t hold back the tears. Neither can I. The finality of it all is brutal. We stand in a hug for a long time, keeping each other afloat in a sea of grief.

When we’re ready, we pull ourselves back together and head downstairs. I am floored to find Constance standing in the kitchen. A lot has changed since the last time I saw her.

For starters, her best friend is in jail now.

“Get what you came for, Buggy?” she asks.

Mia nods at her mother. “But I need to grab something from my room. Can you take this?” Mia hands the pile of Will’s things to Constance and heads back upstairs.

Constance looks at the tie on top. “I bought him that tie. In the Bahamas.”

We stand there in the silence for a minute.

After Gianna was arrested, Constance had copped to lying about what Will said—he never told her he was unhappy.

But she believed so fervently that I was to blame for Will’s disappearance she had concocted the lie to get a reaction from me and pointed Ardell in my direction from the get-go.

She was trying to smoke me out. It turns out she did know Dean Morrison.

As an old friend of Will’s family, Dean had been at their wedding.

His car accident was her first clue that shit was going down.

When she sounded the alarm about Dean, Ardell didn’t listen to her either.

But leave it to the first wife. Constance knew something was wrong before all of us.

After a beat, Constance says, “Maybe we can find a way for Mia to come by to see you from time to time. For her sake.”

It’s the thinnest olive branch. An olive twig, maybe. But I’ll take it. Will’s gone. Whatever rivalry we had needs to end. At least for Mia. Maybe for all of us.

“That would be great,” I say softly. “I would love to have her anytime.”

Constance nods, then heads out the front door.

I can only imagine how hard that was for her. Maybe she’ll always resent the parts of Will’s life that didn’t include her. I don’t know if we’ll ever find a relationship beyond all of the things we begrudgingly shared. Maybe one day.

Mia comes down with a tote bag full of the last remnants of the drawers in her room. She gives me a huge hug. And as we stand there, smiling at each other, Constance’s horn blares from the driveway.

The sound cracks us up.

“I mean. She’s trying, but my mom is who she is.”

Truer words, kid.

I watch Mia get in the car and give a wave as Constance drives off.

—

It’s been a little over two months since Ardell and his team arrested Gianna and got her to confess to Will’s murder.

He had called me from the station late one night to recount her story.

Hearing him go through the details of Will’s last hour was surreal—I still can’t believe I lived through this ordeal.

That this is my story. My life. I hear it repeated in soft whispers as I walk down the street.

Did you hear what happened to Nora Somerset? It’s a crazy story.

The night of Will’s party, Fritz—extremely inebriated—left with some lawyer friends, and as he was apparently known to do, abandoned his phone and his blazer on a chair somewhere out on our lawn for Gianna to deal with.

Which she dutifully did. She and Fritz had taken to boating to our place when they visited, because Fritz liked to skirt DUI laws.

So Gianna took their boat home, but somewhere between our house and theirs she had the idea to try to confront Will.

Knowing Fritz was worried about the state of things in his partnership with Will, she decided to do what she does best: Handle it.

She went back to our dock and called him from Fritz’s phone, claiming she was having boat trouble.

Maybe he could come take a look? Will, being Will, of course obliged and went down.

Why he said it was Mia calling is the one piece that will never make sense to me, but after years of thinking on his feet in a courtroom, he handled the misdirect deftly.

He probably knew if he told me Gianna was having boat problems, I would’ve told him to let her sink and drown.

Will didn’t want the fight. He never wanted the fight, but especially not on his birthday.

Things were good between us again. Sometimes it’s okay to skip the dumb fights. Happy wife, happy life, and all that.

But not telling me set something far more sinister into motion. Something that sent Winter Park into a spiral.

Gianna had heard Fritz and Will’s failed conversation by the dock during the party, she had doubled back when the lights around the house were turned down.

When questioned by the police, she said she was trying to reason with Will and smooth over his issues with Fritz.

She knew about Dean, and the money troubles.

For all of their problems, Gianna and Fritz were thick as thieves in that way.

She also knew that Fritz suspected Will was planning to leave the firm.

All those late nights Will had been pulling were time he had put into working on his exit strategy.

Will had stood his ground with Gianna. He had turned a blind eye to a lot of things, but Fritz was committing fraud.

Gianna couldn’t negotiate her way around that fact—Fritz had driven the ship into the iceberg and Will wasn’t going to go down with him.

After they talked and he checked Gianna’s boat—it turned over just fine—Will stepped back onto the dock and bade her good night.

That’s when she came after him with a hammer Fritz kept in the boat, walloping him until he was unconscious, then rolled him off the dock, watching him disappear beneath the water’s surface.

His shirt snagged on the propeller of her boat—they’d found some threading on it after the fact—which explained why his shirt had shown up before his body.

The whole thing was messier than Gianna had hoped, but a dead Will couldn’t turn Fritz in for fraud.

She used a bucket from her boat and the lake water to wash away the blood and ditched the hammer under the dock.

She had thought of almost everything. But she hadn’t thought about the blood on the bimini.

Which did, in fact, match her DNA profile.

The rest of the story is something we may never know for certain.

At least that’s what the authorities have told me.

We were left to surmise because Will isn’t here to tell us.

Ardell and his team spent their fair share of time wondering how the gemstone got in his stomach, but knowing Will, I have a pretty strong idea.

Always the lawyer, he knew a good piece of evidence anywhere.

And he knew good evidence was to be protected.

He must have sensed his demise or at least an imminent loss of consciousness, and when the stone popped out of Gianna’s ring, knocked loose during the struggle, he swallowed it.

He knew I’d be able to recognize it. And in that one act he gave me his parting gift—the power to take down Gianna Hall.

Gianna was always cleaning up after Fritz.

I can’t say I believe the bit about her trying to smooth things over with Will.

The size of the wounds in the back of his head would suggest blind rage, not steady rationality.

But it was almost the perfect crime, because why would anyone look at Gianna?

She’d placed a heavy bet on Fritz’s connections keeping her out of the pool of suspects and figured Fritz might be able to do some double-dealing if she was brought in.

She’d probably covered up enough for him through the years to be able to call in the favor.

But with Fritz in hot water for the financial crimes around the firm, his social capital was gone, which meant so were her protections.

She hadn’t accounted for Dean and Perry.

She hadn’t accounted for Fritz being arrested.

And she certainly hadn’t accounted for me.