Page 93 of The Wife Upstairs

She raises an eyebrow. “Thoughts?”

I take a long, deliberate sip of wine. “I guess that’s a version of the truth.”

“But you don’t like it.”

I don’t. I don’t want to be the tragic ingenue, the idiot who got duped by a handsome face and a huge bank account.

A victim.

I sit back in my chair, looking at Bea. Maybe it’s the wine, but she’s not looking quite so pale now, and even with her messy hair and pajamas, she looks almost… elegant.

“Why aren’t you more freaked out?” I ask her now, and she meets my eyes across the table. She has pretty eyes, big and dark, her lashes thick without mascara.

“Why aren’t you?” she counters. “You just found out the man you love is a murderer and his dead wife is alive. A little screaming and crying wouldn’t be unheard of.”

I don’t answer.

“Do you know what I think?” she continues. “I think there’s a reason Eddie fell for both of us. No”—she holds up a hand, cutting off my attempt to demur—“he genuinely cares for you. He wouldn’t have risked bringing you into his life if he didn’t. But I think we’re a lot alike, Jane.”

“That’s not my real name,” I say, before I can stop myself, and she smiles.

“And Bea isn’t mine.”

“I knew that,” I tell her. “Tripp.”

She rolls her eyes. “Fucking Tripp.”

I almost laugh at that because I know how she feels. But there’s still something so… wrong about all this. She’s too calm, too collected, too in control for a woman who just went through the most harrowing thing I can think of.

Then she leans forward and says, “Eddie said you were nothing like me. I don’t think that’s the case.”

I look at her, sitting there like a queen, lying through her teeth, and I know they’re the only truthful words she’s uttered.

PART XII

BEA

36

He loved you.

I don’t know why hearing those words out of Jane’s mouth hit me like they do. Maybe because Jane, of all people, wouldn’t want that to be true.

But Jane is a good liar.

I can tell, looking at her. I can also tell that she isn’t at all the girl Eddie thought she was. A girl who would smash his face in with a silver pineapple, then sit here with his wife—who she’d been told was dead at the bottom of a lake—drinking wine.

I like this girl, so much that I almost feel sorry for Eddie that he couldn’t see this side of her.

He might have liked it, too.

Or maybe he did. Maybe, as much as he hated to admit it, Eddie knew she was like me.

Knew that it was what had drawn him to her in the first place.

She takes another sip of her wine. She is petite, pale, her hair a color between blond and brown that isn’t particularly flattering, and the clothes she’s wearing look like muted imitations of the other women in this neighborhood. Maybe that was enough to fool Eddie, but he should have looked into her eyes.

Her eyes give it all away.