Page 80 of What You left in Me
I bring the cigarette to my mouth, drawing a deep inhale that will stain the bottoms of my lungs with tar. The smoke tastes like nothing to me, already embittered. Mostly it gives me a rhythm to measure my anger by.
I hear them a scrape of shoes against concrete, and a voice like gravel. And then… Eleanor’s clipped reply like someone trying to arrange the edges of a disaster into something tidy. I’m already moving before thought catches up: a shadow hugging the building, a path that lets me look without being obvious. The courtyard is a bowl of light and dark and they’re standing in the dim edge, two figures that definitely don’t belong together.
Eleanor is all perfection and posture, a spine meant to discomfort the public. Even in the courtyard, away from cameras and teacups, she’s the sort of woman who wears control the way other women wear perfume. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think this was a perfectly normal scene but the tremor in her hands gives it away.
Fuck. Have I ever seen that? I should take a picture and sell it for a few grand.
Her hands flutter to her throat, to the signature string of pearls, as if the touch might steady whatever is trying to pull her apart inside.
Waren looks like everything a man who traffics in other people’s desperation ought to: too thin and quick with a smile that never reaches his eyes, red rims around both irises like he’s been rubbing the truth raw. He leans into Eleanor like he’s tasting something sweet. The smell of him, old whiskey and stale smoke, drifts across the courtyard and makes the night suddenly cheap and bitter.
“You owe me, Eleanor,” he says. The way he says it isn’t accusatory; it’s a reminder. A ledger, spoken aloud. “You paid me once to make it disappear. That debt doesn’t just vanish.”
Her voice is a small, brittle thing. “Keep your voice down. This is not the time.”
“For you maybe,” he answers, the sentence a knife to her throat. “For me? It’s always the time.”
I flatten myself to the wall and listen. I can tell when a man’s voice is testing, trying to get a reaction. Get what he wants.
Then Waren leans in, lowers his voice the way men do when they want the words to be poison. “I know what you mademe do to his wife. He’s right there. I could go inside and tell him everything.”
The world tilts. The floor crumples beneath me and it takes everything in me to keep myself upright. Concealed.
Eleanor’s mask, that proud, controlled face she wears like armor, slips a fraction. For the first time since I can remember, she looks, actually looks, afraid. This is the raw, animal sort of fear you only see when someone has misjudged their own reach.
She takes a step back. “Waren…” her voice breaks, thin as a thread. “You don’t understand…”
“Oh, I understand,” he says. “I understand payments and deals. I fucking get what desperation smells like. And what I understand best is that people pay me to tidy up what they can’t show a face for. You paid and I did what you asked.”
She swallows audibly.
“It was supposed to be…” She grasps for some tether that does not exist, grappling for any version of reality that softens the edge of what she did. Words start coming out of her mouth that she’s been keeping to herself for decades at this point. “It was supposed to be discreet. And it was a one-time payment thing you said that yourself. Why are you back? I… I fell in love. I didn’t have another choice.”
The confession lands like an anvil.
Eleanor fell in love. My chest tightens with the absurdity of the thought and then with the bite of it: a woman who framed her life around propriety says she fell in love and that is the reason she commissioned a man like Waren to make my mother disappear.
She goes on, in that brittle, rapid voice that tries to dress a crime as a romance. “I thought… God, I thought if I made the road clear…if I could remove what bound him, he would be free.He would see me. He would be mine. Richard was never going to leave her. He wasn’t going to leave that life. I… I was selfish. I did a terrible thing.”
Waren watches her with the smug indulgence of a man who’s been paid to witness other people’s weaknesses. “You weren’t selfish,” he murmurs. “You were strategic. Same thing, different angle. And I stepped in. You gave me the cash, the contacts, the access. I did a job. Now enough with the sob story.”
“But you were supposed to make it look like an accident,” Eleanor says, clutching at the image she’s crafted as if it’s a talisman. “You said it would be smooth… just an unfortunate evening, a mistake. Not—not go on for months. She was in so much pain because the poison was too slow.”
She chokes on the last word.
Waren’s eyes, the terrible red around them, narrow. “A slow death sells better than murder, Mrs. Wagner. People prefer fate and chance because it lets them keep sleeping. You wanted quiet. You wanted him to have a second act with you in it. I arranged the ending everyone bought. I wasn’t gonna let your stupidity ruin my life.”
My hands clench without permission. My knuckles go white. Eleanor and Waren’s words fall like stones into a glass house I never realized I lived in. I have never liked Eleanor… never trusted the woman who is elegant on the surface and barbed underneath. But I never imagined the kind of hunger that could make her cross a line this obscene. Not her. Not the woman who kept trying to teach me manners and polite small talk even though I was an adult.
And what will Ariane do when she finds out? My stomach twists at the thought of Ariane, the girl who believes in the rituals of kindness, the woman I touched and want and couldruin with a single truth. If Eleanor is capable of this, what does that mean for Ariane’s idea of her mother? For the stories she has been told about loyalty and protection and what her mother sacrificed for her? I can feel the shape of that future like a hot iron waiting to brand.
Waren’s voice is a low rasp. “You asked me to get her out of the way. That’s what I did, and I did it well. I made it look like a natural death. Pills, drink, some clever timing… people think tragic things happen and move on. You paid me, thanked me and asked me to be quiet. You thought money could make guilt evaporate. What else did you fucking expect?”
She says, in a thin, pathetic breath, “I did it because I loved him.”
Love. The word should have been ridiculous; instead, it stings. There’s a fundamental ugliness to a love that sits across a corpse like a throne. That Eleanor confesses, not as a confession of weakness but as an explanation, makes my stomach roll.
Waren snorts. “Love. That’s a pretty word for someone like you.” He spits the sentence like something that’s been in his mouth too long. “You paid me, and I did the kind of work you hired me for. I don’t need your moral theater, Eleanor. I need what keeps me fed. And you kept me fed. I’ve been looking for you for at least a year now. I’m out of everything and your wealth’s gonna fill me up.”