Page 53 of What Happened Last Night

This baby, it was fate’s way of pushing W and me back into each other’s arms. There’s no way he would stay with C now. He will choose me and our baby. We will be a family, just liked I’d always wanted us to be. This must have all just been a test, the universe testing me to see if W really meant enough to me, and I had proven myself and now I’m being rewarded. The universe has given me the tools I need to get my man back.

I feel hope growing inside me, and for the first time in a long time, I feel happy without meth or alcohol, although I know I will need a little of both before I confront W with the truth. And I also know I can’t tell just him.

He will tell me to have an abortion and that’ll be the end of it. He made it clear around the office that I was nothing to him. He barely spoke to me, and when he did, he was nasty and spiteful, blaming me for the breakdown of his marriage. It must have already been broken or he wouldn’t have turned to me in the first place. I was never brave enough to say that out loud. I never even admitted to the affair out loud, although I’m sure everyone at work knew about it. Instead, I just played dumb and maintained the notion that I had never so much as looked twice at W, let alone anything else. It hurt me to deny that we were in love, but I see it now. It was another test.

Just like it was when W tried to convince me to stop driving by his home. I didn’t stop, of course. How could I do that? I live for those moments where I get to see a flash of him, and although I hate C with a passion, I kind of look forward to seeing her too. If I’m vigilant for long enough, I’m sure I’ll see something that I can use against her. And every time I see her, I’m reassured that I’m younger, prettier, and have a better figure than her. Surely, that all has to count for something.

Anyway, I digress. I have to tell W he’s going to be a father, that we’re going to be a family. But I have to do it in front of C. I can’t let W be able to wriggle out of this one. If C knows about the baby, maybe she’ll step up and tell W he has to do the right thing by me, by his child. And sure, he’ll be pissed off at first, but he’ll come back around, and he’ll see what I always knew. We were meant for each other. He’ll realize that the universe was testing him too, and even though he hasn’t exactly passed his test with flying colors, it doesn’t matter because I’ve been strong enough for the both of us.

Tonight’s the night. I’m going over there. To W’s house. I’m going to wait until it’s dark, until it’s late enough that I know they’ll both be home. I already know how I will get in. There’s a little window in their basement, just big enough for me to slip through, and it’s out of sight of the road so I don’t even have to risk being seen.

From there, I’ll find them and tell them everything. Both of them together. I have a knife stashed away, ready to take with me. I have to take the knife, as much as the thought of stabbing anyone repulses me. Because if C gets in my way again, I’m not going to just stand by and allow her to take my man. I’m going there tonight to take back what is mine, with or without C’s cooperation.

God, I’m scared, but I have to be strong for just a little bit longer. I just have to pass this final test and that’s it. W and I can be together forever. And that makes anything I have to do tonight more than worthwhile. Wish me luck, Dear Diary.

That was the last entry in the diary, and it was scary to read. Candy had most definitely lost the plot completely by that point. She had succumbed to the drink and the drugs, and it was clear that she was more than a little bit mentally unhinged by that point.

Although Candy saw Carlotta as the enemy, Morrie could see the same thing I saw. Carlotta was as much a victim in this as Candy was in some ways. William was the one who'd gotten Candy’s hopes up and then dashed them. William was the one who had chosen Carlotta. William was the one who had broken Candy, even if he wasn’t the one who had actually killed her.

Reading the diary, though, I was becoming more and more convinced that I was right about William being the one to kill Candy. He had the most to lose. And the diary painted a very clear picture of a young, impressionable girl who was a little dreamy and a little too quick to trust who had been used, impregnated, and then tossed aside like garbage. That wouldn’t suit William’s narrative in any way, shape, or form, and it seemed like he had decided to end his problem with her, once and for all.

At first, my instincts had me leaning more toward Carlotta as the chief suspect. William had mostly remained calm, stating his answers to my questions without much emotion. Carlotta, on the other hand, was quick to work herself into a panic. When she felt overwhelmed or attacked, her voice became abrasive and shrill, and I had mistakenly believed it to be because she was a killer. Now I was seeing that it was manifesting through the fear of being caught lying to protect her husband.

While in some ways, I thought Carlotta was a victim in this to some extent, there was no doubt in my mind that she was also a queen of manipulation and that she knew way more than she was letting on. I had to know how her story really ended, the one where she tried to convince me that Candy had jumped from the window of her own accord. There was no way that was true, and I needed to get through to Carlotta, to make her drop the act and tell me the whole truth.

I stood up and went through to my office where I locked the diary away in my top drawer. At some point, it would need to be officially submitted as evidence, but for now, I had something more important to do. I was going to go over to the Aldens’ place and ask them some questions.

Past experience had taught me that the Aldens turned to drink when they were stressed, which was a lot of the time recently, and I had a feeling there would have been quite an unpleasant scene when Carlotta got home and confronted William about not bailing her out last night. I was hoping to catch them both a little bit drunk and a lot loose-lipped.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Carlotta

Itapped the pen against the dressing table as I paused to think. It occurred to me that William had an office and I didn’t. It had never bothered me before. I had my studio, and for all of William’s faults, if I had told him at any point that I wanted an office, he’d have had designers and decorators in within days to create one for me. I had never wanted an office before because I had no real need for one. The odd bits of paperwork I had to deal with were done in William’s office, but it felt like too much to write this in there. Like it would be the final insult to a man I had once loved.

It felt wrong to be doing this at all, really. I was sitting here in my marital bedroom, writing a statement for Detective Del Rey that told the whole truth about what had really happened that night, a statement that put William very much on the hook for murder. I was going to tell the whole story, even the part about how Candy hadn’t jumped from our bedroom window, how William had pushed her. But I wanted to be fair about the statement, and I fully intended to include that the only reason William had pushed Candy in the first place was to save my life. I thought that was the least I could do when I was condemning him.

I still wasn’t entirely convinced that I was doing the right thing by writing this statement at all, but I knew after I had poured it all out on the pages that if I changed my mind, I could burn it and no one would ever have to know I’d even written it. I didn’t think I would do that, though. At that point, I just wanted the truth to come out and this whole fucking thing to be over.

Besides, the more I thought about it, the more I knew I was doing the right thing. William might have saved my life, but immediately after that, he seemed to be hell-bent on ruining it. He had left me to stew in a fucking jail cell filled with someone else’s vomit last night. And he had told Detective Del Rey a pack of lies about me, about what had happened.

I felt like I had stood by William through everything, and he had done nothing but treat me like utter shit. I was starting to think that handing over this statement would be easy.

The priest’s words still came back to me sometimes, how by telling the truth I was setting William on the path to redemption. But honestly, I was past the point where I even cared that I was breaking my wedding vows. Because I certainly wasn’t the one who had ruined this marriage.

William had been the one to break our wedding vows first, long before I would have even contemplated it. He had cheated on me God knows how many times; he had treated me like the hired help... no, actually worse than that. At least he would have been civil to the hired help. Then when he saw a chance to perhaps save his own skin, he hadn’t hesitated to throw me under the bus with the police.

Well, fuck him. It took two people to make a marriage work, and I was fed up of trying to do it alone. It also took two people to break a marriage, and ours had been broken by William and that fucking little skank.

I didn’t think for a second that Candy deserved to die for what she had done, but I was definitely starting to see that William deserved to do time for what he had done. To me, to Candy, to Lord knows how many others. The man was toxic. It had just taken me way too long to realize that for myself.

When I started writing my statement, I had taken the same vow I knew I would have to one day take in court. I had vowed to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God, and that’s exactly what I was doing. If William didn’t like that, then perhaps he should have thought through his actions before he had killed Candy. Or even better, before he had brought her into our lives at all.

A pang of guilt went through me at the thought that William should have thought through the consequences of his actions before he killed Candy. If he had thought twice, there was no doubt in my head that I’d be the one who was dead, and Detective Del Rey would have had a very different case on his hands.

I laughed then, a bitter-sounding laugh, when I realized something else. Whichever way this had gone, William would have gotten off scot free if it wasn’t for my attack of conscience. The police would never be able to prove one way or the other which of us had killed Candy without some seriously compelling testimony, and most likely, a confession from one of us. Any half-decent lawyer could create reasonable doubt when there were two people present at the scene of a murder, no forensic evidence present on the victim, and no other witnesses to the crime. And if I had been the one to die, then the forensic evidence would have proven Candy to be the killer and William could have played the grieving widower for a while, lamenting on how he didn’t act quickly enough and it was all his fault, and then just moved on with his life without either me or Candy to hold him back.

God, he was such a bastard sometimes, and so damned cunning.

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