Page 14 of Hush Money

Her frown deepens. “The waves were so rough. They made the boats thunk against the dock. I didn’t know which way to go. It was like I knew Ackerley was here, but I couldn’t find it. And then I heard a man’s voice and I…” She focuses on me again, shrugging helplessly. “That’s it.”

“So you remember Daniel finding you on the beach last night. Anything else before that?”

A flash of despair from Ravenna. “No. Nothing.”

“How convenient.”

“I can’t believe I’ve been gone for two years, Lucien,” she says, her voice rising. “How’s that possible?”

“You tell me.”

Those bright green eyes fill with tears. “You’re so cold,” she says, wiping one away from her cheek as soon as it falls. “Why are you treating me like this? If I really have been gone for two years, like you say, why aren’t you glad to see me? What’s happened to you?”

I could almost laugh. This is the thing about Ravenna. She twists things. That’s what she does. She takes a set of straightforward facts and reshapes them in her hands like some master potter with a lump of clay on her wheel, crafting something you don’t recognize. Something that makes you wonder if you’re the one who’s out of touch with reality.

I’m done playing this game. Life’s too short.

“Like I said, we don’t need to get into all this now,” I say, heading for the hallway. “I’m going to check on the workers. See when they think they’ll have the road clear.”

She stands and hurries over, intercepting me before I can get too far. But the effort seems to take it out of her, and she sways unsteadily. Instinct makes me reach out and grab her shoulders to study her. And suddenly there she is, in my arms again, the picture of wounded innocence.

“I love you, Lucien. Why are you treating me like this? What’s happened?”

“You need to sit down,” I say harshly, letting go the second I see that she’s not going to fall.

She puts her hands on my chest and tips her face up to mine. “No. Tell me what’s going on. You’re acting like you don’t want me around. Like you don’t want to be married to me anymore, and I don’t understand— Wait a minute.” Dawning horror takes over her face. “There’s someone else, isn’t there? Oh my God. Are you cheating on me?”

Outrage appears out of nowhere and swallows me whole as I push her hands away. That’s what this kind of insane hypocrisy does to a person. I feel myself drowning in it. Choking on it.

I’m cheating?

I suppose she doesn’t remember that time on our honeymoon when she flirted outrageously with the Italian waiter right in front of me. Or the times, too numerous to count, when she said she was going to dinner or clubbing or girls’ night with friends in the city and wound up staying all night or two days or a week without checking in with me or answering my increasingly frantic calls and texts.

She denied everything. I never quite believed the denials, but how could I accept the awful truth about the kind of person I married?

I suppose she also doesn’t remember the endless spending, the recreational drugs or the increasingly debauched parties here at Ackerley while I desperately tried to fix things and wondered how to recover the intoxicating woman I’d enjoyed during our honeymoon period. I tried to expel the demon and get my wife back when I should have realized that my wife was the demon the whole time.

The worst part of it all is that it took most of our marriage for me to realize what I was dealing with. To fully appreciate what she was. What she is. Then it took years after her so-called death for me to recover from the mind-fuckery and begin to feel like myself again. And the very second I find Tamsyn and think that maybe I can build something with a wonderful woman, here’s Ravenna again.

The obscenity of it all threatens to make my head explode.

“You’re asking me if I cheated on you?” I bark. “Is that what you just said?”

She recoils. “What’s that supposed to mean? Are you suggesting that I cheated on you?”

I laugh bitterly. This whole situation is so ridiculous that it’s all I can do. “Yes, Ravenna. That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.”

“I’ve never cheated on you, Lucien.” More pretty tears plus a wounded hand on her chest, as though I’ve pierced her nonexistent heart with an ice pick. “I would never cheat on you.”

“How can you be so sure?” I ask. “Having lost your memory and all.”

She blinks. “Because I know how much I love you. I may not remember everything, but I remember that.”

“So I suppose you don’t remember that we had a blowup a couple days before you disappeared. Another blowup, actually. After my investor dinner here at the house. When I caught you coming out of my study right after one of the investors you just met that night. Steve Smithson. Remember him?”

She puts some real effort into looking startled and offended. “No. I was probably, I don’t know, showing him your collection of chess sets or something.”

I choke back a laugh. “Heavy on the or something.”

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