Page 51 of The Wife

“She’s your husband’s lawyer, Mrs. Powell, not yours. And she’ll do anything to win a case, including use you and anyone else in a position to help or hurt her client. I don’t know what Randall told you, but the DA can subpoena you. A few of your private conversations might be protected, but other matters are fair game. What time did he come home? Did you notice anything unusual about his appearance or clothing? Things like that.”

“I’m not going to help you railroad my husband. You should be investigating that woman and her company.”

“The woman has a name—Kerry Lynch—and she’s afraid right now. She’s afraid of her name being printed. She’s afraid of being blamed for what happened. She’s afraid that her life’s never going back to normal again. Does that sound familiar? It’s natural to want to protect your husband, but open your mind for one second and just imagine that she’s telling the truth. If that’s the case, do you really want to help Olivia Randall victimize her a second time? This case isn’t going away. No plea bargains. No probation deal. This is actually happening, Mrs. Powell. Will your husband still have a job pending trial? If he gets convicted, are you and your son going to visit him in prison? These aren’t things Olivia Randall will help you with. She’s looking out for Jason, not you.”

“You’re trying to scare me.”

“I want you to ask yourself why you’re so damn sure Jason’s innocent. If it’s based on evidence, then fine, stick with him, and we’ll see which side wins at trial. But if it’s only because you think you know him—”

The detective handed me the papers she was holding. It was marked as an incident report, dated that morning, documenting an interview with a woman named Lana Sullivan. She was a prostitute who claimed that Jason had picked her up three years earlier when she was walking the streets in Murray Hill. I flipped the page to find an explicit description of the sex acts she performed upon him inside our car when it was pulled to the side of the road near the playground by the UN. Whoever drafted the report should have been a professional writer. I could visualize every moment.

I handed the report back to the detective. I didn’t want a copy in my home.

“I left out the part where your husband basically blamed you for the fact that he was hiring a prostitute.”

I couldn’t look away from her gaze.

“He told her that his wife had ‘problems,’ and that’s why he needed to go elsewhere. I know about what happened when you were younger. I can’t imagine what you went through.”

No, you can’t, I thought. “That was a long time ago. It has nothing to do with Jason.”

“Unless it does. There’s a pattern forming here, Angela. Your husband likes to have power over women.”

What was she insinuating? That Jason had chosen mebecauseof my past? That Jason was now targeting other women because I was no longer available to him? That I was only defending Jason because I had been trained to be subservient? All of the above? I knew I should throw her off my property, but the look in her eyes stopped me. There was something about the way she spoke to me, as if she was genuinely trying to protect me. Could empathy be faked this well?

I forced myself to break from her eye contact. “We’re done here, Detective. I need to find my husband.”

She nodded, but reached into her blazer pocket and handed me a business card. “I promise I’ll keep asking myself every day, What if Jason’s innocent? But please, like I said, just imagine for one second that he’s not. Call me if you ever want to talk.”

As I picked up the phone to call Olivia Randall, I tucked Detective Corrine Duncan’s card inside my purse. I didn’t want Jason to find it if he ever managed to get home.

33

I went to the arraignment the next morning. I wore the closest thing I had to a suit—a gray dress I had purchased for Jason’s book launch, topped by a black blazer—thinking it would be like a trial. But the whole thing took less than ten minutes once Jason’s name was finally called.

Jason was charged with one count of rape, and one count of attempted offensive physical touching for whatever happened in his office with Rachel Sutton. The one surprise was the date of the alleged incident with Kerry Lynch. It wasn’t the week before, when he drove to her house in Long Island. It was supposedly on April 10, nearly two months earlier. I found myself wondering how she had chosen which of the many times she had fucked my husband to use for her false allegation.

His bail was set at $100,000. I watched helplessly as deputies placed him back in handcuffs and escorted him out of the courtroom. I had panicked, but Olivia explained that his bail only required $10,000 cash. Once I covered it, we were down to a four-digit balance, more than I ever had in savings before I met Jason, but still, I was worried.

By the time Jason got back to our place, it was after midnight. I was sitting on the sofa, flipping channels aimlessly, when I heard a key in the door.

I rushed to the door and gave him a hug. “I had no idea where you were.” He smelled dank, and his eyes were bloodshot.

“I was wondering whereyouwere,” he said.

“What? I’ve been sitting here, waiting.”

“My battery was dead, and I couldn’t find a cab. I finally gave some guy forty bucks cash to order an Uber from the detention center.”

We spent a few minutes blaming the police, corrections officials, and Olivia for the mix-up before he asked if Spencer had called.

I felt a tug in my chest. I had forced Colin to tell me what Jason would have been subjected to over the last twenty-four hours. He tried to gloss over the specifics, but I now knew that my husband, among other things, had to “squat and spread” for a full-body search to prepare for a jail cell. It was one glaring degradation among the smaller ones of handcuffs, transport, fingerprinting, photographing, churning him through the system like a widget in a factory. But despite all of that, Jason had remembered that tonight was supposed to be Spencer’s first phone call.

The rule of thumb for Spencer’s camp was that the kids could call home every two days to check in. “He called. He sounded great. Happy.”

“Did you tell him anything?”

I shook my head. “That was the whole point of sending him there, right? And I spoke specifically to the camp counselor to make sure she hadn’t heard a single whisper about it among the kids. It sounds like they run a really tight ship. No gadgets, no computers. I told him that you had something on campus tonight.”

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