Page 73 of Unforgivable

You gave me your heart

Keep it forever, you whispered, and I will keep your heart

For we must never be apart

I turn around slowly, and for a second, I imagine strangling her. I can see myself doing it, my hands around her pretty neck as I scream into her face,You’ve been screwing Jack for months!But none of that happens. Instead, I go to stand next to her, smile, my face so tight it feels like it’s encased in plaster. I touch her elbow.

“Hi,” I say softly, give the elderly couple a quick smile. “I don’t want to interrupt, I’m just going to catch up on some emails.” I wave toward the corridor.

“Hi!” But she frowns at me for a minute too long, shifts her gaze down my front, and I realize with a start that my jeans are stained from kneeling on the floor of the attic and my tee-shirt, which is visible under my unbuttoned jacket, is covered in dust. I brush myself down with my free hand, mumble something about Charlie, I don’t know what, I’m not making any sense, I just figure you can usually blame everything on small children.

“Laura is our curator,” Summer says with an outbreath. She smiles at the older couple. They give me a strange look and I try to smile too but I feel sick. I imagine telling them,And this is the woman who is fucking my future husband!But I manage to flash some teeth and hurry to the back, feeling her eyes on me the whole time. I do my very best impression of ‘professional woman in a hurry,’ but my legs are wobbly so I probably look like I’m drunk.

I stop in front of the tool cupboard, fish my keys out of my pocket, unlock it, scan the shelves for an adequate hiding place and when I get to the bottom shelf, I see Summer’s bag tucked in. Nothing unusual in that, it’s where she usually leaves it, but she’s left it unzipped and I catch the glint of metal. Keys.

It happens in a flash. I’ve bent down, swiped her keys out of her bag and shoved them in my jacket pocket. As a decoy I grab a pile of paper cups from the top shelf and lock the door again. Then I fish out her file and write her address on the inside of my forearm.425 23rdAve S, Apartment C125.

I drop the paper cups by the sink in the kitchen and catch sight of my reflection in the microwave door. No wonder they were staring at me out there. I look insane, hair sticking out, eyes wild and bloodshot.

“You’re leaving already?” Summer asks as I walk past.

“I have errands to run. I’ll be an hour or so.”

Then I walk out and hail a taxi.

THIRTY-FIVE

Summer lives in one of those large modern condominium buildings cladded in bright primary colors that are all clustered together, with retail units on the ground level. I get out of the taxi and walk to the glass doors of the building.

I expected it to be locked, but it’s wide open. I wait for the elevator, scanning the wall of letter boxes for her name and don’t find it. I feel sick. I hold my paper bag tight against my chest, feel the sharp corner of the box against my rib. My plan is simple in its conception, tricky in its delivery, but it goes something like this. Since she stoleThe Inverted Garden, she can have it. I’m going to hide it somewhere in her apartment. Under her bed. In a closet. Under the sink. I don’t care. I just want it out of my house. I want to see her face when she calls the police and sends them to my garage, and they find nothing. Then I want them to search her apartment and find evidence of her affair with Jack while they’re there.

The elevator smells of fried food. It makes my stomach lurch. I walk down the carpeted corridor to Apartment C125.

Her apartment smells like her, and for a crazy moment I think she’s there. It’s more than her perfume, it’s a feeling, a presence. But she’s not obviously, it’s just her evil spirit.

The living room is lighter and larger than I’d expected. My eyes are instantly drawn to the black and white photographs on the wall. So many of them, all from the same series as the one in the gallery. Light and shadows, a man’s back, a shoulder, the back of a head, a dozen of them at least. How long has this affair been going on? Judging from this shrine to Jack, a very long time. I need to focus. Breathe. I look around for a space to hide the artwork. I check out her things: candlesticks, placemats, paintings on the wall, indoor plants, books, CDs, crockery. I open kitchen cupboards, sideboards, riffle through bookshelves. The key is to find a hiding place where she won’t look. I open the only other door off the living room and glance into the bedroom. She’s made her bed, pink bedspread, matching pillowcases.

I’m about to close the door again when I hear a toilet flushing, and I’m thinking that the walls must be really thin in this place if you can hear your neighbors flush their toilet and sound like they’re in the next room. Then as I turn away, my gaze lands on a different set of photographs, framed, lining the shelves. These are completely different. Vacation snaps from a skying trip, Summer in a restaurant, Summer on a terrace somewhere in a European city. They’re mostly selfies, but in all of them there is a man by her side. They are posing cheek to cheek, laughing together, and I recognize that man, and that man is not Jack, he’s the man in the photo she showed me on her phone, and his name is Dexter.

“Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my house?”

As I turn toward the man behind me, the one who just spoke and whose name is Dexter, my eyes sweep over the wall of photographs, the black and white ones, and I realize with a shock that they look nothing like Jack, and why I ever thought they were of Jack, is a mystery.

“You’re Dexter,” I say. “I’m Laura, I work with Summer.” I then mumble a story about Summer sending me over to get something, and I rang the buzzer but didn’t get a reply.

“Oh, right, shit, I wish she’d told me! You gave me a hell of a fright! Nice to meet you, Laura.” He extends his hand. I take it, barely, a kind of half-limp handshake.

“Yeah, sometimes the buzzer doesn’t work. There’s a building maintenance guy around, but you never see him.”

I turn back to the black and white photographs on the wall. He follows my gaze, sighs.

“Yeah. That’s me.” He stares at them for a moment, like he’s puzzled to see them there. He scratches his chin. “At least it’s not my face.” He grins. “But you already know that. There’s another one in your gallery. What did Summer need anyway?”

I can feel my cheeks burning. “Nothing, I mean, it’s a…book.” I pat my paper bag. Something sharp pokes through and pricks my hand. I wince. “I should go.”

“You okay?” he says behind me. “You don’t want a glass of water or something?”

“No, thank you. I have to go.”

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