He sighed. “I can’t be responsible for making you happy.”

“All these years, you let me believe in us. You kept me around just so you could keep using me. Fucking me.” Her voice was rising, loud enough that people inside Emilio’s could hear her. Through the window she could see them staring. Let them. She hoped the Bitch was watching too. “I was just your whore, wasn’t I?”

“Taryn.”

“Just a whore you used and threw away. You bastard. You bastard.” She lunged toward him.

He grabbed both her wrists. “You’re acting nuts! Stop it. Stop it.”

She fought him, sobbing as she pushed and punched, but he was too strong. She wrenched away, and he released her so suddenly that she stumbled backward and fell on her butt. Sitting on the icy sidewalk, she could feel the appalled gazes of people staring at her through the restaurant window. They’d seen the whole thing. They knew she was the one who’d attacked first. There was no blaming this on Liam.

“Go home, Taryn,” Liam said in disgust. “Go home before you embarrass yourself even more than you already have.” He walked back into Emilio’s, leaving her alone and shivering on the sidewalk.

She could still feel all those eyes watching her as she slowly rose back to her feet. She couldn’t bear to look at the window, couldn’t bear to see them enjoying her humiliation. She just walked away, sore and limping from her fall on the pavement. She was so numb from cold and shock that she moved on automatic pilot. All she could hear were the same words echoing again and again in her head.

I’m not good enough for him. Not good enough. Not good enough. Not good enough.

Suddenly she glimpsed her reflection in a storefront window, and she halted, staring at her haunted eyes, her windblown hair. Was this what crazy looked like? Was this the moment she walked into traffic or threw herself off a building?

She took a deep breath. Scraped the tangled hair off her face and stood up straight. Liam thought she wasn’t good enough.

It was time to prove him wrong.

AFTER

CHAPTER 15

FRANKIE

Sometimes this job is just too easy, thinks Frankie. The murder weapon, almost certainly covered with the killer’s fingerprints, is already sealed in an evidence bag. The estranged husband now sits handcuffed in a patrol car outside. And his wife . . .

Frankie looks down at the body on the bed. The woman is dressed in a blue cotton nightgown, the hem scalloped with white lace. She lies curled up on her right side, her face nestled on a pillow that is now embedded with bits of scalp and brain matter, blasted there by the force of the gunshot. Judging by the wife’s peaceful pose, she must have slept through the sound of the key turning in her front-door lock, which she had not yet changed. She slept through the footsteps treading up the hall to her bedroom. And she was sleeping when the figure approached her bed, a figure that, after eight turbulent years of marriage, would have been chillingly familiar.

“He won’t stop blabbing,” says Mac. “If only they were all like him.”

Frankie looks up as her partner walks into the bedroom. His face is still florid from the wind, his rosacea inflamed worse than ever on this cold morning.

“Then you and I would be out of a job,” she says and looks at the body again. Theresa Lutovic, age thirty-two. Maybe she was pretty once; it is now hard to tell.

“Restraining order was filed just last week. New locks were supposed to be installed tomorrow.”

“She did everything right,” says Frankie.

“Except for marrying the guy.”

“Do the neighbors have anything to add?” she asks.

“Neighbors on the right didn’t wake up until they heard the sirens. Neighbor on the left heard a bang, doesn’t know what time it was, and went right back to sleep. If the asshole hadn’t called it in himself, it might’ve been a while before anyone found her.” Mac shakes his head in disgust. “No remorse, not one shred of it. In fact, he sounded like he’s fucking proud he did it.”

Proud of asserting his God-given right of possession, Frankie thinks, looking down at what had once been that possession. Did this woman feel any inkling when she first met her husband that a blood-soaked bed was in her future? When they were dating, was there a hint—a glare, a sharp word—revealing the monster beneath his mask? Or did she ignore all the clues, lured in like so many women are by the promise of hearts and flowers and happily ever after?

“At least there aren’t any children involved,” Frankie says.

Mac grunts. “Thank God for small blessings.”

Eddie Lutovic sits at the interview table with his head held high, his back as ramrod straight as a soldier’s. As Frankie settles into the chair across from him, he does not meet her gaze but looks right past her, as if some phantom authority stands behind her. As if this matronly woman with bifocals and a navy-blue pantsuit cannot possibly be that authority. Frankie lets him stew in silence for a moment as she takes her time studying him. He could be considered a good-looking man, muscular and trim at thirty-six, his brown hair clipped short, his eyes an unnerving crystalline blue. Yes, she can see that some women might be attracted, even reassured, by his confident bearing. They’d think: Here is a man who can take care of me, protect me.

“Mr. Lutovic,” she says. “In case you’ve forgotten my name, I’m Detective Loomis. I need to ask you a few more—”

“Yeah, you told me your name this morning,” he cuts in, still refusing to look at her.

She lets his obvious disdain slide right past her. Calmly she says, “At five ten this morning, you called nine-one-one from your estranged wife’s residence.”

“That’s my house. Not hers.”

“Regardless of whose house it is, you called the emergency operator. Did you not?”

“I did.”

“You informed the operator that you’d just shot your wife.”

He gives a dismissive wave. “Why am I talking to you? I should be talking to Detective MacClellan.”

“Detective MacClellan is not the one sitting here. I am.”

“Everything I need to say, I’ve already said to him.”

“And now you’re going to say it to me.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re not leaving this room until you do. So let’s just get on with it, shall we? Why did you shoot Theresa?”

At last he looks at her. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

“You think I wanted to kill her?”

“I think you must be angry that she was leaving you.”

His glare could freeze water. “A man can only be pushed so far. That’s my house she was living in. You can’t kick a man out of his own fucking house!”

“Tell me about the gun you used. The Glock.”

“What about it?”

“It’s not registered. And since Theresa had a restraining order against you, you were in illegal possession of that weapon.”

“The Second Amendment says I have a right to own a gun.”

“The State of Massachusetts doesn’t agree.”

“Fuck the State of Massachusetts.”

“And the State of Massachusetts will happily return the sentiment,” she says and smiles. As they regard each other across the table, the gravity of his situation at last seems to sink in. Suddenly the breath goes out of him, and his shoulders sag.

“It didn’t have to be this way,” he says.

“But it is. Why?”

“You don’t know how hard she made it for me. It was like she wanted to piss me off. Like she did things on purpose, to get me to react.”

“What things?”

“The way she looked at other guys. The way she talked back if I called her on it.”

“She asked for it, did she?”

He hears the disgust in her voice and raises his head to glare at her. “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

Oh, but Frankie does understand. She’s heard this excuse, or variations of it, too many times before. Not my fault. The victim made me do it. She could show him the list of calls his wife made to 911. She could show him the record of her last ER visit and the photo of her bruised face, and his answer would be the same: Not my fault.

It never is.

She sinks back, suddenly weary of her role in these three-act tragedies. Frankie is the character who invariably walks onstage too late, in the third act, after the damage is done. After the corpse is zipped into the body bag. If only she could have entered this drama earlier, when there was still time to warn the future Mrs. Lutovic: Turn back now, before you fall in love with this man. Before you say I do. Before the beatings and the restraining orders and the ER visits. Before the zipper of a body bag closes over you.

But women in love are seldom dissuaded by the voice of experience. She thinks of her own impulsive daughters and all the nights she lies awake, waiting to hear the reassuring sound of their key in the door. How many hours of sleep has she lost as she watched the hours tick by, afraid to think of all the terrible possibilities?