They were all upstairs and I’d just finished loading the dishwasher when the doorbell rang. I felt myself stiffen. I hoped to God it wasn’t Roux, back to try some new angle. Not now. Not tonight. Monday was coming, and I hoped she would take the high road in the end, but the odds were against it. I stomped my way to the front door, tense. If this was my last weekend before the storm caught us all, I wanted to enjoy it, Roux-free.

I swung the door open, but I did not find Roux. It was Charlotte, though I hardly recognized her in the weeping woman hunched over Ruby’s stroller. Her face was so swollen that her eyes were almost shut, like Roux’s in the picture I’d given back. But this was not from bruises. She looked like she’d been crying for hours, and huge tears were still spilling down her face. Ruby looked fraught and tearstained as well, twisting and grunting in her stroller.

“Amy,” she said, and stopped. Too choked up to speak. I couldn’t speak either. At last she said, “Amy. Your friend. Roux. She came to see me. She told me . . .” she said, and again she was unable to go on. Huge sobs racked her body, and I felt my very heart drop out of me, a sick sinking. Roux hadn’t waited. She’d pushed her big red button, stolen my last day.

I wanted to step toward Charlotte, but I knew she would recoil from me. I couldn’t bear it. I’d been wrong, I realized. I should have stayed in the game. I should have paid Roux. Anything was better than this, standing naked, all my lies stripped away, while Lolly Shipley’s true-blue eyes stared at me like she was drowning.

“Oh, God, Char,” I said, my voice breaking.

She shook her head. “I didn’t believe her. Not at first. I got so mad and told her to get out of my house, but then I went to talk to him. It was all true. He admitted it. He cheated on me, Amy.” She put one protective hand over her rounded belly. “He cheated, and he’s leaving us. He slept with goddamn Tate Bonasco.”

Then I could move. I came around the stroller, and she fell into my arms.

19

Roux had gone after Charlotte.

It was unendurable, but I could not respond. Not while Char was weeping herself sick in my arms, telling me the whole sordid story.

“This life, it isn’t for me,” Phillip had told Char, waving a hand to encompass their tidy home, his toddler, his pregnant wife. “We were so young. I didn’t really know myself. I’m so sorry, Charlotte. Turns out I’m not domestic.”

It had not been Phillip’s first affair, only his most recent. He wasn’t in love with Tate. He was actually leaving Charlotte for Phillip; he’d been his own one and only all along. My heart was breaking for her, but under my anger and shock and sorrow the part of me that was like Roux was already thinking strategy. Not on my behalf. That would come later. I was thinking about Phillip’s next move and how best to protect my friend.

I conferred briefly with Davis, and the strategist that Roux had woken up in me saw with bitter eyes how even this was working in my favor. Davis had sensed how troubled I was, but he had put it down to worry over Char. Now that worry seemed more than justified.

He said Char and Ruby were welcome to stay with us, but I told him it would be unwise to leave the house standing empty. It was their largest asset, after all, and possession was nine-tenths of the law. Phillip had driven off, telling his devastated, weeping wife that they would talk more when she was “ready to be reasonable,” but he could come back at any time. He could squat there. I wouldn’t put it past him. Davis agreed, and he knew without being told that of course I’d want to go be with her. He headed to our room to pack an overnight bag for me while I went to coax Char back to her own place.

She balked, saying she couldn’t stand to go home, even if I were with her.

“Ruby needs the continuity,” I told her, and that was true. I kept my more cold-blooded reasons to myself. “Her whole world has been upended. She needs to be in her own bed, with all her animals.”

That worked on Char’s soft heart. I left Oliver with Davis and Maddy and took Char and Ruby home. I went in first, but the house was still mercifully empty. Once there, we let Ruby watch one Elmo video after another. Young as she was, she understood that something in her small life had gone very wrong. She was sucking her thumb and asking for her binky, a habit she’d outgrown months ago.

Char sat in a heap on the sofa, her face wan and shiny with exhaustion, too tired to cry anymore. She kept going over the conversation she’d had with Phillip, quietly trying to make sense of it, trying to see what she could have done differently or better. She wasn’t blaming Phillip. She didn’t even seem angry with him, though that would surely come. Right now she was too blindsided. She wouldn’t eat, though I finally convinced her to have a cup of herbal tea, for the baby’s sake. When I got up to make it, her face turned toward me, following my every move like a flower following the sun.

“God, Amy, what would I do without you?” she said, and started crying again.

I understood Roux’s play then. I hadn’t had time or brain space to think of it before, but in that moment understanding came in a flash, immediate and clear. It was brilliant, actually, and thoroughly vicious, and I myself had given her the idea.

Charlotte’s going to lose something here. . . . The money or my friendship, I’d told her at Rosie B’s. I’m not egotistical enough to think my friendship’s worth a quarter of a million.

It might be now. Char couldn’t take another blow.

I’d told Roux that I was finished playing games with her, and I’d been at peace with it. I wanted to keep my secrets, keep this small, sweet life I loved, but the price Roux demanded was way too high; it stuck Charlotte with my bill. I couldn’t accept those terms, and after saving Roux on that ill-fated dive, I’d come to understand that if I sank to her level to win, I’d be killing the very self whose life I was trying to preserve. So I had opted out, on every level. I’d thought I understood the consequences. I’d been both ready and resigned, waiting, eyes open, for her shot to land. I hadn’t expected her to set her sights on Charlotte. Not like this.

My body went about the business of putting the kettle on, going to the pantry for a tea bag, but inside, a wild, black fury was surging up my spine from the deeps of me, dark and cold enough to burn. I wished that I had Roux’s life balanced in my hands again, right then. I wished I’d never penetrated the wreck. I should have waited five cold minutes, watching for that purple fin to spasm and go still.

But I couldn’t linger on that thought. I had to get fluids down Charlotte, hold her shaking body, try to get her to rest. I had to reassure her that she was good and dear and worthy of love and listen as she picked through the rubble of her marriage, looking for a way to make it her fault, so she could fix it. I worried she would keep it up all night, though if she needed to, I’d stay with her and let her do it. But she was pregnant, and she didn’t have the physical reserves. By ten she was so tired she was swaying with it. Char wouldn’t take one step toward her room, though, much less lie down on the bed she’d shared with her husband.

Ruby had fallen asleep in front of the television. I picked her up and wheedled Char upstairs to tuck them in together. She lay down by her daughter in what Ruby called her “pwincess bed,” a four-poster double with a white eyelet canopy.

I turned the lights out and pulled the desk chair over so I could sit close, petting Char’s hair. While I waited for sleep to take her, I looked at Ruby’s latest pictures, taped in a row over the night-light. Shapes and scribbles, and on each, Char had written down Ruby’s descriptions. Mommy and me if I was a mermaid and she wasn’t. A magic cat, he eat up that apple. Daddy stand on the unicorn and dance. That one made me grit my teeth. As if any self-respecting unicorn would pause to spit on Phillip Baxter. I stayed until Char was as limp and quiet as poor exhausted Ruby, and then I went back downstairs to find my phone. By now, I knew, I’d have heard from Roux.

Sure enough, she had sent a text.

220K. That leaves you enough to pay for her divorce attorney.

It was a greater concession than I had expected. I’d expected a taunt, a reiteration, or maybe only a breezy See you Monday.

Instead she was negotiating. She must understand that this, what she had done, could push me too far. It had, actually. I was past an edge I hadn’t known existed inside me. Right now it was hard for me to think about Luca, or any other reason that the earth needed Angelica Roux to stay on it, breathing.

I was not without recourse. Maddy had given me a new card to play, no blackmail required. Seattle, she’d said. Also, Roux had made this move too early. She should have done it late tomorrow, even Monday morning. She’d given me time to maneuver, and God help me I was going to use it. I was going to play her goddamn game down to the bitter end.

I went to Char’s breezy blue-and-white kitchen, bringing my phone with me, heading for the built-in desk tucked into the breakfast nook. Char called it her office. I sat down in front of her old desktop, staring down at Roux’s text.