Our Wicked Lies by Gledé Kabongo (story read aloud TXT) 📗

to like that. I was careful not to bring up his wife. Thankfully, neither did he.

I always get what I want, and I’ve decided that Eliot Gray is what I want, despite the complication of a family. Sometimes a complication is an opportunity. It comes down to perspective. I’ve finally met a man who’s perfect for me, and nothing is going to stand in my way.

CHAPTER 45

They sat in the family room. Alicia didn’t want to visit the kitchen, the place where Richard had found Kat’s body. Alicia had come over to deliver a few days’ worth of home-cooked meals for him and Maxim and to keep him company for a while. Maxim was at her house with the girls who were trying their best to keep him occupied.

She glanced at a photo above the fireplace. Ironically, it was taken at Arnie Tillerson’s townhouse that night. Kat wore a dazzling smile and a stunning Herve Leger mini dress. Richard appeared constipated.

“She was pregnant,” he said. “The autopsy report confirmed it.”

What? Alicia wasn’t sure she’d heard right, but she knew she was kidding herself. She gulped for air. Distressing thoughts paraded across her mind, her brain synapses firing all at once. Was the baby Richard’s or Eliot’s? Had Eliot lied yet again when he claimed Kat wasn’t pregnant, or had he been deceived this time, too? Was the sonogram Jack provided real then? But Jack would have confirmed if it was. He hadn’t.

Kat had said that she and Richard were in a bad place, but that didn’t mean they weren’t intimate. Marriage was complicated like that.

“Please don’t take this the wrong way, I mean no disrespect—”

“You don’t have to walk on eggshells around me, Alicia. You’re wondering if I was the father. I can tell you with unshakeable confidence that I was not.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because my wife wouldn’t let me touch her. It felt like we hadn’t even been in the same room let alone the same bed in the past year.”

Eliot was the father.

She didn’t have time to process that depressing tidbit of information before a horrible thought slammed into her brain. What if Richard killed Kat? He’d already confided that Eliot might not have been her first affair. Alicia clearly remembered Richard saying he was no saint and that he had a breaking point. What if he’d found out about the pregnancy and knowing he wasn’t the father sent him over the edge?

“I thought if they were both dead it would solve my problem.”

“Um, Richard, did that push you over the edge? With everything that was going on, and Maxim’s struggles, it’s a lot for one person to take.”

A comical expression spread across his face. His eyes crinkled at the corners. Alicia had trouble recalling the last time she saw Richard laugh.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“Alicia, I know what you’re getting at, and the funny thing is, I wanted to. I wanted to kill her for what she was doing to our son. Our family. But I didn’t have the guts to do it.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

He waved off her attempt at an apology. “It’s always the husband, right? But it would have been a pointless exercise. What would happen to Maxim if they carted me off to prison for killing his mother? The kid’s been through enough already. I’m all he has now.”

Alicia nodded and said nothing.

“She envied you, you know?” he said.

“W-what?”

“You had Eliot and she didn’t. It frustrated her.”

She noticed his fingernails biting into his palms. He scrunched up his face and then released the tension, trying to regain his calm, she supposed.

“But after I found proof of the affair, suddenly, it all made sense. She couldn’t be with him openly. They had to hide the relationship, constantly lie to our faces, and keep their stories straight. It didn’t matter that she had her own husband who always begged her to spend time with him, with our son. I imagine the secrecy was exciting at first, but after a while, it couldn’t have been enough.”

Sweat appeared on his forehead. He arranged and rearranged the magazines on the coffee table.

“I suggested we move back to New York or even Miami to be closer to her family. She balked, laughed in my face, and asked me if I was high. Then she used her business as an excuse, the connections she’d made in Boston. Her employees. But I knew it was because of Eliot. She couldn’t stand to be separated from him.”

He dumped it all on her like an exhausted professor who just wanted the lecture to be over with. Impart the information with no feeling or passion. This was his way of dealing with his grief, a cathartic outpouring of his heart. They were kindred spirits, forced to deal with the aftermath of profound spousal betrayal, and death.

When he looked up and made eye contact with her once more, he said, “We’re leaving. Once this is over, and the police close the investigation, I’m taking Maxim and leaving this state for good. That was the plan before she died, anyway.”

“Where will you go?”

“California. My brother lives in L.A. It will be a fresh start for Maxim and me. Sunshine, palm trees, the ocean. I can work from anywhere, and it’s best we’re far away from here.”

Richard’s choice of resting place for Kat suddenly made sense. He wanted to erase her, punish her by leaving her buried in Weston, far away from her family, in a town she had only arrived in four years ago.

“Did you pick her burial clothes?” Alicia asked.

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re a devastated husband. You wanted to have your say because you couldn’t while she was alive.”

The fatigue she’d observed in him the night of the celebratory party returned. The burden of knowing his wife was unfaithful and had been neglecting their son was too much to bear. Looking at Richard now, it seemed like he’d aged ten years in a