Chapter 31: Chapter 31

IT’S three twenty-two in the morning and I’m lying in bed, thinking about her. Missing her.

I build a lot of residential projects, create a lot of homes for people, but the home I found with Vicky was beyond anything even I could’ve dreamed up.

Now it’s rubble.

And not the cool kind you can turn into furniture. It’s toxic and twisted up with unbearable loss, not to mention anger with myself.

And every time I see a griffin, or that ice cream she likes, or a mime, or a hundred other stupid things, that rubble pile gets deeper. And every time I get the urge to tell her some interesting news or a funny realization, I remember I can’t.

And the pile gets deeper.

Why did I listen to her when she told me not to go after her that day?

Well, I know why. I wanted to give her a little space. I wanted to respect her in a way that the world hadn’t.

Fool move.

I underestimated the trauma that sixteen-year-old Vonda endured, underestimated how deeply it burned.

A day later it was too late. She and Carly were gone. Vanished. When Vicky vanishes, she doesn’t mess around.

I got the company, just like she said I would. I got it back—full control. Cold comfort.

I pour myself a scotch and wander out onto my veranda where she fed me cookies and joked about tea cozies. I know what they are now. I looked it up.

The night is mild for late October. I stare up at the moon, wondering if she might be looking at it this very moment. A cliché.

It’s unlikely she’s moongazing. It’s probably daytime where she is; that’s what our PI thinks. He had a lead for Hong Kong. A few continental European cities. Nothing panned out.

In the dark of the veranda, I open up my laptop. Before I even check my email, I click to a section of bookmarks that’s all jewelry. It’s a morbid ritual, perusing the latest debut designer collections of high-end boutiques around the world. I also look at solo designers.

She wouldn’t be so stupid to start up her sequined dog bowtie business again. And she probably wouldn’t create that Smuck U line I so loved and hated, either, but she has to do something.

She’s a maker—it’s in her bones—and women’s jewelry was her passion.

She told me so many things. I could’ve told her about the hearing and the good cop thing, explain that I’d abandoned it. Was some little part of me holding all that back to protect my advantage? Covering my ass? Needing to arrange things to come off perfect to her? Not wanting to rock the boat of our time together? Not trusting her to understand?

I click through collections. It’s not the names I’m looking at; it’s the pieces. I feel sure I’ll see a necklace or a pin or something, and I’ll recognize her vision in it, her sense of humor, her spirit—something essentially her bubbling up out of the pages of baubles, unmistakable as a fingerprint.

I stay out there until dawn, clicking through the images. Then I switch to coffee and get ready to deal with the world.

Over the next few weeks, Latrisha completes the cool-as-hell furnishings for the Moreno, and we collaborate on the installation and interior finishes. I make sure the website is updated with plenty of pictures, just so Vicky can see.

Or should I call her Vonda? I don’t know, but what I do know is that she’ll check. She won’t be able to help herself.

I throw myself into the Ten redesign. It feels good to do the place right. The neighbors are excited—we’re experimenting with bringing them into limited sections of the process. Maybe it’s arrogant, but I have this idea that one of these days, Vicky will pull up the website for that, too.

I want her to see it. I want her to see that beautiful things can be real. Or maybe that real things can be beautiful.

Not everything I do that autumn is noble. I have enough anger to go around, and my sights also happen to be set on Vicky’s mother and the Woodruffs.

The New York Nightly Reports I-team is excited about the idea that I brought them for a news-hour segment about what really happened with Vonda O’Neil. Getting the salacious truth of the story. The mindfuck that everyone was wrong about her, and the opportunity to shame the true villains on camera.

That’s how I find myself flying up to Deerville the week before Thanksgiving with a stack of cash—a hundred thousand, to be exact.

I got the idea for this whole thing after Brett told me that he thinks the mother still has evidence. He figured it out from something Denny said to him about the Woodruffs having to keep her quiet.

This little nugget doesn’t put him back in my good graces, but it’s a start.

Maybe.

The news crew is made up of Marv Jenkins, the on-camera personality, two camera operators, and a tech guy. The address they got for Vicky’s mother, Esme O’Neil, is wrong, but we track her down to a trailer park and then follow the bread crumbs from there to a poorly lit local bar.

I recognize her right away, down at the end.

She’s the skinny woman drinking alone, hair dyed red, skin wrinkled beyond her fifty-something years. She looks bewildered and angry when the lights and cameras fire up—it’s an ambush and a half.

Newscaster Marv buys her a drink and coaxes her into repeating the lies on camera. My blood boils as she tells the world how surprised she was that her own daughter lied. She’d believed the girl—how would she know her own daughter turned out to be a liar? It’s a well-worn speech, calibrated for maximum sympathy.

Her voice wavers when she meets my eyes. Does she feel my rage? Does she sense it’s the end of the road for her story?

The cameras go off when she’s done. I step up and slap the cash onto the scratched wooden bar. Bundles of fifties. The Woodruffs were paying her, but probably in the low five figures. My money adds up to more.

“Now you’ll tell the truth,” I say. “And after that, you’ll deliver the evidence you’re holding back. We know you have it.”

She protests, but her gaze doesn’t leave that money. When she looks up at me, there’s defeat in her eyes, I know she’ll bite. She’ll take that money. She’ll sell herself out.

Maybe I should have some compassion.

She lost the love of her life and couldn’t cope.

I get it. I’ve been there.

I live there.

The footage they gather is insane. Esme O’Neil takes us to a safety deposit box where she has the shirt and a nanny cam—still inside a bear. There’s a cop along to keep the chain of evidence right. The footage inside the bear is Papa Woodruff and Denny bargaining with her for the shirt.

We fire it up on a tablet. It’s captured perfectly. The money exchange is clear as day. “Helloooooo,” Marv says, sounding like a mustachioed, bathrobe-wearing porn star greeting his bedmate. “And with this, the story goes national.”

They get Esme being sorry. They get actual lab shots of the shirt testing. It’s like one of those hidden treasure shows or something.

The Woodruffs got a mayo-spattered shirt, as it turns out. You can never trust a drug addict.

The news feature crew does a Denny ambush at a black-tie gala—they actually hold everything under wraps just to surprise him at the gala. They make him repeat the lie about how Vonda must have fixated on him, and how he doesn’t blame her for the lies.

They run the footage on a phone for him. They get it on camera, him watching himself standing behind his dad in the sad O’Neil living room all those years ago, paying Vicky’s mother for the shirt.

He calls it fake news and storms out of there, lawyering up soon after.

There’s a simultaneous confrontation with the Woodruffs on their doorstep that night—the same doorstep they stood in when they announced they forgave Vonda and that they’d drop the charges.

There’s nothing the public loves better than liars getting caught on camera.

Marv and the I-team make it onto a sixty-minute news show, with the new material spliced up with old Vonda footage.

The statute of limitations has run out on Denny’s crime as well as the cover-up, but there’s no statute of limitations in the hearts of the public.

The story rips like wildfire through social media. Denny’s friends and client base dry up overnight. The Woodruffs are ostracized by all but the hugest assholes.

Who knows, maybe they’ll try to sue Esme O’Neil. But she’s in rehab. It’s more than she deserves.

She turned on her own child. A beautiful, honest girl who deserved love. Still does.

She has it—from me. My love for her bounces uselessly off the moon.