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She wrapped the sobbing woman in her arms
and hugged her.

“I’m so sorry this is happening to you,” Ivy
told her.

Peg started laughing through her
tears.
 
“What a pair we make,” she
said.
 
“Two crying messes.”

“It’s Boston,” Ivy laughed.
 
“Nobody gives a shit.”
 
She wiped at her own eyes.
 
She realized at that moment that she
actually quite liked Peg Woodhouse.
 
The woman had spunk.
 

She was fighting for her sister’s life,
after all.

“You know that I can’t make a promise for
Cullen,” Ivy said, after a long moment.
 
“He’s already told me he can’t take your sister’s case.”

“That was before, wasn’t it?” Peg
said.
 
The tears were still drying
on her cheeks and her eyes had hardened.
 
“Before he got in bad enough trouble to reconsider.”

Ivy’s stomach knotted.
 
“The way you say it, it sounds quite
threatening.”

“If my father calls me back and tells me
he’s doing this for me, for my sister—then I fully expect Cullen Sharpe
to make good on his end.
 
There’s no
other possible result that I’ll accept.”

“I understand,” Ivy sighed.
 

But knowing Cullen, she couldn’t imagine
him being swayed by anything—even the prospect of jail time.

The two women stood for a long time
together outside on the street, while Peg chain smoked and Ivy tried to stay
calm and wait.

Minutes went by.

Finally, as the shadows began lengthening
on the street and the air grew cooler and Peg’s supply of cigarettes dwindled,
the phone rang again and she hastily answered.

“Daddy,” she said, almost
breathless.
 
Peg fell silent as she
listened at length.
 
Her expression
gave nothing away.
 
After a time,
she nodded, seeming excited.
 
“And
you’re sure, Tony told you…he promised?”

Ivy clutched her stomach, not knowing
whether it was better or worse for this little plot to fail or succeed.

She felt like she was damned either way.

Moments later, Peg was off the phone and
shaking her fist.
 
“Yes,” she said,
shaking her fist at the sky.
 
“God,
yes.”

“So the news is…it’s good?” Ivy asked.

Peg turned to her with a shocking
intensity.
 
“Cullen is going to walk,”
she said.
 
“Tony will make it
happen.”

“Oh my God, are you sure?” Ivy cried,
putting a hand to her mouth.

“The DA’s behind us one hundred
percent.
 
He might even go so far as
to look the other way on this investigation for negligent homicide.
 
But only if my sister lives.”
 
Peg’s eyes grew colder and her voice
more ruthless.
 
“If Cullen refuses
to do the surgery,” she said, stabbing the air with her cigarette for emphasis,
“or if he performs the surgery and my sister dies—than the district
attorney will make it his mission to put Cullen Sharpe behind bars for the rest
of his goddamn life.”

***

Ivy was on the way back to her apartment,
about to jump on the T, when she got a call from the jail.

Ivy quickly accepted the call and then
Cullen came on the line.

“I don’t have long,” were the first words
out of his mouth.
 
“And I can’t be
sure this line is safe.”
 

“Cullen, I’m so sorry about everything,”
she said.
 
“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said, his tone terse and
no-nonsense.
 
“But I need you to do
something for me right away.”

“Anything,” she said.

“I need you to go inside my home and
retrieve something.
 
It’s in the
living area, inside the fireplace. Look up, reach inside and take it out.”

“Take what out?” she asked.

“You’ll know it when you see it,” he
said.
 

She realized that Cullen didn’t trust
their phone to be safe—he was obviously worried
they
were being listened to by the authorities
.
 
“Okay,” Ivy nodded.
 
“Then what do you want me to do?”

“Immediately after you get it, you’re to go
to my second home on the Cape.”

“I don’t have any way of getting to The
Cape,” she said.
 
“And where would
you even want me to put this thing?”

“We can’t talk about it now.
 
Just get down there right away.”

Ivy didn’t know what was going on.
 
Everything was mysterious and unspoken,
and she had no idea what Cullen was truly talking about.
 
Did he want her to move a weapon,
something illegal?
 
What?

She couldn’t even ask him.

Ivy licked her lips anxiously.
 
She thought about everything that had
transpired with Peg Woodhouse and the district attorney—the agreement
that Ivy had made on Cullen’s behalf.

“There’s a lot going on,” Ivy told
him.
 
“I think you might want to
know about it.
 
After you were
arrested, Peg Woodhouse showed up at your house and we had a long conversation.”

“Don’t say it over the phone,” he
warned.
 
“The line might not be safe,
and besides, your first priority has to be to get what I told you to get.”

“How can I get inside your house without
a key?”

“Don’t worry, I’ve handled that.
 
Just get over there right away,” he
said.

“But Cullen, I think you’ll want to know
about my conversation with Peg.
 
It’s really important.”

“All the more reason not to tell me right
now.
 
It can wait, Ivy.
 
But the other thing can’t wait.”

She sighed.
 
“Okay.”
 
She took a deep breath and let it out,
turned and began walking back towards Cullen’s home.
  
 

It seemed like no matter how many times
she tried to leave, something or someone pulled her right back.

Isn’t
it supposed to be
our
home,
anyway?
 
Now that
we’re married?

But she didn’t say that to him.
 
Now was not the time for that
conversation.

She didn’t want the phone call to end
like this.
 
She missed Cullen so
much, and he sounded so distant, so far away.

It made her deeply sad, knowing he was
sitting in a cell right now, in large part because of her decisions.

 
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Don’t worry about it,” Cullen said.
 
“I’m doing fine here.”

She highly doubted that, but didn’t say
it aloud.
 
“Has anyone mentioned
when you’ll be arraigned or released?” she asked, hoping that perhaps some word
of the deal Peg had supposedly struck might have already reached Cullen’s ears.

“Nothing.
 
I’ll call you or have my lawyer contact
you when we know more.”

“I love you,” she told him, just before
he had to go.

“I love you too, Ivy Spellman,” he
replied.

And then the line went dead.

When she finally got back to his home,
the limo was waiting for her.

The driver got out and handed her the
keys to the house.
 
“Mister Sharpe
said you’re to have these.”

“Thanks,” Ivy said.
 
She started up to the steps and made her
way to the front door, her apprehension growing.

Was this illegal?
 
What would she find?

Ivy unlocked the door to Cullen Sharpe’s
home and walked inside.
 
It was
eerily quiet without his presence, and knowing he wasn’t coming home to greet
her.

Her footsteps echoed on the hardwood
floors.

She made a beeline for the fireplace, and
then slid the protective screen away from the hearth.
 
It smelled musty and the interior of the
fireplace was clean and dry, as no fires had been lit anytime recently.

Of course not.

Cullen had used this area to hide
something of great importance and secrecy, and using the fireplace would likely
have led to its destruction—whatever it even was.

She got down on her hands and knees and
slid her head into the darkness of the fireplace and looked up the chimney.

She couldn’t see anything, so she instead
reached up and felt around.
 
Her
hand made contact with nothing but the interior of the chimney walls.
 
Ivy felt around for
awhile
,
feeling a strange sense of anxiety, as if some rabid bat or animal would
suddenly bite her fingers at any second.

What if she couldn’t find this precious
thing that Cullen needed her to find?

She was just beginning to truly feel
nervous when her palm made contact with something hard and large and clearly
not part of the infrastructure of the chimney.
 
It was taped or adhered to the inside,
and unless you know it was there, you’d not be able to find it unless you
looked up there with a flashlight.

“Idiot,” Ivy said to herself.
 
She couldn’t believe she’d forgotten the
light on her phone.
 
Ivy took out
her phone and turned on the camera, than pointed it up the chimney so she could
better see what she was dealing with.

The light from the video camera
illuminated the inside of the chimney and now she could make out the item he’d
wanted her to retrieve.

It was a box of some sort, about the size
of a
rolodex
—but completely sealed.
 
It was heavily duct taped and it took
her probably close to fifteen minutes to pull it out of its web of tape.
 

Once she’d pulled it free, Ivy slid
herself out of the little cave, climbed to her feet and replaced the screen.

She dusted herself off, but there was
surprisingly little dirt on her body or hands, considering where she’d just
been.

Ivy picked up the box and tried to open
it.
 
It was locked and there was no
keyhole.
 
She examined it to find
how it was supposed to be opened and couldn’t see anything obvious.

The box wasn’t all that heavy, perhaps
something on the order of five or ten pounds.
 
It was sturdy, strong—maybe it
wouldn’t even have been destroyed in a fire.
 
It wasn’t really large enough to hold a
gun or a weapon.
 

She shook it a little and thought she
heard something rattling around.

“Oh well, none of your business,” she
mumbled, and then slid the box into her purse, feeling suddenly very guilty.

Am
I removing evidence from the scene of a crime?

Is
this going to come back to haunt me?

No,
Cullen wouldn’t ask me to do something illegal like that.

But the truth was, she couldn’t know for
sure what Cullen might have her do, especially not in dire circumstances.

In any event, she knew that she was going
to follow Cullen’s orders, and so there was no point in second-guessing herself
any further.

She left the house, locked the door, and then
got into the limo with the driver, who had been told where to take her.
 
 

 
“Do you want the keys?” she asked, after
getting into the back of the limo.

“Mister Sharpe said you’re to have them,
Miss Sharpe,” the driver replied, nodding and smiling respectfully.

He
called me Miss Sharpe
!
She thought to herself.

That’s
right.
 
I am his wife.
 
I should have the keys to our home.
 
It’s real, and it’s not going to change
as long as I have anything to say about it.

She poured herself a small glass of
whiskey to take the edge off things, and then settled back into her seat and
tried to relax.

***

The drive to Cape Cod was very long.

They hit traffic going across the Bourne
Bridge and it was backed up at least a couple of miles.