Safe With Me (6 page)

Sophie seemed to understand Hannah’s inability to continue to work at the downtown Ciseaux, where Emily had grown up, where she had taken her first steps and played dress-up in front of the mirrors. For now, her savings and the death benefit payments are more than enough to cover the cost of renovation and give Hannah some to live on. Sophie agreed to be a silent partner at this location, with Hannah running the day-to-day operations.

“Your clients keep asking for you,” Sophie says now. “They miss you.”

“They can come see me here,” Hannah responds with a sigh. The truth is, she hates the idea of seeing her clients again—the pity on their faces at Emily’s funeral had been enough. She
wants to exist in a new world with new clients, women who don’t know that Emily is dead. Women whose mouths won’t screw up into dark frowns and who won’t ask how she is
doing
. What does that mean, exactly? How do they
think
she is doing? Her daughter is
dead
. A hard knot forms in her throat, and Hannah swallows around its sharp edges.

“Hey, Soph,” she says, attempting to sound cheery. “I was just about to jump in the shower. Can I call you back?”

“I’ll just see you later this afternoon, darling. The meeting with the caterer for the opening?”

“Oh . . . right. Of course.” Like Mike’s name, Hannah had forgotten this. With the launch of the new salon next week, they are planning a catered open house to welcome clientele to the location, but Hannah has yet to decide on a menu. Party planning is more Sophie’s thing, so she asked her partner to join her. “I’ll see you at three, then.”

“Two, actually,” Sophie says gently, and Hannah smiles.

“What would I do without you, Soph?”

“Good thing you don’t have to find out.”

They hang up, and Hannah strips off her clothes. As steam fills the bathroom, she moves her fingers across her belly, brushing over the stretched, soft skin and silvery lines that carrying Emily created. She wishes she had more scars than these. She wishes the evidence of her pain were somewhere other than inside her body, believing that if other people could actually
see
how deeply she is wounded, they’d know to just leave her alone.

Climbing into the tiled shower, she stands under the hot water, letting it scald her skin. For some reason, she thinks about the cars she saw on the road during her run this morning.
She watched the drivers talk on their cell phones and sip from their Starbucks coffee cups—how they took everything for granted. She wanted to warn them, to tell them how quickly everything can change, but she knew it was useless. There’s simply no telling whose life will be touched by tragedy. There is only a before and an after, with no way to predict the moment when one is over and the other begins.

During the months that James traveled to Tampa to see Olivia on the weekends, he talked a lot about what it was like to live in Seattle. “It gets a bad rap because of all the rain,” he told her, “but it’s actually really beautiful. More shades of green than I can name.”

“I’d love to see it sometime,” Olivia said, hoping she wasn’t being too presumptuous. The truth was she wanted to visit the city so she could have a better picture of what he was doing when he wasn’t with her. She could pull up vague mental images of him surrounded by people wearing galoshes and holding umbrellas as he strolled around the base of the Space Needle or stood on the deck of a ferry, but that was pretty much the limit of her visual knowledge about the Pacific Northwest.

“You will,” he assured her. “But your mother needs you here, doesn’t she? It’s easier for me to come to you.”

Reluctantly, she agreed with him. She couldn’t afford a private nurse for her mother, and since they were only dating at
the time, there was no way she would let James foot that kind of bill, even if he’d offered. So it wasn’t until they were newlyweds that Olivia saw James’s house. She gasped as their driver pressed the button for the automatic gate to open, allowing her a view of the imposing structure at the end of the road. The house was hers, too, she supposed, now that they were married.
Married,
she thought.
I’m twenty-three years old and married to an amazing, accomplished man. A man who adores me and has promised to take care of my every need
.

It was a new experience for her, being cared for. Since her parents divorced when she was five and her father decided he’d rather not bother spending time with his daughter, it had always been just Olivia and her mother. “We’re better off without him,” Olivia’s mother said. They’d struggled over the years, trying to make ends meet, but her mother insisted that she’d never marry again—that overall, men weren’t worth the bother of having them around. “They take what they want from you and then spit you back out,” she told Olivia more than once. “They use you up and then throw you away.”

Her mother’s bitterness lingered in the air of their tiny apartment like secondhand smoke. Olivia did her best to not breathe it in, to believe that someday, she might find a man who would fall in love with her. She promised herself that when she got married, it would be forever. She remembered her mother constantly picking at her dad, screaming at him over silly things like him not taking out the garbage, and a small part of Olivia blamed her mother for her father’s abandonment of them both. She swore that someday, she’d be a sweet, gentle wife who never yelled, so her husband would never leave. She pictured herself living with him—cooking for
him and climbing into his bed at night, giving birth to their children, growing old in the house they picked out together. Years of watching
L.A. Law
with her mother primed Olivia for the idea of becoming a lawyer—she fantasized that she and her husband might work at the same firm, defending clients together. She tried to believe that she didn’t have to share her mother’s fate.

Later, after high school, the few men she dated before James were just boys, wanting to split the check and wait for Olivia to call them instead of picking up the phone themselves. They wanted to “hook up” and “hang out,” vague relationship descriptors that left Olivia wondering if her mother was right—if any man was capable of true commitment. But James was different. James opened doors for her and pulled out her chair; he sent her long-stemmed red roses and helped her with her coat. He made her feel valuable and special. She glowed beneath the pleasure of his attentions.

“You’re lucky he’s rich,” her mother observed, after meeting James for the first time. “He can take care of you.”

“I don’t care about his money,” Olivia said, feeling her face grow hot. It was clear her mother didn’t believe her, but Olivia spoke the truth. The fact that James had money seemed beside the point. What mattered to Olivia was that he wanted a happy, loving marriage as much as she did. “I’m ready to settle down,” he told her after just a few weeks of dating. “I want to have the family my parents never gave me.”

It surprised her, at first, that James pursued her so fervently, since it was obvious with his money and level of success, he could have any woman he wanted. “I’m not sure what you see in me,” she said, feeling a little shy. She knew she was pretty,
but she was far from the polished women with whom she knew James worked and socialized.

“I see your determination,” he answered. “I see how kind you are and what an amazing mother you’ll make. I see that you might teach me to be a better person.”

His words pleased Olivia; she loved that for all his sophistication, he felt as though she had something to teach him, too. Just a few months later, she agreed to marry him in a quick civil ceremony at the Tampa courthouse. “Who needs all the fuss of a big wedding?” James asked, and while a part of Olivia would have loved that kind of fuss—it was, after all, the only wedding she ever planned to have—it seemed that after everything he’d already done for her, asking for him to pay for an event like that would seem greedy. He took her to Paris for their honeymoon, and they took moonlit walks along the Seine, sipped wine and ate buttery croissants in their enormous hotel bed, made love two or three times a day. Afterward, James would rest his head on Olivia’s chest and she would run her fingers through his thick hair until his breaths slowed and deepened and he fell asleep. Olivia had never felt so content.

One evening, after just such a moment, Olivia tried to slip out from under the weight of him in order to use the bathroom, but James held on to her tightly. “No,” he said. “I won’t let you go.”

She softened her body and gave him a little squeeze. “Just for a minute, love. I’ll be right back.” In her experience, most men were afraid of their emotions; she loved how vulnerable he was with her, how willing he was to express how he felt.

He looked up at her with so much love in his eyes, she was
almost startled by its intensity. “I need you, Liv. I need you so much.”

“I need you, too,” she said, feeling as though she was the luckiest girl in the world.

A week later, they arrived in Seattle, and James smiled at her in the back of the limousine as the heavy gate closed behind them. “What do you think?” he asked as they traveled up the driveway to the house.

Olivia couldn’t respond, still staring at the red-brick palace before them. It was three stories high with several turrets, a circular driveway, and a detached five-car garage. Towering maples flanked each side of the building, and a large marble fountain served as centerpiece to the extensive grounds. A tall, black iron fence enclosed the entire property—wired to shock the hell out of anyone who tried to scale it, James told her. She knew James was well-off, but he hadn’t made clear the exact level of his fortune. Olivia felt like it would have been in poor taste to ask for specifics.

The driver parked the car, then came around to open Olivia’s door. Both she and James climbed out of the vehicle and stood beside it. “Welcome home, baby,” he said, and then he kissed her, pushing his body hard against hers, making her feel drunk with arousal. When he finally pulled away, Olivia gave him a wicked smile.

“Let’s make love in every room,” she said, and immediately, James’s body went stiff. He gripped her forearm until tears flooded her eyes.

“Don’t talk like that in front of the staff,” he growled. “I don’t want them thinking my new wife’s a slut.” He released
her arm, then smiled again, a wide easy motion, leaning down to kiss her cheek. “Come on, beauty. Let’s get you cleaned up and I’ll tell the cook to get dinner started. I asked her to stock all of your favorites. Chicken Caesar salad sounds good, doesn’t it?”

Stunned, Olivia swallowed back her tears and nodded.
Did my husband just call me a
slut? The moment had happened so quickly, she wondered if she had imagined it. She glanced down at her arm then, and there it was: the bright red imprint of his fingers. She rubbed it, as though trying to erase the evidence.
He’s just tired,
she told herself.
He didn’t mean anything by it.
She promised herself to do as he asked, to be cautious of how she spoke in front of the people who worked for him. A man at his level of success had an image to maintain, and it was her job as his wife to support that. This was why he’d taken her on a shopping spree in Paris, helping her pick out an entirely new wardrobe: simple straight skirts, tailored slacks, and a rainbow of gloriously soft cashmere sweater sets. He bought her diamond stud earrings and a pearl necklace. “You know I already love how you look,” he told her. “I only want you to have the best of everything.” When she protested that she didn’t need him to buy her so much, he shushed her. “It makes me happy to be able to give it to you,” he said, and Olivia decided that she would do whatever it took to make
him
happy, too.

After he showed her their room—a master suite with an enormous walk-in closet and private bathroom all her own—she showered, dressing simply in a pale yellow sundress, then found her way back down the curved staircase into the dining room. A tall, slightly homely woman in a black chef’s coat was placing a large salad on the table, but Olivia didn’t greet
her, afraid James might walk in and hear her saying the wrong thing. The woman pressed her lips together and nodded at Olivia, then exited the room.

She took a moment to absorb the simple, luxurious beauty of the space: creamy white walls were accented by crimson drapes. An enormous, brushed-nickel-framed mirror hung opposite the French doors that led out onto an extensive patio. This room alone was bigger than the tiny apartment she’d shared with her mother; its opulence outweighed any other home she’d ever entered. Walking over to the doors, Olivia stared out across the property on the backside of the house, which held a kidney-shaped, sparkling blue pool and what looked to be a modest but lovely guest cottage. She wondered briefly why James had never suggested bringing her mother with them, since he obviously had an appropriate separate living space, but then she brushed away the thought, knowing she should be grateful for everything he
had
done, both for her and for her mother.

“What do you think?” James asked, and Olivia put a splayed hand over her chest, whipping around to face him.

“Oh god, don’t sneak up on me like that!” she exclaimed. “You
scared
me!”

“Sorry, darling. Bare feet on marble floors don’t make much sound.”

She dropped her arm back to her side. “
Bear
feet? I thought you had
people
feet.”

James smiled indulgently at her silly play on words. “Let’s eat, shall we?” He gestured toward the table and Olivia stepped over to it, sitting down in the chair he held out for her. She felt small in this high-ceilinged room, out of place in a house that was supposed to be her new home.
I’ll get used to it,
she reassured
herself, then forced a smile at James, who was filling her plate, then his, with greens and thin slices of chicken breast. She watched him pour the dressing over his salad, then asked him to please pass it to her. He tilted his head the slightest bit to the side. “Are you sure you should have any? You had that scone for breakfast.”