Daniel’s skin crawled. You evil, evil fucker. You let her give something she couldn’t get back, just for fun. I already wanted you for what you did to Sophie, to our lives. Now . . .

“And the next day.” She paused. “The very next day, Bennett tells me about this guy running for Congress. A man with family money. He says the guy likes,” she made air quotes, “ ‘young pussy,’ and that I was going to help blackmail him.”

Daniel’s thoughts were sewage, stinking and black.

“He’d hidden cameras in the hotel. Pictures of me naked, of us . . . doing things. He said he’d send them to my father, my brother, post them in my high school.” She shook her head. “Now, I think, Who cares? My dad wouldn’t have liked it, but teenagers have sex, and the world still turns. It wouldn’t have killed him. It wouldn’t even have killed my career. But that’s now. Imagine being seventeen. Everyone pointing. Imagine trying to go to church with your family, and everyone in the congregation glancing sideways, all of them picturing you naked, and not just naked, but . . .” She stopped. “Stupid. Vanity. But that’s how Bennett works.”

Daniel moved to wrap his arms around her from behind. “So you did it.”

“Yes. I . . .” A shiver ran beneath her skin. “I did. I felt like throwing up, but I did it. Bennett got what he wanted, and I got free. I left Chicago and came to Los Angeles, the best place in the world to reinvent yourself. I came here and I said, ‘You’re no longer Elaine Sedlacek, model and victim and Stupid Girl. You’re Laney Thayer. You’re an aspiring actress with a reason to make it. You’re going to become a star, and eventually you’re going to meet a real man and fall in love, and you never need to think about Bennett again.’ ”

He closed his eyes. Her back was hot against his chest, and the smell of her was in his nostrils. “When did he come back?”

“Two weeks ago. In a way, I’m surprised he waited this long. He already knew my sins, after all. Maybe he saw me as an investment, waited for the money to get bigger. Anyway, when he did come back, it was the tape of seventeen-year-old me and the married congressman.”

“He said he’d release it.”

“Maybe my career would have weathered it—maybe—but maybe not. For every Drew Barrymore the public forgives, there are a hundred women whose names no one remembers. Plus, he’d blackmailed the politician, and there was no way to prove that I hadn’t been in on that. But really, it wasn’t those things. It was you. I didn’t want to put you through that. The embarrassment of it. Of people watching your wife . . .” She spun the ring on her finger. “And all he wanted was money.”

“So you bought the necklace to pay him off.” It burned him to think of rewarding this fucker who had taken so much from her. Maybe it was the simplest way to handle things, but Bennett deserved to be hit with a car, not paid off.

“He wanted that one specifically. And ten grand in cash.” She paused, looked at him quizzically. “I don’t know why he didn’t just want the whole thing in cash.”

“Taking out that much draws a lot of attention. Most banks don’t have half a million just sitting in the back room. Plus, with that much, it’s easy to include a bunch of sequential serial numbers, which the FBI might be able to track— What?” She had an odd look on her face.

“That’s almost exactly what you said before.”

“Before?” He caught on. “You asked me that before.” She nodded, and he said, “So what was that? A test?”

“I’m just getting used to it. It’s kind of interesting, though, don’t you think? That you would answer almost exactly the same way? I remember because when you said that about half a million in the back room, I flashed to the image, you know, fluorescent lights, a big metal door, stacks of cash on shelves. It’s like those words were in you. Waiting.”

“Yeah. My head is a wondrous place,” he said. A silence fell. The glass door to the balcony was open, and a breeze rippled the sheer curtains. “Can I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

“Did you tell me? About Bennett?”

“Of course.” She turned to face him. Her eyes were steady and close. “I told you years ago. All of it.”

“How did . . .” He realized he was frightened of the answer, but had to ask the question anyway. “How did I react?”

“You asked me to marry you.”

“I did?”

“That’s how we ended up getting married on a beach in Maine. We’d been dating about a year then, but that was our first real trip together. You’d been busy, writing for Brothers Blue—” she caught herself, explained, “it was a cop drama, great show but misunderstood, got canceled halfway through the first season—and we were in this place on the coast. Lying in bed, talking, you could hear the waves in the background, and I felt . . . safe. So I told you. And when I was done, you asked me to marry you, and I said yes, and you said you meant right away.” Her eyes in a happy distance. “So we paid a Unitarian minister five hundred dollars to marry us on the beach the next afternoon. You gave him your camera to take a couple of pictures, and then you said, ‘Thanks, we appreciate it, now get the hell out of here so I can do my wife.’ ”

Daniel was a writer, but he would have been hard-pressed to name the feeling that rolled through him. The warmth and love and trust, the sense of coming home and loving the view, all mingled with relief—after a week of shame and the very real suspicion he had done something terrible, to realize that of this, at least, he was innocent, that was hard to roll into one word.

But maybe bliss.

B

ennett waited for three minutes. Not a lot of time. About what it took to nuke a can of soup. Not a lot of time, but time enough; when neither Laney nor Daniel had returned to their cars by then, he knew they weren’t coming.

Ah well.

He climbed out of Jerry D’Agostino’s Jaguar and started across the parking lot. The screaming had stopped, and the running. But in typical herd fashion, now that the immediate danger was over, fear had been replaced by curiosity. There had to be two hundred people milling around the Farmer’s Market parking lot, circling at a distance. People were so predictable. He watched as a police cruiser pulled up, lights flashing. They burped the sirens a couple of times to clear a path, then two cops got out and hustled inside. Everyone stared after them. No one noticed him open his flick knife and cut the tires on Daniel’s BMW and Laney’s piece-of-shit van. If nothing else, at least he’d limit their mobility for a while.

It took him half an hour to make the drive back to Sophie Zeigler’s neighborhood. Bennett rolled with his windows down, arm on the door frame, wind pouring in. The Palisades were all peace and prosperity. Sunlight showered through the canopy, a woman pushed a stroller down the broad lane. He parked the Jag in front of her house and drummed his index finger against his lips.

This was a mess.