The Wicked Redhead. Beatriz Williams
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forward again. Ella fixed her gaze to her knuckles. Next to her, the man with the navy jacket sleeve made a slight movement and slipped his hand further up the pole, away from hers.
The train blew into Twenty-Third Street and stood on its brakes. Pitched Ella into the chest of the navy suit guy, who looked at her in horror.
Five more stops. Thirty city blocks between Ella and unemployment.
And her job was the least of her worries.
IN AN UNEMPLOYMENT TRIBUNAL, which God forbid, Parkinson Peters and its polished, navy-suited lawyers could probably make a reasonable case against Ella. You could always find actionable cause if you wanted to get rid of somebody, after all, and maybe Ella could have been more careful to make absolutely certain Travis Kemp—the managing partner on the Sterling Bates audit—knew that Ella’s husband happened to be employed at Sterling Bates, albeit in a wholly different division. She could have reminded Travis of the information on her disclosure form on file with human resources, instead of assuming he’d reviewed it before assigning her to the project. She could have used that opportunity to affirm that her husband, Patrick Gilbert, had no relationship, formal or otherwise, with the activities of the disgraced Sterling Bates municipal bond department, which Parkinson Peters had been hired to audit, and allowed Travis to decide whether Ella should remain on the team.
But none of those actions would have mattered, in the end. Ella’s dismissal had nothing to do with any kind of wrongdoing, at least on her part. She’d known that from the moment she hung up the phone with Travis on Friday evening, brimming with tears, brimming with all the physiological symptoms of shock. She was the kind of person who always paid for the apple she dropped in the supermarket instead of putting it back on the stack, who slipped a tip in the Starbucks box even when the barista wasn’t looking. She had tagged the unusual pattern of payments at Sterling Bates not because it was her job, but because it was the right thing to do.
Friday night, she’d shook with rage at the injustice of it all.
Not until later did she realize she had bigger things to worry about.
But she couldn’t think about that. She couldn’t think about Saturday night and she especially couldn’t think about Sunday afternoon, because the subway was really cooking now, congestion cleared up ahead, and by the time Ella had finished pretending to read the left two columns of the Wall Street Journal and started feigning the middle one, she was already crashing into Fiftieth Street, brakes squealing, mosaics blurring past, slowing, stilling. In the instant of silence before the doors opened, Ella nearly gagged on the smell of somebody’s sausage sandwich.
And then she was free. She burst out into the sour, damp underground and through the turnstiles, up the stairs, clutching her company laptop bag that contained a laptop scrubbed clean of files, clutching her Wall Street Journal in the other hand. She emerged into a chilly mist and checked her watch—seven thirty-nine, way too early, even for Ella—and ducked into a Starbucks to gather herself. Her hair was already curling into a hopeless cloud; she pulled an emergency scrunchie from the outside pocket of her bag and bound the mess back into a ponytail. Found her security pass and cell phone. Saw that she had missed two calls, one from Patrick and one from Hector, who had each called within a minute of the other. Hector had left a voice mail. Patrick, knowing better, had not.
Her husband and her lover. To be clear, her estranged husband and her brand-new lover, but did that matter in the eyes of God? Maybe it did, but waking up yesterday morning, she hadn’t felt a shred of guilt. Had instead felt bathed in something like God’s mercy, after six mortifying, agonizing weeks.
Now, as she stood before the pickup counter and accepted a latte she didn’t really want, Ella thought that maybe she was wrong. That she had bathed in nothing but sexual afterglow, and God was a vengeful God after all. Like Parkinson Peters, punishing her for a crime that belonged to somebody else.
BY ANY ABSOLUTE MEASURE, Ella had woken on Sunday morning in a state of sin. The waking was Nellie’s fault, the sin was all her own. Actually, the waking was probably Ella’s fault too, since responsibility for the dog’s bladder now belonged to her. She’d set aside Nellie’s wriggling, investigating body and squinted her eyes at the clock on the bedside table. Eleven minutes past nine. Also, there was a note.
Nellie lunged forward and licked Ella’s nose in frantic little strokes.
“All right, all right,” Ella had said. Sat up too fast and wobbled. Set her two hands on either side of her bottom and shook her head. Nellie climbed into her lap and stared beseechingly upward. Nothing more soulful than the round black eyes of a King Charles spaniel who needed to pee.
Across the room, the blinds were down over the windows, but the sunlight streaked fearlessly around the edges and illuminated what seemed like acres of Ella’s bare flesh. Full, happy breasts. Flushed, decadent skin. Curling, tumbled hair. Ella hadn’t examined her naked body in months, maybe even a year or two; she couldn’t even remember the last time she performed that ritual of minute, critical, inch-by-inch dissection of flaws, ending in resolve to eat less, exercise more, use moisturizer, buy another push-up bra, maybe reconsider a long-standing personal prohibition against cosmetic surgery. Back then—happily married—she hadn’t cared.
More recently—wronged wife—she hadn’t dared.
And now? Right that second? Staring down at breasts and stomach and thighs and calves and feet against the wrinkled, disgraceful white sheets? She’d thought she looked pretty damned beautiful.
Pretty damned beautiful. (That was Hector’s voice, echoing in her head.)
Hector. She reached for the note. Nellie barked and spun in a desperate circle.
“All right, all right,” Ella said again, retracting her hand, and this time she swung her legs over the edge of the bed and rose. The movement made her head slosh. Made her belly swim. Swamped her with the seasick, full-body hangover sensation of a night without sleep, except that unlike actual hangovers, or those following all-nighters spent at work, this malady represented a small price to pay for what had caused it. If you threatened Ella with a lifetime of such wakings, she wouldn’t trade away last night. If you erased her memory of the past twelve hours, she would still know it existed, humming in her bones and skin, shimmering down the long lines of her veins, hovering like a ghost inside her—
“I think I’m going to throw up,” she told Nellie, and exactly six seconds later she was leaning over the edge of Hector’s toilet bowl while Hector’s dog watched anxiously from the door.
After vomiting, she’d felt much better, the way you did. Weak but purged. Purged of what, she wasn’t sure. Guilt or sin or something, right? After all, she was married.
Except she didn’t feel guilty. She was quite sure of that. Ella knew what guilt felt like, and this wasn’t it. This was something more complicated, like when you walked onto an airplane headed to a brand-new country and couldn’t turn back, adventures waiting before you, and yet somewhere, in the back of your skull, pounded the certainty that you’d forgotten to pack something important. She found a washcloth on the counter and turned on the faucet and wondered whether her husband had barfed, the first time he cheated on her. Aunt Julie had said that Patrick was a congenital cheater; she could smell it on him, the way you smelled garlic on someone who had eaten forty-clove chicken the night before. He’d probably cheated in kindergarten. Kissing Michelle after telling Jennifer he was going to marry her. He was numb to sin. What was that line from Dangerous Liaisons? It only hurts the first time.
Well, Ella didn’t hurt at all, that Sunday morning. She didn’t regret a minute of the night before.
Nellie’s paws grabbed her knee. Bark ended in a whine.
“All right! All right!” Ella said, for the third time. She set down the washcloth and went back into the bedroom, Hector’s bedroom, Hector’s bed, Hector’s simple wooden furniture. On the chair lay her clothes, neatly folded, nowhere near where she had left them last night. In fact, Ella could have sworn she wore not a single stitch by the time Hector carried her from the living room to his bed, and yet here sat all those