CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Rhys spotted the two Boston police officers as soon as he and Andie entered the hotel lobby. His urgency propelled him across the expansive space. Every nerve in his body jangled painfully. It felt so wrong not knowing exactly where Will was—how he was—that it was like the entire universe had been unplugged and then rewired the wrong way.
He lost no time in greeting the police, then quickly proceeded to fill them in. “We called from the car, and the hotel valet confirmed that my ex-wife and son arrived here a short while ago, and her car is still in the lot.”
“Would your wife have registered under her own name?”
“Ex-wife,” Rhys corrected. “Yes, Karina Novak. We think this was an impulsive thing. She wouldn’t have any reason to have booked under another name.”
The concierge tapped a few keys on her keyboard. “Yes, it looks like Ms. Novak is—”
Another hotel staffer behind the desk disconnected from a call, a worried frown creasing his brow. “That’s the third call of a disturbance on the fourth floor,” he reported. “Apparently a child is screaming and—”
“Ms. Novak is in 416,” the concierge confirmed.
Rhys and Andie ran toward the elevator bank.
“Hold on a moment, sir, ma’am,” one of the officers cautioned, his face impassive. “This is a tense situation, and we’re not sure what we’re going to find up there. If you’d kindly hang back—”
“Of course,” Rhys said tightly, unable to think of anything but closing the distance between Will and himself. He stood back while the female officer punched the elevator call button, but after only a few seconds of waiting, all four gave up and headed for the stairs, the concierge—with a master key—following close behind. Two hotel security guards joined the group as it proceeded up the stairs.
The cries were audible as they reached the third floor, even through the heavy fire doors that separated the stairwell from the interior corridors of the hotel. By the time the group emerged onto the fourth floor, the echoing screams were inescapable. All along the hallway near room 416, doors opened and closed as guests looked out, shaking their heads or congregating in disgruntled clusters. It was after one in the morning. No wonder they were upset.
On the way down the corridor, the police officers peppered Rhys with questions. What was Karina’s state of mind? Had she ever done anything like this before? Was she likely to be in possession of a firearm?
“Of course not!” Rhys spluttered, his heart practically seizing at this last inquiry.
He had to force himself to stay calm. It sounded for all the world like Will was being tortured in there. But, then again, Will quite often sounded that way in the loving and diligent custody of Rhys himself, so it would be a mistake to jump to conclusions. All Rhys wanted was his son back in his arms.
Nodding briskly at her partner, the female officer rapped on the door. “Boston police, ma’am. We need you to let us in.”
Will’s screams continued, and the door stayed closed. His voice produced an echo that chilled Rhys’s blood. Did Karina have him in the bathroom? Were they barricaded behind yet another door?
The concierge produced her key card from her jacket pocket and handed it to the female officer. Rhys’s hand had somehow found Andie’s, and she gripped him so tightly his bones hurt.
“Ma’am, we’re coming in.” The officer signaled for everyone to stand back as she and her partner stationed themselves before the doorway.
She was about to swipe the card when the door fell open, revealing a startling vision. Karina staggered into the doorway. Mascara and copious tears had scored sinister black tracks in the matte pallor of her cheeks, and her hair formed dark, tangled cobwebs that emitted an acrid bouquet. The pristine cloth of an Egyptian cotton hotel bathrobe made a striking contrast to the overall image of dishevelment she presented. As she swayed toward the group, a corner of the robe fell open, revealing that she wore only sultry black-lace underwear underneath.
“Rhys! Andie! Thank God!” she exclaimed, her voice otherworldly but strangely hospitable, as if she’d invited the whole motley group in the doorway to a cocktail party. “He won’t stop crying.” She swayed on her feet as she stepped aside to admit them.
On the floor behind her, laid out like a corpse in a TV crime scene, was a bedraggled black-velvet dress plastered in vomit curds—obviously the main source of the odor that hung like a pall over the room. In a haphazard trail that led to the bathroom door were an evening bag, black high heels, and a pair of toddler pajamas printed with happy sheep.
The police pushed past Karina and went to check the bathroom. Within seconds, they emerged, the female officer carrying a swollen-eyed, red-faced Will. He was clad only in a diaper, and Rhys scanned every visible inch of his body for signs of harm.
“Andie!” Will croaked, his voice sounding like he had contracted a case of croup. “Dada!”
Rhys couldn’t help it. That was the moment that broke him. He moved forward, almost as unsteady as Karina herself, and took Will from the officer’s arms. The relief of it. The shattering, overwhelming relief. Tears streamed down his face. His hands shaking, he hugged his clammy, hiccuping little son, pressing kisses into his hair, knowing with absolute certainty that he’d never seen anything so magnificent—so perfect—as that exhausted, bewildered little face.
“I needed him. He’s mine, and I needed him, but he wouldn’t stop crying.” Karina’s voice was hollow, bewildered. “The screams . . . I couldn’t make them stop. I thought maybe he needed a bottle, but then I couldn’t remember if he still takes one . . . I couldn’t remember . . .”
Rhys watched, aghast, as his ex-wife drifted over to the king-size bed and picked up an unopened bottle of red wine that lay half-enfolded by the covers. With a strange, glassy expression, she scooped the wine bottle into her arms and gazed down at it as lovingly as if it were an infant in swaddling clothes. “Does he still take a bottle, Rhys? A bottle?” She lay down, wrapping herself protectively around it, still murmuring.
He stared at her, horrified. What had happened to his whip-smart, driven ex-wife? How had he not seen this coming? He was reminded of her jittery, panicked mood in the wake of Will’s birth. Her grandiose assumption about being able to resume her place in their family upon her return to Concord. And her deteriorating appearance on her succession of visits with Will.
And then there were Andie’s dire warnings. She’d pegged it. Karina was sick, in desperate need of help, and he hadn’t taken Andie’s admonitions about her mental state seriously enough. The woman had obviously been unraveling before their eyes.
Anger gave way to guilt as Rhys wrestled with his conscience. Five minutes ago he would have happily seen Karina imprisoned for what she’d put Will through that night, but now he saw it was quite possible he’d failed her, and—in doing so—failed Will. The police wanted to know whether he wished to press charges for parental kidnapping, but Rhys declined. What Karina needed was help.
A team of EMTs filed into the room, and there were questions to answer and decisions to make. After checking Will over, one of the crew pronounced him unscathed, apart from a minor case of dehydration. Karina, on the other hand, would have to be admitted to a psych facility for observation. She actually seemed relieved by the idea when the issue was put to her, in one of her brief patches of lucidity.
Bracing himself, Rhys placed a middle-of-the-night call to Karina’s mother in Sacramento to learn his ex-wife’s recent medical history. Karina had been diagnosed with bipolar I in the wake of her stint at Stanford, her mother, Danika, revealed in distressed, accented English. Karina’s depression and mania were well controlled by the medication she’d been prescribed, and she’d regained her strength under her mother’s care, but her doctor had not heard from her since she’d returned to Massachusetts.
This was Will’s grandmother, Rhys reflected as he spoke to the woman, feeling chastened by the love and worry in her voice. He had never troubled himself to be in touch with her, to enable her to share in Will’s life. He wondered to what extent Karina’s faithlessness truly absolved him from this fuller set of responsibilities, especially in light of what he knew now.
A contrite Allison added her impressions to the general picture of Karina’s last several weeks. Apparently his ex-wife had inveigled herself into his assistant’s favor way back, before Will was even born. Allison was a mild, amenable person, dazzled by Karina’s glamour and flattered by her overtures of friendship. “How could I say no to my boss’s wife?” she’d asked, confessing to long-ago coffee dates and shopping trips.
Even after Karina and Rhys’s marriage had ended, Allison had stayed in touch, sending Karina updates and occasional photos of Will. She realized now what poor judgment she’d shown. She would have plenty of time to think about that in her new position in reception at the company’s gym. Rhys genuinely liked the woman, but he could no longer trust her with access to his e-mail and calendar. He suspected she might not stick around long in her new post, as she preferred to be at the nerve center of the company. He wished her well but wasn’t open to keeping her in a position in which she was privy to sensitive information.
It was Allison who’d relayed the news of Will’s official autism diagnosis, triggering Karina’s return to Massachusetts. She’d willingly assented to Karina’s request to put her up for a week or two when she first arrived back. But a week or two had stretched beyond three months, and tensions had started to rise.
At first, his ex-wife had seemed fine, Allison reported. She’d barely even thought twice about it when she came into the bathroom one morning to find a cluster of pink-and-white capsules sitting in the unflushed toilet and an empty prescription bottle in the trash. But, as the weeks went by, Karina’s behavior started to change.
Allison’s couch, which Karina had initially straightened up each morning, became a perpetual nest of tangled sheets, blankets, and clothes. Karina’s makeup littered the bathroom, and she left dirty dishes in the sink and a trail of discarded clothes on the floor every time she returned to the apartment. She never lifted a finger to clean and had the unfortunate habit of wandering around in her underwear when Allison’s boyfriend came to visit. Lately, her troubled state of mind had started to show in more obvious ways. Allison would emerge from her room in the middle of the night to find Karina pacing around the apartment, murmuring, eyes glazed.
When Karina had announced her intention to stay at the hotel for a night or two and asked Allison to procure a ticket for her to attend the charity gala, Allison jumped at the chance to finally spend some alone time with her boyfriend. She had no idea what Karina had been planning. She should have told Rhys about her link with Karina right from the beginning, she admitted tearfully, but she got in too deep and never quite knew how to bring it up.
The sun had risen by the time Rhys and Andie, with Will slumbering in his car seat in the back of the Range Rover, finally made it back to Concord.
“You tore your dress,” Rhys said as they turned away from Will’s bedroom door. It was the first chance he’d had to really look at Andie since their ordeal had begun. Her face was wan, and her pinned-up braid had fallen down and started to unravel. A side seam of her dress had opened to the thigh, no doubt from her vigorous leaps up flights of stairs.
“I don’t care,” she said softly. “The only important thing is that Will is back.”
“And now I can fall asleep with you in my arms.”
Rhys, wrapping himself around her, was dismayed when she stiffened against him, resisting the usual slow melt against his body.
“No,” she said. “That’s not a good idea.”
“Okay,” Rhys said gingerly. “It’s been a tough night. It’s understandable that you might want to get some rest in your own bed.” No, it wasn’t. He didn’t understand it at all, but he didn’t like the fatalistic look in her eyes as she stepped away from him. He needed to prevent this from escalating. Something was eating at her, and he sensed that if he let it continue to corrode her thoughts, it could have a dire outcome.
“Andie, please, I know what happened tonight was upsetting. I know I reacted harshly. I was just so afraid—”
“I’m leaving,” she interjected. “And no, before you ask, this isn’t some ploy. I’m really going, and if you have any respect for me at all, you won’t try to stop me.”
“Of course I’ll try to stop you,” Rhys declared. “I love you.” He wasn’t just saying it. He was tearing his heart out and handing it to her on a silver platter.
“It doesn’t matter.” Her tone was almost bewildered. Like she couldn’t quite believe she was saying it, either.
This wasn’t happening. She wasn’t turning away from him and walking stoically toward her room, the soles of her bare feet flashing with each step. He wouldn’t allow it to be true. He loved her. He needed her. He closed his eyes and reopened them, expecting the world to reconfigure itself to the way it should be. The way he’d thought it was just a few days ago when he’d bought the diamond solitaire nestled in the black-velvet box in the safe in his bedroom—their bedroom.
God, how happy he’d been on that secret shopping trip with Jess, running off at the mouth about Andie and her virtues, fantasizing about a life graced by her love. And now she was walking away from him. He watched her half-undone braid sway between her shoulder blades like a metronome, marking out the tempo of her desertion.
He quickened his pace, overtaking her and standing in the doorway to her room so she couldn’t pass.
“I’ve never known you to be a boor, Rhys,” she said, her chest heaving with barely restrained emotion. “Or the kind of man who doesn’t credit a woman to know her own mind. Don’t make me think badly of you now.”
He wanted to yell in frustration. He figured he knew why she was doing this. That it had to do with her brother and her screwed-up relationship with her mother—that her flight was some sort of instinctive response to the horror of Will’s disappearance. But he couldn’t point it out without doing exactly what she warned him against. Besides, she was an intelligent woman. She had a more intimate knowledge of her innermost fears and motivations than he did. If instinct told her to desert him, and she obeyed the impulse, she knew what she was doing. She was choosing to walk away.
“What about Will?” he demanded. “He loves you. He depends on you.”
“I promised I wouldn’t let anything that happened between us interfere with my care for Will, and that still stands.” She jutted her chin at him, her eyes lustrous with unshed tears. “I’ll be here each day for Will’s therapy sessions for the remainder of the time I agreed to. Then we can figure it out.”
“Why? Why are you doing this?” He was going to force her to say it. You will look me in the eye, goddamn it, and voice your convictions, not slink away coddled in a haze of denial.
“I’m sorry. I’m not cut out for this. I never was.” She was retreating behind her walls again, going back to her ghosts, refusing to see the flesh-and-blood man in front of her. A man whose life would never be the same without her in it.
Stop it, Andie. Just stop it. You’re wrong. Dead wrong. Rhys wanted to sit down on the floor and grab her ankles, like a thwarted toddler. Let’s see you walk away manacled to close to two hundred pounds of recalcitrant man. Especially in that dress. But he had to admit it wasn’t a long-term solution.
He gripped the doorframe to steady himself. He couldn’t do this anymore, couldn’t pit himself against her ephemeral foes—not when she was so determined to keep them alive, to give them succor. The night had been too long, and he was too drained. “Fine,” he said heavily, stepping aside so she could enter her room. “Leave, if that’s what you’re so determined to do. I’m not going to stop you.”
Andie gave him a long stare, then nodded and walked past him, into her room, to pack her bags.