“Oh, please, I was kidding.” I took a beer for myself and leaned against the counter that separated the living room from the kitchen. “I’m sure she’ll be here in forty-five minutes, max.”
“She has twenty.”
“Okay, I know you’re pissed at me, Anatoly, but I’m paying you a lot of money to sit on your tuchas and drink my beer, so the least you can do is give her thirty.”
“Twenty-five. Why don’t you give me the details of the case while we wait? Why does Leah suspect her husband of sleeping around?”
“You know, the usual. After years of inattention he suddenly began to shower her with gifts while at the same time scheduling a lot of late-night meetings, and if that isn’t code for ‘I’m screwing my secretary’ I don’t know what is.”
Anatoly waited for me to continue and when I didn’t do so immediately his countenance assumed a more pleading expression. “There’s more than that, right? Tell me your sister isn’t as paranoid and insane as you are.”
“Oh, excuse me!” I slammed my beer on the counter. “I am nowhere near as crazy or paranoid as my sister!” Anatoly took a long swig of his beer in lieu of responding. I sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “A couple of weeks ago, the night before I accidentally got you shot…”
“Accidentally?”
“We’re not getting into that now. Anyway, Bob told her he had a dinner meeting with his employer so he wouldn’t be at Chalet.”
“Chalet?”
“His place of work, Chalet.com. They sell home furnishings via catalogs and the Internet. Think Pottery Barn but twice as expensive. Bob’s the comptroller. Anyhoo, that night James Sawyer, Bob’s employer, called looking for him. When Leah told him she thought Bob was with him, this Sawyer guy claimed that they had no plans to meet. When Bob came home, she asked him how the meeting went and he said it was great. Gave her all these details that she didn’t even ask for. Just totally lying. The next day he got her a pair of 1.5-carat studs. God, he’s such a pig.”
Anatoly jotted something down in a pocket notebook. “She have any idea who he’s cheating on her with?”
The buzzer went off before I had a chance to respond. “Well I guess you’ll just have to ask her yourself.” I pressed the intercom button. “Leah, is that you?”
“Yes.”
I hesitated. Leah is one of those people who uses five words in place of the one that was necessary. When she did opt for brevity it was never a good sign. I buzzed her in and stood by the door in wait.
When she reached the top of the stairs my level of alarm rose a notch. Her perpetually saturated hair seemed unusually devoid of products. As she moved closer I could see that the tip of her nose was a little too rosy and her waterproof mascara was barely hanging on. She nodded at me in acknowledgement before wordlessly passing into the apartment. She dropped her Louis Vuitton on the floor and paused while she impassively studied Anatoly.
He rose and offered his hand. “Hi, I’m…”
Leah walked past him to the window and stared blankly out at the street.
“Great. Just what I need, one more mentally imbalanced client.”
I gave Anatoly a warning look before crossing to my sister. “Leah?” I put a cautious hand on her shoulder. “Leah, Anatoly’s the PI I’ve told you about. He’s going to…”
“I don’t need him.”
I glanced at Anatoly, who looked incredibly relieved. I held my hand up to indicate that he was not yet free to bolt for the door. “Leah, I know you think that Bob’s cheating, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to get some proof before you—”
“He already confessed…this morning before he went to work. I was standing there holding my son, our son, and he confessed to screwing some pathetic little home-wrecker. He says he’s leaving me for her. Just throwing it all away for some twenty-one-year-old whore.”
I removed my hand from her shoulder and clenched it into a fist. I was going to kill the SOB. I was going to reach down his throat, grab his tonsils and—
“All right, then—”
I started at Anatoly’s chipper tone.
“Sophie, thanks for the beer. Leah, it was nice meeting you. All the luck with the divorce…”
“There’s not going to be a divorce.”
My head snapped from Anatoly back to Leah. Either I had just misheard her or she had lost her mind. “What do you mean there won’t be a divorce? You just said…”
“I’m going to fight—for him and for my family. I can win him back, Sophie. I know I can.”
She made eye contact with me for the first time, and I saw the desperation tempered with what I assumed was some kind of psychotic determination. I opened my mouth to speak before I had formulated what the next words should be.
“Even better, then,” Anatoly boomed. “I hope you two have a wonderful life together. See you around.”
“Anatoly!” But he was already out the door.
Pig. Men were all pigs. I turned back to Leah. “Honey, you know you can’t win this one. Even if he did come back to you, why would you want him?”
“I knew you’d say something like that. I’m sorry if I actually take my vows seriously—unlike some people around here. I took a vow—”
“Yeah, you did. So did Bob. But he broke the deal, Leah. You can’t honestly think of being loyal to someone who has no interest in being loyal to you.”
“Lots of marriages survive adulterous affairs. Just because yours didn’t…”
“And thank God it didn’t! Don’t you get it? Finding Scott with that Vegas showgirl was the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Otherwise, I might have actually done something stupid like try to stick it out in a doomed relationship. Hell, I still send that woman holiday cards.”
“Sophie, I’m not you and I don’t want to be you. I want to be Mrs. Bob Miller. That’s my life. Everything I have, everything I do…it’s all about being Mrs. Bob Miller. I’m good at it. My life with Bob…well, it’s what it’s supposed to be. He’s just forgotten that. He’s confused. But I’m going to make him see.”
“Leah, you can’t—”
“The hell I can’t!” I involuntarily stepped back. I had never seen her like this. She swallowed and looked away. “I found a receipt from Tiffany’s. He bought her a six thousand dollar bracelet. He bought it on the same day he bought me the diamond studs.”
“And what does that tell you, Leah?”
“It tells me that she’s using him. He bought the earrings for me because deep down he loves me, and he bought her a bracelet because he thought he had to in order to hold on to her.”
“Well
