Page 49 of Filthy Lies

“I even warned you about Vince’s reputation,” she continues. “I thought if you knew he was a womanizer, you might keep your distance.”

I bark a bitter laugh. “Fat lot of good that did.”

“By then, I think he was already fixated on you. Nothing was going to stop it.” Natalie wipes a tear from her cheek. “And then you got pregnant, and everything went crazy, and suddenly, you were married to him, and I couldn’t?—”

“And you still kept reporting to them?” I cut her off.

She nods miserably. “They had over eight years of leverage on me by then, Rowan. Videos of me accepting money. Recordings of my reports. If it ever got out what I’d done…”

“So you sacrificed me to save yourself.”

“I thought you were okay!” She leans forward earnestly. “You seemed happy with him. You were having a baby. I told myself I wasn’t really hurting you anymore.”

The irony isn’t lost on me. I’d made similar justifications when I discovered Vince’s criminal activities—that loving him wasn’t wrong, so long as I wasn’t directly involved in his darker world.

“And then you disappeared,” Natalie continues. Her voice breaks. “I thought you were dead, Row. I thought I’d helped get you killed.”

The raw pain in her face gives me pause. Whatever else she might be lying about, this grief seems genuine.

“Natalie called my phone fifty-three times while you were missing,” a deep voice interrupts from the doorway.

We both look up to find Vince standing there. His face is unreadable as he stares at Natalie.

“She also came to our house, demanding to know where you were,” he continues as he approaches. “Arkady had to physically remove her from the property.”

Natalie doesn’t flinch under his gaze. “I thought you’d killed her.”

“And now?” His eyebrow arches.

“Now, I think you actually love her,” Natalie answers simply. “Though I’m still not sure that’s a good thing.”

An uncomfortable silence falls as I try to absorb everything. I look at Natalie—my friend, my betrayer—and feel the tangled emotions warring within me. Rage at her deception. Pain at the years of lies.

And underneath it all, a reluctant thread of understanding I can’t bring myself to snip.

After all, haven’t I made my own compromises for financial security? Haven’t I closed my eyes to certain truths about my husband to preserve the life we’ve built?

“Arkady’s waiting in the car,” Vince says to me. “We should go.”

I nod and stand.

“Rowan.” Natalie rises, too, desperate. “Please. I know I can’t undo what I did, but our friendship was real. At least for me. And I swear, I tried to help you that day. I would have done anything to stop what happened.”

I look at her—really look at her. The girl who held my hair back when I drank too much at college parties. The woman who brought me coffee during all-nighters before big presentations. The friend who’d stood beside me through breakups and job interviews and my mother’s cancer treatments.

Maybe some of it was real.

Maybe.

But not enough.

“I can’t do this right now, Natalie,” I say finally. “I’ve got a dying mother, a newborn daughter, and my biological father camping outside our house with an army. I don’t have room for your guilt, too.”

Her face crumples. “I understand.”

I move past her toward the door where Vince waits. But something makes me pause, my hand on the doorframe.

“The daisies,” I say without turning. “Mom likes them in a blue vase. There’s one in the cabinet under the sink in her room.”

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