Page 14 of Happy Wife

Fritz turns back to me, and he must see the reluctance on my face because he adds, “I’ll handle Constance, all right? And don’t talk to anyone without me around. I’ll call you if I hear anything from Travis.”

“What? Why? And what makes you think they’d call you if they find something? I’m his wife.”

“That’s cute,” he snipes. “But I’m his business partner of twenty years. I don’t think you understand what’s at stake here.”

“I guess I don’t,” I say, voice hardening. “Are we talking about Will’s safety or your law firm?”

Fritz’s preoccupation with the firm makes me want to tell him to fuck off, but he glowers at me and heads to his car, robbing me of the opportunity. He gets in his Porsche and drives away.

I close my eyes and turn my head up to the sky, feeling the heat on my face, letting the sun and the helplessness bear down on me.

Jesus, Will, where are you?

“Hey,” Este calls from the front door, snapping my attention back down to earth.

I turn to look at her.

“Come inside. You’ve earned a glass of wine.”

I look at my watch. “It’s eleven in the morning.”

“So what?”

“Okay.” But I stay in the driveway for just a second longer.

That’s when I see it. A gray sedan creeping slowly up the road. The make and model seem out of place for the neighborhood, butI dismiss the prickling feeling under my skin. DoorDash and Uber Eats always come through here at the beck and call of the wealthy and lazy. Still, I turn toward the house, shivering a little when the gray sedan completes the loop of the cul-de-sac and slowly drives by again. I quickly head inside, locking the door behind me.

Chapter9

Before

Before Will Somerset and boat rides around Winter Park’s Chain of Lakes to cool off on a hot Saturday morning, and before Este and rosé by the pool on random Wednesday afternoons, I was hot. Not, like, check-out-those-curves hot, but rather, wondering-why-the-fuck-did-I-choose-to-live-on-the-surface-of-the-sun hot. I understand that Northerners will tell a Floridian to take a seat with weather complaints when theywillinglylive with minus-forty-degree winter days, but Florida’s climate is a special kind of unforgiving. There’s a heaviness that comes with the humidity that can feel impossible to shake. It’s an ass-sweat-sticking-to-the-seat-of-your-car, perspiration-gathering-under-the-cups-of-your-bra kind of heat. Unless, of course, you have the luxury of spending your days poolside with a little umbrella drink, best not to be outside at all.

Back in those days, I spent most of my time working as a receptionist at the front desk of a children’s museum in Loch Haven Park, a hub for museums and theaters just outside the boundaries of Winter Park. And my daily dose of sunshine came during my lunch break, when I would find a shady tree in the park where I could eat my brown bag lunch before the most oppressive heat of the day, and daydream about how I was going to reboot my life.

When I took the museum job just out of college, I had high hopes of parlaying the nonprofit role—with its fundraiser events and donor cocktail parties—into something with more upward mobility, like a job in marketing or public relations. At every event, I held my breath with the fantastic expectation that I would meet someone looking for a plucky young upstart. But three years into answering phones and doling out visitor stickers at the front desk, no one had taken me under their wing to help me find a bigger and better job. For all intents and purposes, my career was stalled, which was too bad, because living on a nonprofit receptionist’s salary was, as the title implies, not exactly lucrative.

Meager funds and dwindling career prospects were why I snagged a second job as a swim instructor at the Winter Park Racquet Club. One of the three private clubs in town, the Racquet Club is nestled among the enormous estates and historical homes on one of the town’s most coveted streets, Via Tuscany, and its lakeside location meant that members could arrive by boat and leave their vessels at the property’s dock. Neighborhood moms would bring younger kids here because they could keep a close eye on their children between Chardonnays.

Teaching swimming was a nice way to escape the heat for a few hours on the weekends. And the second income stream from giving one-on-one lessons to children with deeper pockets than my own meant that, if I was thrifty, I could save up enough money to move out of my mom’s place in a year or so.

“You want a Diet Coke?” Quinn, my 10:00a.m.student, always offered as her lesson wound down. “I can charge it to my parents’ account.”

I’m not proud of the number of times I took her up on her offer, but the swimmer I saw after her was always my toughest student of the day. Fearful of water and not in command of his own limbs half the time, three-year-old Spencer tugged on my one-piece bathing suit like it was a life raft. More than once I had to pull his hands out of my neckline when, in plain sight of most of the club’s guests, he grabbed wildly for anything that he could use to haul himself out of the water. And sometimes, a Diet Coke from Quinn felt like a well-earned treat.

One Saturday morning, I was trying to teach Spencer how to dive for small Paw Patrol figurines and keep his wandering handsfrom coming near me when I spotted two girls sneaking drinks from abandoned pool chairs. Frowning, I watched them giggle and hide behind the snack stand, and I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed.

It was another sunny day in Winter Park. The moms, perpetually in an arms race to see who could be the most agelessly beautiful while also jockeying to snag the latest designer bag or priciest Cartier bangle, sunned themselves on lounge chairs while a veritable army of babysitters and nannies sat fully dressed under umbrellas with strollers or wrangled kids and their snack stand hotdogs and instantly melting Popsicles. Everyone seemed too engrossed in their own afternoons to notice the girls.

But over the course of a thirty-minute swim lesson, I watched as they became more brazen in their thefts, swiping fresh drinks as busy bartenders left them on the bar tops for servers to carry off. Given the relatively small size of the club, it came as a surprise to me that the girls weren’t being caught or even noticed.

“All done!” Spencer shrieked as he rescued a Dalmatian figurine in a red fireman hat from the second step of the pool for the umpteenth time.

“You ready to be done, buddy?” I checked the clock on the side of the snack stand. “Yeah. We can be done for the day. Did you have fun?”

“Nooo.” He shook his head with a cheeky grin.

“Noo?” I parroted. “Should I bring some Spider-Man figurines next time?”

---