Page 94 of Happy Wife

I feel my palms go clammy. How many cumulative hours has Lindy Bedford spent on cable news implying that Will is dead because of me, the young wife? Winter Park is small, and it is fueled by optics.

Is Ardell getting pressure to arrest me?

“Why don’t you tell me what happened at the end of the night?” His pen stays at the ready in his hand, balanced over the notebook, which he angles away from my line of sight. “You were waiting for Will to come to bed, and you believe that you fell asleep around onea.m., but you don’t have anyone who can corroborate that for you, right?”

“I was in bed, alone, yes. And because I was in bed, alone in my own house, where I live, it’s accurate that I don’t have anyone who can verify that. But I was alone. In bed. In my own house.” I am not even trying to hide the defensiveness in my voice now.

“You didn’t think it was strange that your husband never came back to bed?”

“Maybe I would have if I’d been conscious.”

“And then you wake up, and he’s still not there. Tell me about the next two days. What did you do then?”

I want to tell him to shut the fuck up, but I also want to avoid the inside of a jail cell. I purse my lips and say nothing.

“Look, Nora, I am going to level with you. We’ve had some evidence come to light—”

“What evidence?” I ask.

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Then why am I here?”

“Because something very bad happened to Will.”

“No shit,Travis.He’s DEAD!” I slap my hands on the table between us.

Silence falls over the room, and I’m acutely aware that I’m in the middle of a storm.

“You think the evidence points to me,” I say grimly.

Travis doesn’t respond, and I look around, feeling the cameras, the two-way mirrors, the weight of suspicion bearing down on me.

I’m not the enemy here. I did not kill my husband. I did not kill Will.

The words finally come rushing out of me. “Why aren’t any of you looking at Constance?”

“Constance?” Ardell says her name with an offensive level of incredulity.

“Yes. Constance. She didn’t have a party the night of Will’s party like everyone said she did. She doesn’t have an alibi. No one can account for where she was. And she was angry. She yelled at her food delivery guy. I bet you could get the time from the delivery service, but that night, all her friends came to Will’s house instead of being with her. That’s a motive.”

Ardell looks at me like I’m baby Bambi personified. So cute. So stupid. “Nora, Constance was one of the first people we questioned.”

I wind my hands up as if to say “Spit it out.”

“She does have an alibi. She was on a Zoom with her…well, her psychic for over four hours that night.

There’s a ringing in my ears as my thoughts catch up to what Ardell’s just said.

“And the psychic confirmed, and we’ve verified the times with Zoom. Apparently, they talk a lot.”

Constance was home. She’s going to be alibied by Madame Cleo.

And Marcus was right; I wasn’t an interloper. I was the person who knocked Constance off her pedestal, sent her running to consult with the stars.

Constance is saved by some cosmic medium. What does that say about karma?

I shake off the disbelief and try to regroup. “What about Will’s phone records?” I almost can’t believe I’m mentioning it after how quickly Ardell shut down my questions about Dean, but it’s the only card I have left to play. “What about that Mia call?”

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