Page 53 of The Thinnest Air
I rise from the sofa, pacing his living room and stopping before the picture window, my gaze trained on the waiting cab in the driveway. “You’re trying to talk me into staying. Please stop. My mind’s made up.”
“He doesn’t deserve you, Meredith.” Ronan sucks in a deep breath, his head in his hands. I’ve blindsided him. “But you already know that.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to be with you,” I say. “It’s that I shouldn’t be with you. It’s wrong. I don’t want to be that woman anymore.”
I don’t say goodbye—I can’t.
Instead, I show myself out.
I climb into the back of the cab.
I will go home to my husband, hoping I can forget what I’ve done, that my marriage is still salvageable.
But as the cab backs out and veers down the familiar, tree-lined street, I find myself missing Ronan already, and I can’t help but wonder if I’ve made the wrong decision ... if I’ve chosen the wrong man.
CHAPTER 24
GREER
Day Seven
“You know he has a housekeeper,” I say to my mother as she stands over the granite sink in the Price kitchen.
“I’m just trying to help.” She’s elbows deep in soapy water, washing Calder’s and Isabeau’s dinner dishes. Her gaze is transfixed on some cable news show on the TV, where a screen full of pundits and crime analysts are discussing my sister on the eve of the one-week anniversary of her disappearance.
“Ugh, turn this off.” I reach for the remote, but my mother slaps my hand.
Just this morning the police released a statement about Ronan being a possible suspect and being placed on paid administrative leave, and it seems to have breathed new life into this story, placing it front and center on all the cable talk shows again.
It doesn’t help that the tips that were flooding into the tip line the first few days all led to dead ends. I had hopes for the conversion van sightings, but with a license plate number, they were able to track down the driver and determine he was in Missouri the day Meredith went missing.
So now everyone’s focused on Andrew and Ronan, scorned lovers, the usual suspects.
“If you ask me”—a man in a gray suit and yellow tie tries to speak over the rest of the crew—“my money’s on the ex-boyfriend. The detective. Never in my twenty-five years in law enforcement have I seen anyone pull a stunt like that. You take an oath. You do your job. And if you didn’t do anything, you don’t have anything to worry about. Not removing himself from the case is the biggest clue we have so far. How you people are ignoring that is beyond me.”
“It’s got to be the husband,” a woman with strawberry-blonde hair, a dusting of freckles, and pale pink lipstick chimes in. The screen says her name is Lindsey Chatham, and she’s the president of a not-for-profit domestic abuse center. “It’s always the husband. He’s the one with the most to gain here. Money, fortune, fame, publicity for his business. His cheating wife goes missing? It’s win-win for him.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Yellow Tie says, “but the husband didn’t know the wife was cheating.”
Lindsey shrugs. “So he says. We don’t know that. Only he does.”
“I’d have to agree with Lindsey on this,” another man says, identified as Utah criminal defense attorney Vince Barbetti. “With a case like this with nothing to go on but basically zero hard evidence, we have to examine motives. Let’s look at the husband. Why would he want her gone? Well, for one, she was cheating on him. Maybe he wanted revenge? Second, money. Was there a life insurance policy? An inheritance? Was she worth more dead than alive? Anything she’d have would go to her spouse. Instant windfall. Third, crime of passion. Maybe something set him off and the husband just snapped?”
“He’s a multimillionaire, so you can remove money from your list of motives. Also, he was at work when she was reported missing.” Yellow Tie defends Andrew.
“So he says,” Lindsey counters. “From what I understand, his receptionist says he was there, but she didn’t say if she actually saw him between the hours of ten a.m. and three p.m. He claims he was in his office, working. There are no witnesses to that effect.”
“All right, so you want to examine motives?” Yellow Tie asks. “Let’s look at the lover. So we know Meredith was pregnant—presumably with Andrew’s baby. She’d been seeing Ronan McCormack for years, off and on from what I understand, and she finally has to end it because she’s having a kid with her husband. That easily could’ve been enough to set him off. He’s angry because he’s losing her. He’s jealous because she chose to go back to her husband instead of staying with him. He doesn’t want to lose her. You want me to go on here? Because I can.”
I wish I could take a side, but they all have valid arguments. At this point, everything’s a matter of opinion regardless of their expert backgrounds. We’re all just trying to make sense of something that doesn’t.
The host, a spitfire with pencil-thin eyebrows named Jeannie Jones, cuts Yellow Tie off midsentence as he rambles on, announcing they’re Skyping in a former girlfriend of Ronan McCormack’s, and the screen cuts to a woman with mousy-brown hair, dark circles under her eyes, a narrow chin, and slender shoulders. She’s seated in what appears to be a living room, with beige walls covered in picture frames and an old piano in the background.
“Okay, coming to us live from Haverford, Utah, is Alana Nash, former girlfriend of person-of-interest Ronan McCormack,” the host says. “Alana, what can you tell us about Ronan? When did you know him? How long did you date? Was there ever anything he did that would lead you to believe he was capable of hurting anyone?”
The girl clears her throat, splotches of skin turning red. She’s nervous as hell, but clearly something compelled her to speak up and let the world know about Ronan.
“We dated just after high school,” she says, her voice as mousy as her hair. “I met him at this store we both worked at, Pitino’s Lumber Supply in Crestwood. Anyway, we dated for about a year. He was really nice. And I thought we were in love. But we got in a fight once. He’d been drinking. We were at a party. He thought I was hitting on some guy, and he got really mad. He pulled me outside and ...” Her eyes begin to well as she glances down. The host tells her to take her time. “And pushed me up against the side of this house. He put his hand around my neck. I couldn’t breathe.”
