Page 19 of Sterling Clay

“He ever lay a hand on you?”

I don’t speak, but our eyes meet, and the watery appearance of mine answers his question. I swallow hard and blink back the tears. I refuse to waste any more on Wesley.

“Shit,” Clay mutters before lifting his beer and tossing back the bitter crispness. His eyes snag away from me and stare at the opposite corner of the room, somewhere near his fireplace.

Maybe I’ve said more than I should. Maybe I’ve confessed too much, but once the flood gates have opened, the rest of the story pours out.

“There’s no doubt you heard about the fire.” The house irreparably torched. “It took forever for the insurance company to accept the claims because . . .” I swallow hard again. “Because there was suspicion of arson.”

The investigation took six months before they finally processed the claims. Another three months passed, and constant nagging on my end before the claims moved through the chain of command. The final payout was expected in July, then August. The final days of September are upon us and still nothing.

I scrape at the label on my beer once more. “They eventually determined faulty wiring but that faulty wiring could have been on purpose.” Those sketchy contractors. Or a contract on my life.

I lift my head again. “The night before, I’d told Wesley I was leaving him. I was putting the house on the market and taking Dutton back to Florida.”

“You wanted a divorce.” Clay states the obvious.

“I didn’t need one. We weren’t married.”

“But—” His gaze drops to my left hand, looking for the ring I haven’t worn in over a year.

“It was an act. We called ourselves Mr. and Mrs. Holland but we weren’t legally a couple on paper. Wesley always said we’d get to it. We’d have a proper wedding. A grand affair.” I weakly wave my hand through the air, like the magic wand he’d pretended to be, fulfilling my every wish.

“Only we never did. We didn’t have the money and even though we could have had a civil service, we didn’t do that either.” And here’s where the stab wound in my heart reopens. My eyes prickle with tears once more. “He already had a wife. In Florida.”

“What the fuck?” Clay snaps, leaning forward and staring at me. “He what?”

“A wife in Florida. Me in West Virginia. And, I suspect, a new girl in Kentucky.”

“What a mother—” Clay cuts himself off, chewing hard at his lower lip to hold back a slew of terms I’ve used myself to label Wesley Holland. Whatever Clay is thinking, I’m certain I said it out loud at some point. For all the names Wesley called me, I have some choice ones for him as well.

“How did you find out?”

My laugh is bitter. “When Wesley went missing, it wasn’t as hard as I thought to trace a few breadcrumbs in his history.”

What did surprise me was my parents never had the foresight to investigate him. My dad thrived on fault with authority and suspicion of others outside his world. Maybe they had looked into Wesley, and hadn’t wished to share the truth, waiting for me to discover it for myself. Waiting for me to fail and come home with my tail between my legs.

Hadn’t I done that for a while?

I shake my head. “He’s still married to his wife, as far as I know, but she reported him as missing as well. I don’t know what happened to the girlfriend.”

I’m not certain what I was considered. The other woman? Never his fiancée. Never his wife as we’d told this community.

“Did you know about his wife before you planned to leave him?”

I shake my head. “After.”

“And the house?”

“Was in my name.” I came into a bit of money. The upfront investment had been all mine. “So, when the bills came due, or creditors called, and the insurance needed to be claimed, it all fell back on me. The arson investigation started with me.” As if I’d want to torch my own home.

“I had to prove I wasn’t a flight risk, which was first implied with Wesley’s disappearance, before I could leave the area.”

For a few weeks, Dutton and I stayed with Meredith Mulligan.

“Do you think he did it?” Clay asks, then immediately sits back and swipes his hand down his face. “Is this more than you want to talk about?”

His concerned expression tells me he’s giving me an out. I don’t need to overshare, but it feels good to tell someone other than my parents my thoughts.