Chapter 5 - She Celebrates
The call reached Demi at 6:20 in the morning. She was in the master bedroom of the Bethesda house — Roderick’s house — with Gareth asleep beside her, one heavy arm thrown across the duvet.
She listened to the night nurse’s careful, practiced condolences, said the right soft things back, and set the phone down on the nightstand.
Then she laughed.
It came out of her before she could think about it, a bright, delighted sound in the quiet room, and Gareth stirred and lifted his head.
“It’s done,” she said. “He’s gone. It’s finally, actually done.”
She got up, wrapped herself in the silk robe that had cost more than Brandon Robbins made in a month, and went down to the kitchen, and took a bottle of Roderick’s good champagne from the wine refrigerator — she made a point of choosing the most expensive one — and poured two tall glasses, and carried them back up the stairs.
They drank in bed while the sun came up over the oaks, and Demi talked about San Diego, about the glass house on the water, about the boat she thought they might buy, about how quickly they could sell the ugly serious furniture Roderick had loved.
She arranged the memorial for the following week, and she arranged it cheaply, because every dollar spent on the dead was a dollar taken from the living, and the living, as far as Demi was concerned, was her.
A modest chapel, a short service, no reception to speak of. She wore black lace and a veil, and she performed. She had always been able to perform. She dabbed at dry eyes in front of Roderick’s plant managers and his golf acquaintances and the handful of relatives who came, and she let her voice break at exactly the right moment in exactly the right places, and afterward more than one person told her, pressing her hand, that she had loved him so.
It was near the end, as the small crowd thinned toward the doors, that she saw the young man standing at the back of the chapel. Plain suit, ill-fitting, the kind you buy off a rack for occasions like this.
She knew his face and could not immediately place it, and then she did: the orderly. The one from the hospital. Standing quietly against the back wall with his hands folded, watching the service with an expression she could not read.
Something moved through her — a small, cold current of unease she had no name for.
“Gareth,” she murmured, turning her head. “That man in the back. Why is a hospital orderly at my husband’s funeral?”
Gareth followed her glance and shrugged. “Probably wants a handout. Grieving widow, rich estate — you’d be surprised what crawls out of the woodwork looking for a piece.
May you like
Ignore him.” He put a warm hand at the small of her back. “It’s over. You did it. Don’t go inventing things to worry about now.”
She let herself be steered toward the doors. But she looked back once, and the orderly was still there, still watching, and the cold current moved through her again.
