Her Dark Lies Page 10

  “Does she get thirty percent of Elliot’s estate as well?” Oh my God, Claire. Rude much? I put my hand over my mouth. “I’m so sorry, that was tacky of me.”

  But Ana laughs. “Hardly. She’ll receive a nice payoff, and will live comfortably. But she and Elliot don’t have what you and Jack do, so we didn’t take the same...precautions. It’s a shame. I think Elliot truly thought he loved her, but it wasn’t born of any sort of passion, only lust. A mother can sense these things. I never expected Amelia to be a long-term part of the family. Not like you.”

  She looks over at me, assessing. I am struck again by how silly I must look to her, my ripped jeans and wild hair. Thank God she’d never seen the art that covered my body. I can’t imagine she would have appreciated my choice of canvas.

  “My son loves you very much.”

  “I love him, too.”

  “I know you do. That’s why we agreed to the terms of the prenup when Jackson approached us. That, and...you know he was married before. It didn’t turn out the way he’d hoped, but that marriage, too, was doomed. Morgan wasn’t right for Jackson. I worried from the moment he brought her home, hoped it wouldn’t get serious.”

  “I don’t know much about her.”

  Lies. Such dark little lies.

  “Romulus doesn’t like many people. He despised Morgan. When Jack brought her home, the dogs made such a fuss, growling and circling her. She was scared of them. They were young then, just pups, not fully trained, but in my experience, animals are good judges of character.”

  I go very still, enough that Romulus looks up at me with a tiny whine of concern. I’m now on full alert, because this is the most I’ve heard about Morgan from a Compton.

  “She was such a beauty. She had that energy around her that many overtly sexual women have. She was bright, too, almost too bright for her own good. You know we invested in her company, don’t you? Her talent was clear from the beginning. Brice and I immediately knew the value of her work. Scientific innovation is commonplace now, with so many people looking for new, better ways to communicate, but most of the young thinkers we came across, though brilliant, were only looking for ways to cash out. They didn’t want to build a long-standing business. They wanted the quick and easy path, develop an app or idea good enough to be bought out by a bigger company, so they could move on to their next moment of genius.

  “Morgan wasn’t different. She created something useful, something she could grow, and she knew her work’s value. We did as well. We took full advantage. Maybe she didn’t like that. We gave her more than market value for her company, did everything we could to make sure she was given credit, too. Instead of being grateful and excited, she resented us. She tried to pull Jackson away from us. Even before the wedding, she was very busy driving a wedge into our family. She wanted him all for herself, didn’t want to share him with us, with the world. She was obsessive, controlling, destructive. Jackson was so unhappy. I’ve never seen him like that before. Cowed. Beaten. He knew he’d made a mistake from the beginning. No, their marriage was never going to have a happy ending.”

  She pushes a few stray strands of hair that are caught in the wind off her face, then bestows a small smile upon me.

  “You’re different. You’re an artist. You’re making something that can nourish the soul. Your talent isn’t ephemeral. Computers are obsolete almost the moment they come out of the box. Phones, tablets, cameras, software. The science changes as quickly and often as the weather. Art is enduring. You aren’t taking from him, you’re adding. He appreciates that. As do his father and I.”

  The compliment is a kind one, but it strikes me—Katie was right. They invested in Morgan like they invested in me. Ana saw talent, and wanted to nurture it, in both of us.

  Her voice is soft. “Jackson told me what happened on Monday. I know everything. I need to ask. Did you shoot the intruder in Nashville, Claire?”

  I don’t hesitate. “Malcolm shot the intruder.”

  I feel her relax.

  “Such a terrible thing to have happen on your wedding weekend. I admire your strength, Claire. You are a true match for my son. And for this family. One day, this will all be yours. Yours and Jackson’s. It will be your responsibility to protect this family, protect our legacy, just as it is mine, now. You must be willing to do whatever it takes. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Good. I hope you know you can have anything you want from this world now that you’re a Compton. Anything. Let’s get back to the house. I’m sure Jackson is missing you, and I want to talk to Henna. We’ll see what we can do to find you a dress that isn’t ruined.”

  She whistles, and the dogs disappear.

  And with that, our audience is over.

  19

  Wee Obsessions

  It’s embarrassing to admit, but I didn’t start looking into Morgan’s death until after my blowup with Katie. I’d made such a big deal out of not caring that I felt like a hypocrite. And I know myself. Once I latch on to something, it’s hard to let go. “Like a dog with a bone,” my dad used to say, but he meant it kindly. My obsessions were amusing to him. A way for me to get smart. It meant late nights with a book in my lap, and then a computer, looking things up. It’s why my reports for school came back with extra points for my exhaustive research. When I found painting, realized I was attracted to the modernists, I became a walking encyclopedia on the movement. I was eight.

  I think it’s why I’m a decent painter. For me, painting is simply storytelling. Throwing a mental obsession onto a canvas. To have an idea in your head, a vision, to layer it day after day after day until it becomes a visual narrative, something a stranger can look at and comprehend, that’s the key to a successful project. Though interpretations vary. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t that right?

  My obsession problem is also how I ended up getting so many tattoos during my teen years.

  “Doesn’t it hurt?” Harper would ask, tongue stiff through her freshly tightened braces, and I’d nod and try to explain that it’s the kind of pain that feels good. It gives a serotonin rush, and you seek it out again and again. Some people become addicts, some use their bodies as canvases or pin cushions. Some bite their nails. Some starve themselves. Some cut. Some overeat. Some find succor in hours of exercise. Some gamble. Some drink. Some fuck. It’s a thing. Everyone has their thing, right?

  Katie knew I’d fall down the rabbit hole if she gave me the right push. She left a window open on my computer with a beguiling shot of Morgan in profile at a cocktail party. Within days, searching the internet for pictures of Morgan became a thing for me. Even as I erased the mistakes of my youth, becoming the woman I thought Jackson wanted, which became its own torturous pleasure—trust me, it hurts a hell of a lot more to remove a tattoo than to get one in the first place—Morgan became my idée fixe. She was heroin, and the internet my favorite pusher.

  I tried so hard to keep it private. To look only when he wasn’t around. But it got out of control, as all obsessions do.

  It got to the point that even when Jack was lying in bed next to me asleep, when I was most at risk of discovery, I would have my phone out, screen fully dimmed, sound down, searching. Honestly, I would feel less guilty if I was looking at porn and satisfying myself rather than waking Jack to tend to my desires.

  I can see why he was attracted to her. She is a dynamic presence on the screen. Flaming red hair. Heart-shaped face. Pillowy lips. A sharp jaw. Elegantly arched brows, exactly the right thickness, two shades darker than her hair. I go back time and again to a shot of her laughing, mouth open wide enough that I can see her bottom teeth aren’t perfectly straight. Such a tiny flaw. Was she self-conscious about it? She doesn’t seem self-conscious about anything. She seems like the kind of woman I always wanted to be—confident as hell and disdainful of those mere mortals who gave a damn about the way others perceive
them.

  And the way Jack looks at her...

  I have a private Pinterest board where I save all her photos, capturing all of her many moods, her looks, her style. Every single thing I was able to find of the two of them, or her alone. From her pictures in high school, the vague gaze off to the side of the camera, to the one with the smudge of dirt on her chin, to the one from Stanford, with her in some electrical suit, a gadget with wires and lenses on the table in front of her. I have shots of her smiling shyly. Giving Jack coquettish glances. Staring frankly into the camera as if to say Yes? What do you want?

  Their wedding photos—most from magazines, taken by drone paparazzi. From above, she looks so austere and elegant in her gown, but I can’t see her face, or the details. Just Jack’s arm around her waist.

  Don’t get me wrong. Jack loves me. I don’t doubt his affection for a moment. He loves me in a way that is impossible to fake. He’s in love with me. He does look at me like he looked at her; I’m sure others can see it in our photos.

  But does he touch me like he touched her?

  When we make love, and he does the things he knows I like, things I didn’t know I liked until he taught them to me, I can’t help but wonder, did he teach them to her, too? Did she teach him?

  The idea of her writhing in pleasure in his arms drives me mad.

  It would stand to reason that I’d start painting her.

  Even in abstract, she became a part of my work. Her hair, a swirl of cinnabar in the center of the canvas. Her eyes, the base of my sky. Any flash of creamy skin or strawberry hair or a cardinal in a branch reminds me of her.

  But I can’t share this with anyone. Morgan is my darkest secret. My enduring obsession.

  It would be so much easier if he’d just talk about her every once in a while. I mean, it’s natural, right? When someone was a part of your life, weird little things remind you of them, and it’s perfectly normal to remark on these things.

  Oh, Morgan liked apples.

  Oh, Morgan enjoyed foreign films.

  Oh, Morgan was great at trivia.

  Oh, Morgan struggled with split ends.

  Anything, anything, to give me a better sense of why he loved her enough to marry her. Why he chose her to spend his life with.

  I know my fiancé. He’s not a shallow man. He wouldn’t marry someone just because she was smart, or beautiful. There was something about her that he connected with on a visceral level, something that made him tingle with desire at the thought of her. Despite what Ana has just shared, I know it wasn’t just a business transaction—yes, I already knew that Compton bought Morgan’s burgeoning company soon after she and Jack met.

  I know it was something more.

  I know she had something more.

  If she hadn’t died, would he still be with her?

  He won’t speak of her. It’s as if she never existed. As if there aren’t a thousand photos of them together on my computer, hidden away, a humiliating treasure trove that I revisit night after night, day after day, adding to it whenever something I haven’t run across before captures my attention.

  Was that what Ana was trying to do? As I follow her back to the Villa, I wonder if she was trying to set me at ease, trying to make me think the ghost of Morgan doesn’t live in the small, liminal space between Jackson and myself. Though I feel her there, as distinct as a plate of glass.

  Does Ana know he holds that part of himself separate from me? From our life together?

  Jack can never find out about this. It makes me look weak, and childish, to spend so much time on a dead woman. But the truth has kept me up at night for months. Despite Ana’s strange reassurances, I know the truth about my soon-to-be husband.

  I am his second choice.

  20

  Women Become

  The week after Claire met Jack, she made an appointment to start laser surgery to remove the ill-advised tattoos on her ankle, shoulders, and lower back—especially focused on the tramp stamp she’d gotten to defy her mother and cover her surgery scars. That tattoo wasn’t the best artwork money could buy anyway.

  A month after they began dating, Claire took out all her extra piercings—her nose, her septum, her belly button, her left nipple—leaving just the two main earring holes and a double piercing on the left.

  Three months in, she dyed her didn’t-pay-for-it ombré hair back to her normal dusky blond and had it properly highlighted, with sun-kissed bits bright around her face. The money piece, the hairdresser called it. How very appropriate. The woman also trimmed Claire’s shaggy Medusa mop into a sleek bob that she straightened to swing below her chin. The keratin treatment cost a fortune, but it was worth it, for the time it lasted.

  Jack came home from an exceptionally long trip to Africa and she was changed. Altered. He was traveling a lot those first several months, so whenever he made it home, and she was a slightly fresher, sterilized version of her old self, he simply kissed her and told her she was beautiful no matter what and took her to bed.

  He pretended not to mind her transformation, but I could tell he hated it. The way his jaw tightened when he saw her as a regular girl was a dead giveaway. I never thought he’d go for that kind of thing—the external evidence of internal pain and punishment—but with her, he lapped it up. She was his little artist girl, his artiste, his dark and broody girl, spending her days with the oils and adulations and her nights with his cock in her mouth. And here she was, his dirty little girl, scrubbing herself clean for him.

  Claire’s mother, Trisha, enjoyed the changes. She came for tea, nodding approvingly at the state of the house’s renovation, love love loving the paint colors, the exposed beams, the gray kitchen cabinets, the Carrara marble single-sheet backsplash and the champagne brass finishes. She approved of the woman Claire was turning into, becoming such a grown-up. She approved of Jack. Approved of his family, especially. Who doesn’t want their kid marrying into wealth and privilege?

  Katie, though, questioned every step vociferously. Oh, the fights they had. She accused Claire of trying to fake her way into his family. Why don’t you let them judge you for who you are? Why do you have to conform to some ideal you think they’re looking for? And what happens when he dumps you for the real deal?

  Do you blame her? Claire spent years layering on a disguise and Katie understood her like that, understood her motivations. Katie couldn’t fathom why Claire would want to fling back the curtains and let the world see everything. It was the ultimate betrayal. Conformity was a sick disease in her mind. Katie was a free spirit, a daredevil. She resisted the idea that Claire wanted a different kind of normalcy.

  Jack was Claire’s salvation, and she was wise enough to leap on the opportunity.

  By the time Jack took Claire to New York to deliver the promised canvases to Ana and Brice, she had completely reverted to her preteen self, the one who existed before her father died. Blond hair, green eyes, creamy skin and subtle gold hoops in her ears. She was demure. Feminine. Adoring.

  They loved her transformation.

  They had no idea she felt like a fraud.

  Claire wanted to change for this man. She wanted him to see her as she was meant to be, not how she’d changed, altered, punished herself. She wanted him to think she was a typical, normal woman, not understanding there is no such thing as normal. And there was no way to erase the slices to her soul that drove her to the artistic path in the first place. She was doomed to repeat them.

  But that’s what true love does, right? It opens you to the possibility of who you were meant to be. Like raindrops in a thirsty garden, you open, you flower, you become.

  Some women become more than others.

  Some don’t.

  21

  Server Down, Server Down

  Jack no longer thinks there is any sort of coincidence in the past few days’ events. Someone is after the family. After him, and
after Claire. The only questions that still lingers—who, and why now?

  Though the latter is easy enough to answer. With the entire family on the island, they are vulnerable. They are stuck here, being lashed by the storms, soon to be without recourse to leave, to defend themselves. He needs to get Claire by herself, now, tell her everything, and find a way to keep her safe.

  “We need to coordinate,” Jack says. “We need to make sure everyone’s safe. Whoever is after us, they have an ax to grind.”

  Elliot throws his phone on the table, though Brice is still talking. “Why is someone after us, Jack? What’s going on?”

  “How the hell am I supposed to know?”

  “Well, I haven’t done anything wrong. I have nothing to confess. Fuck, man. Our personal servers are gone. Deleted. The corporation’s systems are untouched, it is only the private servers.”

  “How is that even possible?” Jack asks. “Who even knows about our servers? They’re only for the family.”

  “And yet, someone very talented has managed to slip inside our family’s wards, Jackson. Someone with the means, and the desire, to bring us down. Why do you think that is?”

  Jack leans forward, fingers curling on both hands. He is lit with white-hot rage at his brother’s tone.

  “Elliot, what the hell are you saying?”

  “Everything was going just fine until you started lusting after that woman.”

  “That woman? How dare you? Claire is going to be my wife. I—”

  Elliot squares off against him. The two are nose to nose, hissing like feral cats.

  “I am not talking about Claire. I’m talking about that bitch of a woman you married ten years ago.”

  “How dare you bring her into this,” Jack spits through clenched teeth.