When His Mistress Ran Down My Daughter

My hands were red to the wrist. I didn't look away from Rylie's face when I reached into my coat. I didn't have to look. I knew exactly where the phone was, exactly which button, because I'd practiced this a hundred times in my head and never once thought I would need it.

Three years married. Three years I never pressed it.

I pressed it now.

No siren went off. No light flashed. It just made a small sound, almost like a text message sending, and somewhere across the city a room full of people I had never met went from standing to running.

"Someone call 911!" a woman behind me was screaming. "Oh my God, oh my God, is she breathing—"

Phones were up all around me, little black rectangles catching the blood on the pavement, catching my face, catching Rylie's open, unseeing eyes. I kept both hands pressed against her chest. I counted her breaths because counting was the only thing keeping my own lungs working.

Mitchell hadn't moved. His umbrella was still open above his head, rain sliding off the edge of it in a clean sheet, like he was standing in a different world than the rest of us. His mouth was open. No sound came out.

"Elaine—" he started.

I didn't answer him. I didn't have anything left for him. Not yet.

That's when I heard it. A low thrum, far off, then closer, then not far off at all — rotors cutting the wet air, a sound so deep I felt it in my sternum before I heard it in my ears. People on the sidewalk looked up. A woman grabbed her child and stepped back. The thrum became a roar, and the rain around us started to move sideways, whipped by the downdraft, and a black shape lowered itself out of the gray sky like it belonged there.

It set down in the middle of Fifth Avenue, right between the stalled cars, close enough that the wind off the blades flattened my hair against my skull and sent a paper cup skittering into the gutter. The crowd scattered back into a ragged circle. Nobody was filming their phones now — they were shielding their eyes.

The side door slid open.

Oscar Scott stepped down first, before anyone else, before the six men in dark suits who followed him out with the kind of stillness that meant they'd done this before. He didn't duck under the blades. He didn't hurry. He walked like the street had cleared itself for him personally, which, in a way, it had.

He was carrying a slim leather portfolio under one arm, like a man walking into a board meeting instead of a crime scene.

I'd met Oscar Scott exactly four times in three years. He'd always looked at me sideways, never straight on, like he was reading a document instead of a face. I used to think it meant he didn't trust me. I understand now it meant he was the only one paying attention.

He crossed the wet street to where I knelt, and for one long second he looked down at Rylie's face — really looked, the way you look at something you've been searching for so long you've stopped believing you'll ever see it.

Then he knelt.

It startled his own men. I watched two of them flinch, actually flinch, at the sight of Oscar Scott lowering himself onto bloody, rain-slick pavement in a five-thousand-dollar coat. He brushed a strand of wet hair off Rylie's forehead with two fingers, so gently I almost didn't believe it was the same hand that had signed papers ending careers.

He found her wrist. Held it. Counted.

A breath went out of him, low and controlled, when he found the pulse.

Then he stood. Unhurried. He opened the portfolio.

"Mitchell." He didn't raise his voice. He never had to. "Come here."

Mitchell's feet moved before his face caught up to what was happening. He stopped a few feet away, staring at the paper his grandfather held out — a certified lab report, three signatures, three seals, folded so many times the crease had gone soft.

"This is a DNA report," Oscar said. "Authenticated by three independent labs. I had it run the day Elaine came to me and told me she was going to find your sister herself. I've been carrying it for months, waiting for the day I'd need it."

The crowd had gone silent except for the idling engine of the Porsche and the rain hissing against the asphalt.

"This," Oscar said, and he pointed one finger, steady as a scalpel, down at Rylie, "is your sister. The sister your wife spent ten months finding, in places you never asked about. The sister your mistress" — his eyes cut, once, toward the white car — "just tried to kill."

Mitchell's face went the color of the rain.

I looked down at Rylie's chest, rising, falling, rising. Alive. Still alive.

And somewhere behind me, I heard Brittany's car door creak open again, slow this time, careful — like she'd finally understood the ground beneath her heels had shifted.