Page 44 of Sweet Ruin

“I do,” I tell her. “I just fucking did.”

She doesn’t have an answer for that. I can’t really blame her.

She’s never met a man like me before.

Then the hallway gets loud.

“Where is she? Where’s my sister? Somebody go find her.”

Somebody answers her, too far off to make out.

“Well, she’s the one who moved it up,” the voice snaps back. “So she can be the one to start it. This stupid slideshow is taking forever and my feet are killing me.”

In the dark in front of me, the woman goes still.

“That’s her,” she whispers. “That’s Vivian.”

In an instant, I know exactly what kind of woman she is. Even if I hadn’t heard what she’d done, the adultery, the disdain, I would’ve known from the second she spoke that she’s a fucking snake.

“She sounds like a delight,” I drawl. “Pity that her evening is about to take such a twist.”

She laughs. Then she straightens up. “I have to go.”

“I know.”

“No, I mean—” She hesitates. “I have to go do it.”

Her hand finds the doorknob, but she doesn’t turn it. I look at the sliver of light beneath the door and ponder my next move.

I came here to take this family’s evening apart myself.

But I just decided something:

I’m not going to.

I want to watch her do it instead.

It isn’t mercy and it isn’t patience stopping me. It’s just pure fucking greed.

What she’s about to walk out there and do to her husband will be worse than anything I had planned.

Also… I want to hear her voice just a little bit more.

“Go on, then,” I tell her. “I’ll be right here, watching. Give them hell.”

“Jesus,” she says, half-laughing and half in disbelief. “You’re a strange guy, you know that?”

“Like recognizes like.”

She nods. Then she opens the door.

The party comes in all at once—light across the tile, forty conversations, a kid shrieking, ice in glasses. The bright yellow of the kitchen falls on her back and her hair and the shoulder of a black cardigan.

I get a half-second of the shape of her before I retreat back into the bend of the wall, out of the light.

And in that half-second, a man’s voice comes over the top of everything else.

“Hey—there she is! Dee! Delilah. Babe, your mother’s been hunting you for ten minutes.”