The Divorce by Freida McFadden - 65

65

Naomi is going to kill me.

I can see it in her eyes. I should never have told her that Teddy is my son. I should have kept it a secret until she let me go. But now, she will never let me go. She can’t.

Naomi is standing in front of me, still reeling from the revelation. She usually looks put together enough in a soccer mom kind of way, with her yoga pants and sweatshirts and her hair always neatly pinned back. But now she looks frighteningly disheveled—there are reddish-brown hairs plastered to her forehead as well as sticking to her neck, and there are circles of sweat under her armpits. She has those scissors gripped in her right hand, and I imagine her cutting my throat with the blade. Can you cut someone’s throat with a pair of scissors? If not, maybe she’ll get a knife. One way or another, she’s going to kill me.

I thought I was saved when I heard the voice upstairs. I managed to get the duct tape off my mouth by pushing my tongue out until the tape started to give. Once I had the tape partially loose, I screamed my head off, trying to get the attention of the visitor. It was Naomi’s lawyer, Ezra Fletcher, and he heard me. He was going to come downstairs and save me. But then she pushed him.

The sound of Fletcher falling down that flight of stairs was sickening. And now the man who I thought was going to save me is lying at the foot of the stairs, a puddle of blood around his head. He’s almost certainly dead, like I will soon be.

Naomi’s eyes seem to dilate as she stares at me. “You’re Teddy’s birth mother,” she acknowledges.

“I’m his mother .” I’m not going to cater to her lies. Not anymore. Either way, she’s going to kill me. “You stole him.”

She frowns. “ Stole him? No, I saved him. Do you know how I found him?” When I don’t respond, she answers her own question. “He was abandoned. In the back seat of a car, with a man passed out in the front with needles next to him. He was wailing for help!”

Oh, Clay, how could you? If he weren’t already dead, I would kill him.

“I rescued him from the car,” she says. “I rescued him from that horrible life.”

“It wasn’t your place,” I retort.

“My place!” she bursts out. “Look at Teddy’s life! He has two parents who dote on him constantly. He lives in a huge dream house and goes to the best private school on Long Island. Did you see that birthday party yesterday? He has everything he could possibly want! His life with you would have been…” She sneers at me in disgust. “It would’ve been awful.”

“No, it wouldn’t have been awful.” I raise my chin. “ Because he is my son, and I love him more than anything else in the world.”

Naomi shoots me a smoldering look. “You don’t love him half as much as I do. After all, you wouldn’t do this for him.”

At first, I am certain she’s going to take the scissors and stab me in the neck. But instead, she drops the scissors entirely, having lost interest in them. She walks over to one of the racks full of Jeremy’s whiskey bottles, picks up a bottle of scotch, and then smashes it against the floor. The dark amber liquid leaks out all over the unfinished floor. I brace myself for her to use the jagged edge of the bottle as a weapon, but instead, she drops that too.

“Now,” she says, “I just have to get some matches.”