Chapter 5: Mrs. Sterling
Colin didn’t sit down. He ran.
He made it as far as the parking garage. The detective, whose name was Sergeant Liz Moreau, had two troopers waiting by the stairwell, because Adrian had told her everything on the drive down from Canada. They found a pair of bolt cutters and a utility knife in the trunk of Colin’s car, and a burner phone with eleven weeks of text messages to a number saved as V.
Vanessa Hale wasn’t a stranger after all. Not to Colin. She’d been his girlfriend for two years, a real estate agent from Providence with a lot of credit card debt and very good taste in clothes. The plan, the prosecutor told us later, had been simple. Colin knew Adrian’s marriage was secret. He knew the only other witness was dead. He knew I’d be on a ship with no signal for six weeks. He paid a new deputy clerk eight thousand dollars to swap a name in the register and backdate a certificate. He took my real one out of the safe. Then he waited for a calm day and a long sail.
Two point three billion dollars, split two ways. All they needed was a widow.
“They just picked the wrong one,” Dana said, the day Colin was charged with attempted murder. She bought me a coffee and clinked her paper cup against mine.
Vanessa took a plea deal in March. Forgery, fraud, perjury, conspiracy. She cried in court, and for a second I almost felt sorry for her, until I remembered her breath against my ear in that church. You should have stayed on your boat, Natalie. She’d known exactly where I was. They’d timed everything around it.
Melissa Ferris, the deputy clerk, lost her job and testified against both of them. Pete, Adrian’s head of security, came to the house in Cape Elizabeth with his hat in his hands and apologized to me for ten full minutes. I told him he’d only done what the person in charge told him to do. Then I told him to make sure he always knew who that was.
Eleanor took longer.
She came to the house on a gray afternoon in April, three weeks after Adrian’s cast came off. I opened the door. She stood on the step in her black suit and pearls, smaller than I remembered, holding a cardboard box.
“These are yours,” she said. “She’d moved them to the garage. I found them when I cleared the house out.”
Inside was my grandmother’s quilt. My dissertation notes. The cream-colored envelope, empty now. The police had the certificate.
“Thank you,” I said.
Eleanor didn’t leave. She looked past me, down the hall, toward the kitchen where Adrian was burning pancakes and swearing at them.
“I stood in that church,” she said, “and I let a stranger hold my hand at my son’s funeral. And when his wife walked in soaking wet, I had her thrown out.” Her chin trembled. She lifted it anyway. “I don’t expect you to forgive me. I don’t think I would. I just wanted you to know I know what I did.”
I thought about it for a long moment. About the senator’s daughter, and the Subaru, and the way she’d looked at me in that hearing room like a stain.
Then I thought about Adrian at six years old, learning to sail on a lake, with his mother holding the back of his life jacket.
“Come in,” I said. “He’s ruining breakfast. You can help me save it.”
In June, on our fourth anniversary, we got married again.
Not secretly this time. On the lake, the way Adrian had always promised, with two hundred guests and a local photographer and a notice in the Portland Press Herald in plain black ink: Adrian James Sterling and Dr. Natalie Brooks Sterling renew their vows. Arlene Watts came in her cat cardigan and cried through the whole thing. Dana gave a toast that made the room laugh until they wheezed.
Judge Price’s widow sent a gift. It was a little box, and inside was a bow tie covered in tiny anchors.
Adrian wore it.
When the officiant said, “You may kiss the bride,” Adrian leaned in and whispered, so only I could hear it, the way Vanessa once had:
“Nobody’s ever going to wonder who you are again.”
And then, louder, for everybody: “Now it’s official, Dr. Sterling. You’re stuck with me.”
