The One Who Got Away (2 page)

The journalists in the media pack couldn't possibly have known who I was but as soon as I stopped by one of the pillars and began punching the code – the twins' birthday – into the security pad, they pounced.

‘Are you family? Are you a friend? Do you know Loren Wynne-Estes?'

My hands were shaking and I must have punched the numbers incorrectly. I tried again.

A reporter said: ‘Loren who is missing from the cruise ship? Do you know her? Is that why you're here?'

The gates were taking their sweet time to swing open. A fluffy TV mic was hovering over my head and an iPhone with a recorder app was under my face.

‘Do you know what happened? Did she fall?'

Did she fall?

I turned as if to say: do you really want me to answer that? Because what was the alternative? She either fell or she jumped? She either fell, or she was pushed. Those were the only options.

* * *

It was completely quiet inside Loren's house. I can't tell you how unusual that was. Loren was a proper High Side mom. She employed a team of nannies. She had a housekeeper who hummed and clattered about. She liked to have music playing, and she had the girls. So Loren's house was a noisy house.

I thought back to one of the last times I'd been there. Loren had invited me over. My business, before all this started, was cosmetic surgery. I'm not a doctor, obviously, but I used to work in a cosmetic-surgery office, and I got to know what people want, as well as how much they had to pay. That's where I came up with the idea of starting a business doing cosmetic-surgery vacations down to Mexico. New boobs. New butts. Mommy makeovers. They're all much cheaper in Mexico, provided you know what you're doing. So I set out on my own, and three or four times a year, I'd take clients down there for a nip and tuck, with a luxury vacation tacked on the end. And because I was in that business, I sometimes used to get freebies in the mail from cosmetic companies. And on this occasion, I'd received a basket of face-cream samples, and I'd texted Loren, who'd texted back:
Ooh … bring them over!

It wasn't like she couldn't afford her own fancy skin-creams, but who doesn't like a freebie?

I'd arrived to find Peyton and Hannah dressed as Elsa, from
Frozen
. They're both blonde. Loren had plaited their hair and gone crazy with the costumes. They were belting the theme song into a set of those comedy-sized, plastic microphones.

‘Sing with us,' Hannah cried, ‘we can upload it to iTunes!'

I'd gone along with it, singing loudly into one of the microphones, doing my best to keep up while one of the nannies hovered with a video recorder. It had been so much fun, and now the house just seemed so quiet.

I went down the corridor and into the kitchen. Loren's kitchen normally gleams, yet it was a mess. The juicer was still out on the bench, with a stick of celery jutting out.

Whoever was last in there – the girls, Janet and at least one nanny – had obviously left in a hurry. The image of Loren's children being bundled into an SUV, being told to hurry, hurry, hurry, made my heart hurt.

Had the media already arrived by then? How awful. Imagine being five years old, still with a teddy or a doll under your arm, having to dodge a TV camera. Imagine being seated in the SUV, with the cameras coming up close to the tinted windows.

I left the mess in the kitchen and headed down the hall, my footsteps echoing on the parquetry floor. I don't know if you've ever been in somebody's house when they aren't home, but it's nerve-racking, which is weird because it wasn't like I had broken in. This was my sister's house. I had the code.

I poked my head into the girls' bedroom. Hannah and Peyton were old enough to have their own rooms, and the house was certainly big enough to accommodate them, but they are twins and they love to be together. Maybe that comes from when they were babies. One of Loren's first helpers – the baby whisperer,
she'd called her – taught Loren how to swaddle each of her infants, and then place them together in one cot. Being together seemed to soothe them.

Now they were bigger they had their own canopy beds, but they still shared a room. The bed curtains were supposed to be tied back with bows, but they were loose – more evidence of how quickly everyone had left? – and the sheets were messed up and jumped on. The rocking horse was wearing a hat. The kid-sized table was set for a mini-tea party, with one American Girl doll, one Talking Dora, and a matching set of teddy bears sitting in little chairs, waiting expectantly.

I continued down the hall, towards Loren's bedroom. My heart was beating like a bird under a blanket. It wasn't often that I was in my sister's house, and rarely did I venture into what she grandly called the ‘parents' retreat'. Fair enough, too, because Loren's bedroom was more like a suite: there was the bedroom, a dressing room, a walk-in robe, and then the bathroom, with double sinks, a double shower and double mirrors.

I opened the door. Unlike the girls' room, this was immaculate. The bed was beautifully made. The cover – it's Scandinavian wool, I remember Loren telling me that – was stretched and tucked around the mattress, and the pillows were smooth. The housekeeper had set out felt slippers on each side of the bed, ready for when the occupants returned.

I looked around. I knew what I was looking for. My sister has always kept a journal, and wherever she's lived, it's always been hidden in the same place: under the bottom drawer of her dresser.

I removed the bottom drawer. There was a leather-bound notebook in the cavity. It wasn't old – on the contrary, it was
new – and it wasn't even all that thick, and the way the writing all ran together, I could just tell that Loren had been pouring her heart into it.

I sat down on my butt on the floor by her bed, with knees up under my chin, and started to read.

 

‘Love is blind, and marriage is the
eye-opener. That's a classic!'

Tweet posted by Loren Wynne-Estes

 

W
e met by the fridge. That was twelve years ago. I was twenty-three and straight out of college.

Thinking about it now, a fridge probably wasn't the best omen. Fridges are cold and hard and full of dead things, ha-ha, but who was looking for an omen?

Not me. I was looking for a tub of strawberry-flavoured yoghurt I'd left in the fridge earlier that day. Where the hell was it? There was a big note: if it's not yours don't take it, but this being an office full of unpaid interns, people took things anyway.

A voice behind me said: ‘Lost something?'

I turned and straightened and, wow. There stood a guy who I was going to say was at least as good-looking as George Clooney, but forget George Clooney. There stood a guy who was just hellishly handsome.

This guy was tall and strong and lean and tanned. Dark hair, blue eyes.

So, who was he? Besides being Captain Handsome? I had no idea. I'd only been working for Book-IT for … well, certainly for less than six weeks. The company doesn't exist anymore, but Book-IT was basically a Brooklyn-based start-up.
Our founders were two guys – they weren't related, yet both had these curiously long white eyelashes – who had devised a computer program that was going to let people choose their own hotel rooms, and their own flights. I was one of twenty marketing graduates they had hired to help get the concept off the ground. If you're wondering whether that meant people sat on balance balls at their desks and brought their dogs to work, then yes, they did.

If you're wondering whether we had all been promised big bonuses if the whole idea took off, then yes, of course we had.

Anyway, I looked at this guy and said: ‘Somebody stole my yoghurt.'

David – for that was Captain Handsome's name – tilted his head and said: ‘Right,' and then, in a kind of quizzical way he added: ‘Hang on … don't I know you?'

Don't I know you?

That's a line, right? To this day, I can remember thinking:
Oh, come on, that is a line.

It may not be the lamest line ever – ‘I have a rare tropical disease that will kill me if I don't have sex in the next half-hour' is the lamest line ever – but it was a line nonetheless, and if there was one thing I really wasn't in the mood for that day, it was being fed a line, but then, just as I was about to shut the fridge and say, ‘Excuse me,' and make my way back to my desk, David clicked his fingers and said: ‘No, wait, we do know each other! You're from Bienveneda.'

That floored me because, as it happens, I was – and I am – from Bienveneda.

Could this guy also be from Bienveneda? The odds were against it. Bienveneda is a town on the Californian coast road, too far from LA to make a day trip of it, and the nice parts are
too filled with gated estates to be the kind of place that anyone would go to for a vacation. The chances of meeting somebody else from Bienveneda in Brooklyn, let alone at Book-IT?

Surely nil.

‘No way,' I said, startled. ‘Why, are you?'

‘I am,' he said. ‘Maybe we've met?'

Maybe we had, but then again how? Looking at him, I could see that he was at least eight or maybe even ten years older than me, which wasn't necessarily a problem, except that he had probably abandoned Bienveneda for college before I had even started high school.

‘I don't know,' I said doubtfully. ‘Which side were you on?'

Which side were you on? It sounds like a sporting question, but it's not a sporting question. It's actually a question that only a fellow Bienvonite will understand.

Which side you were on refers to the Bienveneda River – the lovely, muddy, rocky Bienveneda River – which runs right through the middle of town.

When that river rises, one side of the town floods. Which side? The Low Side. Where was David raised? The High Side. And never the twain shall meet.

‘Well, that can't be it,' I said.

‘Well, who cares anyway?' he said. ‘We're here now. We should have a drink.'

Ah, but should we?

David might have thought so, but I had my reservations. It wasn't so much that he wasn't cute. Oh my goodness, he was cute. It wasn't that he was married. He definitely wasn't married. No, for me the problem was that David was obviously quite a bit older than I was – I was twenty-three; he was thirty-two – and much more senior at Book-IT.

Was falling into bed with somebody who may well turn out to be one of my bosses really what I wanted to do in my first few weeks on the job?

I wasn't sure.

‘Oh come on,' said David, sensing my hesitation, ‘we're only talking about one drink.'

‘Well, alright,' I said, although I think I knew even then that we weren't. ‘I'm Loren, by the way.'

David grinned and stuck out his hand. ‘Well, how do you do, Loren By-the-Way,' he said, ‘I'm David Wynne-Estes.'

* * *

We went to Hudson on the West Side. Being new to New York City, I'd never heard of Hudson and yet it was standing room only on the green glass floor.

‘Are those antlers?' I asked, as David led me through the buzzing crowd, past a chair made from what seemed to be bits of deer.

‘I believe so,' said David, ‘they had an artist come in. I read about it in the
Times
. He was big on natural materials.'

‘Including animals?'

‘Yes,' said David, laughing, ‘including animals!'

It was late Autumn, and cold and grey outside. We stripped out of our layers and handed them in at coat check. The main bar was completely full of women with stick legs and high heels and with men holding beer bottles from the neck, but there were a few empty nooks and crannies in the cramped library bar, so we squeezed ourselves into one of them. The table was the size of a steering wheel, on a high pole. The chairs were cracked leather. There were bookshelves to the ceiling on three
of four walls, and they had one of those library ladders on a rail.

‘What can I get you folks?'

The waiter looked like a young Bruce Springsteen in faded denim with a stars-and-stripes hankie in his back pocket. David did the ordering, for which I was grateful. Being new to town, I wouldn't have known what to order. This was to be my first ever lychee martini, and my first ever wasabi peas.

We sipped, we nibbled, we ended up staying five hours.

‘You're fun,' I said at one point.

‘And you're pretty,' he said, touching my nose.

I blushed. Was I pretty? I don't know. I guess so. Who isn't at twenty-three?

Anyway, eventually, David said: ‘So … shall we find a quieter place to eat properly?'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘I think we should.'

The alcohol had loosened me up. We gathered our things from coat check – David tipped five dollars, which I remember thinking was quite a lot – and stepped onto a near-vertical escalator for the ride out to the street, and guess what? It was snowing.

‘It's beautiful,' I said, putting out my mittens to catch some flakes.

‘Today it's beautiful,' said David, ‘tomorrow it's dirty slush on the sidewalk.'

‘Can we walk around in it?'

David looked down at me – he's a good foot taller than I am – to see if I was serious.

‘I keep forgetting you're new here,' he said.

‘Well, I am.'

‘Then let's go.'

He took my arm, and we began walking – slowly, since I didn't have quite the right boots on – down to the corner of Central Park South.

‘Would you like a ride?' said David.

‘You mean in a carriage?'

Yes, he meant in a carriage. The driver helped me up. I settled back into the bench seat. David got in beside me, and put a blanket over my knees.

‘This is like something from a movie,' I said.

‘Which movie?' said David.

‘All of them!'

We went once around the bottom end of the park, which was just long enough for David to get his hands under the blanket, and then under my skirt.

Cheeky monkey was already taking liberties, and for all my earlier hesitation, I found I didn't mind.

* * *

‘So, how did you know that I was from Bienveneda?'

We were lying naked in David's bed on the ninth floor of a cast-iron building on Mercer.

‘Easy,' he said. ‘I took a peek into your personnel file.'

I sat bolt upright, not easy given I was tangled in sheets at the time. ‘You did what?'

‘Hey, don't be like that,' said David, propping himself onto an elbow, ‘it's not like I was stalking.'

‘Except that you have been poking around in my personnel file!'

‘Well, sure. You were sitting at your desk on, what? Day one or two of the new job, and I thought,
Wow, who is that?
So I
asked my PA to bring me your file. That's not stalking. That is due diligence.'

‘Oh, come on. That's stalking!'

‘Hey, don't be like that. Imagine if I hadn't had that peek?' he protested, ‘we might not be here now, and how bad would that be?'

Bad. Very bad, because honestly, there was nowhere in those days that I wanted to be, other than in David's bed.

It seems ridiculous now, but I can still remember how nervous I was during my first sleepover at his place. All the gossip at Book-IT was that he only ever dated models, and I wasn't a model – not even close – but I knew where to find Victoria's Secret.

Don't spend a fortune
, I told myself.

I spent a fortune and honestly? I shouldn't have bothered, because men don't care. They want you naked.

‘You are gorgeous,' David said. He was pretty hot himself.

Do I have to describe the sex? Well, it probably goes without saying that David was more experienced than me in that regard, too. I'm not saying that I hadn't had any kind of sex life before I met him – of course I had – but it had been vanilla. My greatest skill was faking orgasms, or so I thought until I fell back against the pillow – this was after one of my better
When Harry Met Sally
performances – and he said: ‘So … do you always fake?'

How had he known? Because guys do. They pretend they don't, but they do.

Part of me wanted to splutter: ‘Oh no, I wasn't faking …' but it wasn't like David was smirking. He seemed really interested to know.

‘I'm not sure how to answer that,' I said.

‘Well, faking is stupid,' he said, ‘and it has to stop.'

With that, he got up and took his firm ass into his en suite.

‘What are you doing in there?' I said.

‘Picking up this.' David was holding an electric toothbrush. ‘Do you know what this is?'

‘A toothbrush?'

‘No. It's a pleasure machine,' he said, and honestly, I had no idea what was coming, except that I soon was.

‘How did you even know how to do that?' I said, afterwards. ‘Who even taught you that?'

Thinking back now, I guess that was a stupid question, because did I really want to know the answer? No. All that mattered was that David seemed keen on giving me an education in the bedroom – and we all know what happens when we come across one of those guys, right?

We become enthusiastic students!

It wasn't long before we were doing everything. Alright, maybe not everything. I've seen on the internet what some people get up to and I'm not doing any of that, but I can't be the only girl to have figured out that the more sex we had, the more I wanted; and the more things we tried, the braver I became.

One day, I brought chocolate sauce into David's apartment. Another time it was candles (I'm laughing now, remembering how he yelped when I dripped the wax on him).

Given how I was raised – pretty conservatively, and mostly by Mom, after Dad walked out – this was all a big deal for me, but I don't want anyone to think that my relationship with David was all about sex.

We talked.

No, I promise, we did.

Lying in David's bed – he had a leather-bound bed in those days, with very manly Calvin Klein sheets – we shared stories
about our friends, our schools, our childhoods. I'd taken it for granted that he had had an easier time growing up than me – basically because his parents were still together, and because he was High Side – but he didn't see it that way.

‘It wasn't fun being sent to boarding school,' he said, as the New York taxis honked outside and the coffee went cold in our cups. ‘It wasn't fun being told over the phone that my dog had died.'

I had been running my bare feet up David's naked legs in that sexy way you do when you're young and in love, but now I stopped.

‘How did they break it to you?' I asked.

‘We used to get weekly phone calls, and Mom just said: “Oh, and we had to put Lucy down. She'd gotten incontinent.” And then, you know, “So, that was sad. But listen, we have to go. Talk to you next week.”'

I placed a hand on David's chest. ‘That's awful.'

‘They're British. They don't show emotion,' said David. He had removed one hand from behind his head and he was stroking my hair.

‘But enough about me,' he said. ‘What did your parents do to you?'

‘Well, they certainly never had my dog put down.'

‘No, but I'm sure they did something. Parents can't help themselves.'

The worst thing my father did to me was leave my mother for a woman with a kid about the same age as me. And the worst thing my mother did to me was die of a stroke, in my last year of college – but that was too hard to talk about.

‘I wasn't that happy when my parents split up,' I said.

‘Why did they split?'

‘Why? I guess because Dad met somebody he liked more than Mom.' I was talking about Val, who is Molly's mom. ‘Dad left when I was eight. Molly was six. There was a time when I couldn't stand to look at her,' I told David. ‘We're still not that close.'