Buried Deep, page 9
“Really?” James looked surprised. “I didn’t know you were considering that.”
“I contacted my old boss a few days ago, and he said he had a few smaller projects I could cover on a freelance basis. I’ll start there and see how it goes.”
“Okay—well, that’s great. If that’s what you want, then I fully support it.”
I nodded, although I certainly didn’t need his permission. I had spent far too much of my life focused on making James happy. Parker had actually been right on that account—I had always put my husband on a pedestal. Or maybe it was more than that. Maybe it was that I had never felt that I was good enough for him. I had always sensed that I was James’s second choice.
I didn’t feel that way anymore.
Most people, I realized, weren’t all good or all bad, but a mixture of the two. Now I knew that James had a far darker side than I’d ever realized. Yes, he was still the kindly doctor who had dedicated his life to helping people. But when it came down to it, he was also a murderer. And even if he had killed Hannah in a fit of passion, when he was out of his mind with anger and jealousy, that part of him had always been there somewhere.
And recently, I had learned a similar lesson about myself.
I wasn’t simply the adoring wife, the dedicated mother, the person who sincerely wanted everyone in my orbit to be happy and fulfilled. I had a darker side, too.
Of course, I wish James hadn’t been the one to kill Hannah. At the very least, I wish I could remove it from my memory, like a surgeon carving out a malignant tumor. But I had no power to change the past. And once all the facts had been revealed to me, I was left with one clear and unflinching thought.
I was glad Hannah Nilsson was dead.
If she hadn’t died, James and I probably would never have gotten married, or even met. Even more unthinkable, we would never have had Paige, who had truly inherited the best of both of us. Hannah’s death resulted in my happiness, and in the end, I wasn’t sorry about that. Even if it made me a bad person, or at least, a deeply flawed one.
Hannah was gone forever. And somehow knowing that, and knowing what had really happened that night, freed me in a way. I didn’t have to be jealous of her anymore. James might have loved her once, but he loved me more. I was the one who he protected, the one he took care of. She was the one he had disposed of. It wasn’t a pretty thought, I knew, but there it was. It was our truth, for better or worse.
James seemed to be reading my thoughts. “Maybe one day, we’ll forget about all of this,” he said quietly. “And everything will go back to normal, like it never happened.”
He didn’t have to explain any further—I knew exactly what he meant.
“Maybe.” I looked at my husband, at the face I had loved for almost half my life. “Happy birthday, sweetheart.”
Margot Hunt is a USA Today best-selling author. Her full-length novels include BEST FRIENDS FOREVER, FOR BETTER AND WORSE and THE LAST AFFAIR. She has also written two novellas—BURIED DEEP and THE HOUSE ON THE WATER.
Margot wrote eight previous books as Whitney Gaskell and the Young Adult series GEEK HIGH under the pen name Piper Banks.
She lives in Stuart, Florida.
Margot Hunt, Buried Deep
