Survival Clause, стр. 19
A few more words were exchanged—I remembered them, but whoever had been holding the camera; probably a phone—hadn’t been close enough to catch what we said. Then I smiled up at him, and he nodded, and then he—as Charlotte had put it—laid a kiss on me that had certainly curled my toes at the time, and did it again now.
“Sheesh,” I said, my cheeks burning.
Charlotte chuckled. She was bouncing Carrie up and down, and my daughter was giggling. “Pretty hot, isn’t it?”
“It was. I just never realized what it might look like from the outside.”
“Now you know,” Charlotte said as, on the screen, I came up for air. My expression was part dazed, part aroused, and wholly embarrassing.
“Oh, my God.” I closed my eyes in mortification, as another wave of heat flooded my cheeks.
“At least you know what Rafe sees when he looks at you,” Charlotte told me, and I guess she had a point. It explained that amused chuckle he usually gave me at times like that, too.
On the screen, he waited until I was steady on my feet, and then he tucked me into the car with another quick kiss. He bounded up the stairs and through the door, and the camera stayed on me while I reversed out of the parking space and rolled off down the street. The video ended with me passing the car where the videographer had been sitting.
“Should I read the comments,” I asked Charlotte, “or is that just going to embarrass me further?”
She pursed her lips. “Hard to say. Most of them don’t mention you, other than to say things like ‘Lucky girl’ and ‘Wish I were in her shoes.’ The rest of it is all about ‘he can kiss me like that anytime,’ and stuff like that.”
“Any comments from Jessica herself?” I started scrolling as I asked, down through the comments and heart-eyed emoji Charlotte had quoted.
“I didn’t notice any.” She bounced Carrie again, and the baby gurgled. “She’s precious, Savannah.”
“Looks like her daddy,” I said.
“She has your eyes.”
She did. Bright blue, against Rafe’s dusky skin and curly, almost-black hair. “Oh, great. Someone’s calling me a fat cow and wondering how someone like me ended up with someone like him.”
Not like that thought hadn’t crossed my mind too, a few times. That didn’t mean I appreciated anyone else asking the question.
“And here someone else who says he should be with a black girl.”
“I think he’d disagree,” Charlotte said calmly. “Besides, they’re just jealous.”
Maybe so. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. I married him, he’s mine, and it doesn’t matter what someone else thinks.”
“You go, Savannah,” Charlotte said, grinning.
“Well, it doesn’t. I spent too much of my life thinking I knew who he should be with, and it wasn’t me. It happened this morning, too. I took one look at Leslie Yung—she’s stunning—and I immediately thought she was an old girlfriend, because that’s the kind of woman I feel like he should be with. Not someone boring and fish-belly white like me.”
“I think he’d disagree,” Charlotte said again.
“I know he’d disagree. He told me he disagreed. Just before he laid that kiss on me.”
“Ah!” Charlotte said, as if that proved something.
“So I don’t care that some woman thinks I shouldn’t be with him, and she should. He’s my husband and I’m keeping him.”
“Maybe you want to leave a message on the thread saying that?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
She smirked. “Afraid they’ll cancel you?”
The thought had crossed my mind. I’m in a profession where public opinion of me matters. “If I just ignore it, maybe it’ll go away.”
“Maybe,” Charlotte agreed. “This can’t be comfortable, though. And next thing you know, she might be following you home. Or him.”
She had a point. “Surely this is illegal? It’s stalking, isn’t it?”
“That’s something you should be asking Rafe,” Charlotte said. “Or your friend, the police chief. Or Sheriff Satterfield. Or Todd. Or Dix or Catherine.”
Plenty of people I could ask, it seemed. My life was full of law enforcement and lawyers.
“Not much we can do about it until we figure out who she is, though. You can’t arrest someone, or serve papers on someone, if you don’t know who they are.”
“No,” Charlotte said. “I guess you didn’t notice anyone filming you earlier.”
“After that kiss? I wouldn’t have noticed a full crew with a dolly and a boom mike.”
“That’s what I figured,” Charlotte said.
We spent some time rewatching the video—it made me squirm with embarrassment each time, although I suppose the squirming might have lessened a little by the third time through—but it turned out to be for naught, since rewatching didn’t show us any clues we hadn’t noticed before.
“The interior of her car looks messy,” I said. “And not new.”
“A lot of cars are messy and not new. My minivan was.”
“I don’t think this is a station wagon,” I said. “The camera’s too close to the ground.”
Charlotte squinted at it. “Maybe.”
I lowered the phone to my lap, where it kept going through the same video again. “I’m not sure what to do, other than follow Rafe around all day. And now that she’s seen—and filmed—my car, I can’t really do that.”
“We can borrow Mom’s car,” Charlotte said. “She won’t mind, if we leave her yours.”
Really? “You’d spend your whole day following my husband around?”
“It beats sitting here,” Charlotte said.
I shrugged. “I guess it does. I have to be over at the house on Fulton by eleven to let the photographer in. But before and after that, I guess we could follow Rafe around and see what he gets up to.”
He’d notice us, of course. Maybe not at first, if we used Charlotte’s mother’s car, one he wasn’t conditioned to look for. But it wouldn’t take him long to pick up on any car