Heartbroken by Lisa Unger Page B

for it, naturally. It was in her blood.
    As if reading her mind, Joe said, “I think I’ll go back to the city for a few days.”
    She drained her cup and put it in the sink. “Fine.”
    There was no point in arguing. She could say that Kate and her family were coming, that she needed his help with the cleaning, the shopping. Didn’t he want to see his princess and her perfect progeny? It didn’t seem to bother anyone but Birdie that each child had a different father. One of whom was a scandalous drunk, an adulterer, and a lousy writer. And Sean? What to say about him? He was not the type of man she’d have expected Kate to end up with. Once, Kate (Katherine Elizabeth Burke, a beautiful name, a regal one) might have had anyone , could have been anything . She’d had every privilege, a first-rate education. She’d thrown it away.
    If Birdie made a fuss, Joe would stay out of obligation. But then there’d be some kind of fight, and he’d leave in anger. Joe Burke always got his way. You either gave it to him or he took it.
    “I’ll be back midweek to see Katie and the kids.”
    “And Sean.”
    “Well, yes, of course.” There was that famous Joe Burke squint. “Him, too.”
    She thought about telling her husband what she had seen—a figure, a man on their island. But now she wasn’t sure of it herself. What had she seen? Was there really someone there? Or was it some tricky combination of deteriorating eyesight and the wind? It would be silly to tell him, a play to any latent desire he might have to protect her. He might even mock her. He’d always thought she was an alarmist, too quickly frightened or overwrought. She didn’t bother.
    “I’ll shower and bring you to the marina,” she said. “I’ll do the shopping for the rest of the week while I’m there.” See , she thought. I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone .
    “No rush,” he said. He was staring at the new iPhone again, checking his e-mail. He was so proud of that thing, showing off photos of the kids, the amusing apps he had bought. She hated it for no reason she could name, often imagined the look of horror on his face if she were to snatch it from him and throw it out the window of their apartment, or a moving car, or into the drink. He didn’t look up as she walked off to the bedroom. If he had, he might have seen that she was fighting back tears.

chapter seven
    E mily was getting that feeling. It was a kind of swelling anxiety, a low-grade panic that made her say stupid things, that caused objects to slip from her hands.
    The yield from the prescriptions she had lifted was low. The bottle of Adderall, a cocktail of amphetamines prescribed for ADD, and the bottle of Ativan, an anti-anxiety med, brought fifty dollars each, about five dollars a pill. The rest of the bottles contained only old antibiotics, which were worthless. What they really needed was OxyContin at twenty dollars or more a pill. In a perfect world, they would have hit the jackpot with the morphine ampoules prescribed to cancer patients. In the burbs, people would pay fifty or more for one of those. She’d seen the morphine only once. It was very rare.
    She’d waited in the car while Dean and Brad took the meds up to the small split-level ranch where Dean’s dealer lived. It looked like any of the other houses on the block, in a working-class neighborhood just like hers.
    There were some untended shrubs along the walk, a welcome mat at the door, and a sticker in a window so the fire department knew where the kids were. There was a frog-shaped sandbox on the lawn, a tricycle tipped over in the driveway. If she didn’t know who lived there, she wouldn’t have guessed. There was a minivan in the driveway, two car seats in the back. But she noticed, on the street, a black slick of various oil and fluid stains from a parade of old beatercars. People parking to pick up or drop off drugs had left an indelible stain on the road.
    Dean had forgotten to leave the car