Vengeance. Mystery Writers of America Presents B00A25NLU4

thousand grown men were living, shitting, breathing the same air in this miserable place.
    What was she worried about — her nose wrinkling, her hand going to her mouth — that she’d get lung cancer?
    And then Richard had shown up, a shuffling old man, but still much the same. Stooped shoulders, because he was tall but never proud of it. Gray hair. Gray skin. He’d cut himself shaving that morning. Toilet tissue was stuck to the side of his neck. His thick, black-framed glasses reminded her of the ones he’d worn when they’d first met outside the school library, all those years ago. He was in two of her classes. He was from a small town. He wanted to teach English. He wanted to make kids feel excited about learning. He wanted to take June to the movies that night and talk about it some more. He wanted to hold her hand and tell her about the future they would have together.
    There was nothing of that excited eagerness in the old man who’d sat across from her at a metal table.
    “I am dying,” she’d said.
    And he had only nodded, his lips pursed in that self-satisfied way that said he knew everything about June before she even said it.
    June had bristled, but inside, she understood that Richard had always known everything about her. Perhaps not the dropped chicken or the ugly shirt she’d gladly sent to the town dump, but he could see into her soul. He knew that her biggest fear was dying alone. He knew what she needed to hear in order to make this transaction go smoothly. He knew, above all, how to turn these things around so that she believed his lies, no matter how paltry the proof, no matter how illogical the reasoning.
    “I’m a good man,” he’d kept telling her. Before the trial. After the trial. In letters. On the telephone. “You know that, June. Despite it all, I am a good man.”
    As if it mattered anymore. As if she had a choice.
    The secret that horrified her most was that deep down, part of her wanted to believe that he was still good. That he cared about her, even though the hatred in his eyes was so clear that she often had to look away. She could snatch the truth from the jaws of a tenth-grader at twenty paces, but her own husband, the man with whom she’d shared a bed, created a child, built a life, remained an enigma.
    June turned her head away now, stared out the window. The curtains needed to be washed. They slouched around the window like a sullen child. Her hands still remembered the feel of the stiff material as she had sewn the pleats, and her mind conjured the image of the fabric store where she had bought the damask. Grace had been eight or nine then. She was running around the store, in and out of the bolts, screaming, so June had finally given up, quickly buying a fabric she wasn’t particularly fond of just to get the annoying child out of the store.
    And then came the horrible realization that the annoying child would be in the car with her, would come home with her and continue screaming the entire way. Outside the store, June had sat in the blazing-hot car and recalled stories of mothers who’d accidentally left their kids unattended in their cars. The children’s brains boiled. They died horrible, agonizing deaths.
    June had closed her eyes in the car, summoned back the cool interior of the fabric store. She saw herself browsing slowly down the aisles, touching bolts of fabric, ignoring the prices as she selected yards of damask and silk. No child screaming. No clock ticking. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do but please herself.
    And then her eyes popped open as Grace’s foot slammed into the back of the seat. June could barely get the key in the ignition. More shaking as she pressed the buttons on the console, sending cold air swirling into the car, her heart stopping midbeat as she realized with shame that it was not the idea of killing her child that brought her such horror, but the thought of the fallout. What the tragedy would leave behind. Grieving mother. Such a sad story. A cautionary tale. And then, whispered but still clear,
How could she …
    Every mother must have felt this way at one time or another. June was not alone in that moment of hatred, that sensation of longing for an unattached life that swept over her as Grace kicked the back of her seat all the way home.
    I could just walk away,
June had thought. Or had she said the actual words? Had she actually told Grace that she could happily live without her?
    She might have said the words, but, as with