She Jumped Into His Pool and Blamed Me, So I Left Him novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Pool
At the Rainsford party Lila falls into the pool and says Valerie pushed her; Bennett tells Valerie to apologize, she walks out, and Mitchell waits at the gate with her bag and a camera angle nobody else has.
At eight o'clock on the second Saturday of July, Lila Pennock went into my boyfriend's family pool in front of ninety guests and told them I had pushed her.
I was at the terrace rail in a white dress, holding two glasses of champagne.
Bennett had asked me to stand exactly there.
"Right at the rail, at eight," he'd said in the upstairs hall an hour before. "My mother's giving a toast and I want to see you from across the lawn."
That was when I told him about the job.
A clinic across the country had offered me a job running its whole physical therapy floor.
I wanted him to hear it from me first.
He kissed my forehead. "That's huge, Val. Let's keep it between us until after the party. Mom's in a mood."
Then he went down to the lawn, and I thought nothing of it.
At lunch that day I had said something I thought was a joke.
Lila is twenty-seven and calls herself "baby" in every other sentence.
So I told her, "You're in your twenties and you still call yourself a baby. Are you a giant infant?"
Her eyes went red, and she stared at me across the table for a moment too long.
Then she smiled and asked Bennett to pass the bread.
At six she had zipped up my dress in the hall and told me I looked like a bride.
So when she walked up beside me at the rail at eight, I smiled at her.
She had her sandals in one hand.
She looked up at the balcony of the house, and then she looked at me.
"Valerie, please don't," she said, loud enough for the whole terrace to hear.
Then she stepped backward off the pool edge and went in with a splash that soaked the first row of guests.
I hadn't moved.
Both my hands were full.
Lila came up screaming. "She pushed me! She said I was a giant infant and then she pushed me!"
Forty phones came up at once.
Bennett ran across the stones and jumped in with his shoes on.
He carried her up the steps in his arms, and she cried into his shirt.
His mother, Judith Rainsford, stood at the head of the terrace with a glass in her hand and said, "Someone find this young woman her bag."
I looked at Bennett.
He set Lila on a lounge chair, wrapped a towel around her, and came to me dripping.
"Val," he said quietly. "Just say sorry. Say it was an accident and I'll fix everything tonight. I've got you."
A man in a blue blazer held his phone a foot from my face.
"Is she going to apologize?" he asked the crowd.
"I didn't touch her," I said.
"I know, baby, I know," Bennett said, in his smoothest voice. "But look at her. Just say it."
He had called me baby once before, in bed, and I had liked it.
I looked at Lila.
She was shaking under the towel, and she wasn't looking at me anymore.
She was looking at Bennett, waiting.
I put both champagne glasses into Bennett's hands.
"Hold these," I said.
So I stepped out.
I walked across the terrace with ninety people watching, and a flute that someone had knocked off a tray broke under my heel.
The glass went through my sandal and into my foot.
I kept walking.
Nobody said my name.
On the front drive the gravel was still warm, and I had no car, because Bennett had driven us out from the city.
I was standing there bleeding on the stones, trying to work out how far the train station was, when headlights came on at the gate.
A black pickup sat at the end of the drive with its engine running.
The man leaning on the hood had my overnight bag in one hand.
I had met Mitchell Rainsford exactly twice.
He was Bennett's older brother, he lived in the boathouse, and he had never said more than two sentences to me in a row.
"I took this out of Bennett's room while everyone was watching the pool," he said.
"Why?"
"Because you were going to need it." He looked down at my foot. "Don't stay for dessert. My mother will have papers by then."
I opened my mouth.
"Lila took her shoes off before she went in," he said. "I was on the dock with the cameras on. I have all of it."
I stood there with blood in my sandal and could not make a sound.
"Do you want it tonight," Mitchell said, "or when it matters?"
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