The Good Life

Sarah K. Stephens

• Publisher: Bloodhound Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9781504075152
• Print ISBN:
  9781914614828

"Brilliant, it had me on the edge of my seat and I didn't want to put it down!" —Goodreads reviewer, five stars

A shocking crime during a Costa Rican vacation exposes the secrets of a wealthy, troubled couple in this gripping novel by the author of It Was Always You . . .

Kate and Calvin are on the trip of their dreams in Costa Rica, hoping to heal their marriage after years of difficulty and loss. When they meet a young newlywed couple at their resort, an attraction develops between the two couples that threatens to disrupt both marriages.

After a life-threatening shark encounter, with emotions and adrenaline running high, the couples act on these simmering feelings—and the morning after, Kate awakens to find herself covered in blood, her husband missing, and the young couple dead. As she goes on the run and furiously tries to unravel the mystery of what happened in that hotel room, Kate uncovers connections leading back to her life in New York and the secrets she's hidden for years. Traveling deeper into the Costa Rican jungle, will Kate find her husband and the answers she seeks—or will her sanity be tested to its limits?

1

Kate

Kate woke up in the haze that comes after a long night of drinking and sex and pumping your body full of everything that it wants. Light pierced her skull as she opened her eyes. When she tried to swallow, her throat closed in on itself from the dehydration of the tequila shots and whatever else they’d all imbibed the night before.

Her head was on something hard—Was she sleeping on the floor?—and she shifted her neck so the pain shooting up her left side would ease off. The pounding in her temples dissipated a little and she wiped a lazy hand over her eye to clear out the sleep from the corners.

It had been a wild night.

Kate could count on one hand the number of nights she’d woken with this sense of throbbing satisfaction—mixed with a swirl of regret. There was the night back in college, when she and her sister went clubbing and someone gave them ecstasy, which they’d never done and decided to mix with their Vodka Red Bulls. Rebecca threw up behind a Denny’s dumpster at 3am while Kate picked at a Styrofoam tray of take-out fries. Then there was the time Calvin brokered that huge deal, and they ate and drank their way across New York City until 3am, when they ended up in a hotel room instead of their apartment and made love until the early dawn streaked through the expensive brocade drapes.

Something moved in the corner of the room. Kate turned her face gently. The walls of the room were white, with what her hungover brain interpreted as abstract paintings in bright primary colors. Blues, yellows, and reds.

Later, Kate would realize the walls were decorated with massive blue and yellow flowers. That the reds didn’t belong.

The dark smudge moved again in the corner. When Kate focused, she recognized the long orange beak and sleek body. It was a toucan, hopping in a tangle of bed sheets on the ground. His dense, intelligent eye stared back at her.

A breeze drifted from above. The poor bird must have wandered in through the open window to snack on the remnants of last night’s party. They’d ordered room service to Ashby and Bill’s cabana, their two new best friends at the resort, indulging in burgers and chocolate pudding like teenagers. “It’s not every day you have a near-death experience,” Bill said, holding his drink in Kate’s direction.

Everyone laughed and toasted each other. “To surviving,” Calvin replied, his face already pink from the whiskies at the hotel bar he’d slung back after they returned from the day trip gone wrong.

Kate couldn’t remember when the tone began to shift. She was still a little sun-drunk from their day on the water, and she hadn’t eaten much. The tequila went straight to her head, and her movements and those of Calvin and Bill and Ashby started to blur around her, like they were moving in slow motion. It couldn’t have been too late into the night when Ashby leaned in and kissed her, full on the mouth, with their husbands cheering from the sidelines during a game of truth or dare, Ashby insisted on starting up.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” Ashby asked when Kate, like an idiot, chose truth for her turn.

Kate avoided Calvin’s eye, and then lied and said it was stealing a purse from Macy’s when she was fifteen.

Ashby’s turn was next, and of course she chose “dare” and so Bill dared her to kiss Kate. It was like being the star of her own coming of age teen drama, except Kate was almost forty and Ashby was the cool girl, not Kate.

Her lips were softer than Kate expected, and what started off as a chaste pressing together of their lips turned into a deeper kiss, the two women tipsy from the liquor and exhilarated from the events of the day. They kept kissing, Ashby’s hands moving to Kate’s waist and looping around to pull the two of them closer together. Then Kate felt hands in her hair and another pair of lips on her neck, and she opened her eyes to see Calvin looking at her with a mixture of desire and discomfort from his seat on the couch while Bill started to unzip Kate’s dress from the back.

She could have stopped it, easily. Kate could have said no and pulled the straps back over her shoulders and grabbed her husband by the hand and returned to their cabana, where they could have made love together in an old married way. But she didn’t. Kate let what was happening keep happening, and so did Calvin.

Kate blinked. Her hip bones ached. The toucan rapped his beak against the wooden post of the bed.

Finally, Kate felt coordinated enough to sit up. The room spun for a moment in front of her and then settled into a crisp image.

But what Kate saw didn’t make sense, even though the colors and edges were all forcing their way in through her optic nerve and her brain was telling her what she was seeing. And smelling. The lush, flowery acidity in the air wasn’t coming from the exotic flowers gathered in a vase on the coffee table.

It was blood. Her friends’ blood.

Ashby lay across the room, her eyes closed. Streaks of red marred her forehead, along with mottled browns where the blood had dried already. Her neck gaped open like an animal had been tearing away at her perfect, smooth skin. Bill was crumpled in the corner by the bar, his face buried in the floor and his head bashed in from behind. Kate was certain she could see the soft tissue of his brains spilling out along the edges, with white ribbons of his skull framing it like a portrait. Both were naked, their limbs sprawled out in strange, unnatural angles.

Bile rose in Kate’s throat. She vomited onto the plush grey carpet. She was naked, too, and she instinctively checked over her own body, trying to feel if any part of her had been attacked, but she was intact. Save for the injury on her leg from yesterday’s encounter in the water, Kate wasn’t hurt at all.

Calvin. She needed to find Calvin.

He would know what to do.

He did it once. He could do it again.

Before

New York to San José, Costa Rica

Day 1

2

Kate

“I believe you’re in my seat.”

Kate turned her gaze from the specks of dust floating in the air. The speaker was a woman—girl-woman, really, her face smooth as an apricot skin—with glossy hair and the body of a whippet.

Calvin shifted next to Kate. His thigh pressed into hers, despite the relative spaciousness of their first-class seats.

“This is 2A and B.” The woman smiled, baring her teeth. “Maybe you should be over there.” It was a statement, not a question. Her body was like liquid mercury in her white silk jumpsuit, all smooth curves filling the close space between them. A man stood behind her, their hips touching.

Next to her, Calvin cleared his throat and threw on a kind smile. “I don’t think so. Check again.” He shifted and put a hand on Kate’s knee to replace the weight of his body.

“I don’t know what my wife is talking about.” The man in the aisle reached up and gripped the woman’s arm, a little too tightly Kate thought, but then again he was the best kind of solid man, so anything he touched probably looked roughly handled. “We’ll leave you alone.”

Calvin nodded as the couple sat down in the seats that were always clearly theirs to begin with.

Kate fidgeted, her matching lilac twinset and black pants ill-equipped for dazzling, even if they were Chanel. She knew her clothes hung off her, making the expensive fabric look cheap. There was a time when Kate loved fashion and looked forward to her monthly meeting with her stylist, but now it was just another chore on her to-do list, like brushing her teeth or having sex with her husband. She got it done, because it was one of her responsibilities, but she didn’t enjoy it.

Which was exactly why they were taking this trip. When Calvin showed Kate the tickets for the five-star resort in Costa Rica, he’d been almost giddy. “We can recharge, soak up the sun, go zip-lining in the jungle canopy. Be happy.” He’d come closer to her, his lips so near her own that his breath tickled her skin. “Reconnect with each other.” And then he’d kissed her, fuller and more tender than he had in months. “Come on, Katie. We need this.”

More passengers filed in, but Kate couldn’t stop staring at the man’s hands. She thought about what it would feel like to have him grab he...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Love best-selling fiction?
• Also by Sarah K. Stephens
• Dedication
• Day 3
• 1. Kate
• Before – Day 1
• 2. Kate
• 3. Kate
• 4. Rebecca
• 5. Kate
• 6. Kate
• 7. Calvin
• 8. Kate
• Day 2
• 9. Paul
• 10. Kate
• 11. Kate
• Day 3
• 12. Kate
• 13. Kate
• 14. Calvin
• 15. Kate
• 16. Kate
• 17. Kate
• 18. Kate
• Day 4
• 19. Kate
• 20. Kate
• 21. Rebecca
• 22. Kate
• 23. Rebecca
• 24. Kate
• 25. Kate
• 26. Rebecca
• 27. Kate
• Day 5
• 28. Calvin
• 29. Kate
• 30. Calvin
• 31. Kate
• 32. Rebecca
• 33. Alina
• 34. Kate
• 35. Kate
• 36. Calvin
• 37. Kate
• 38. Kate
• 39. Kate
• 40. Paul
• 41. Kate
• 42. Calvin
• 43. Kate
• 44. Kate
• 45. Kate
• 46. Kate
• 47. Kate
• Day 95
• 48. Kate
• 49. Kate
• 50. Kate
• 51. Kate
• 52. Paul
• 53. Epilogue – Rebecca
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• A note from the publisher
• You will also enjoy:
• Love best-selling fiction?