Sara smiled and nodded as if she was actually following what Charlie was saying. She could feel her heart pulsing inside her throat. Her stomach had turned sour. She prayed she would not get sick.
Charlie clasped his hands together. ‘So I’ve got all my fancy camera equipment and lights and—’
‘I’m sorry,’ Sara interrupted. She put her hand to her chest again, certain that Charlie could see her heart pounding underneath. ‘Do you mind if I have a minute?’
‘Absolutely. I’ll start setting up in the first room. Just pop in when you’re ready.’
Sara could barely choke out a thank-you. She walked across the balcony toward the far set of stairs. She passed the room where Dale Harding had died, feeling like she’d committed the worst kind of sin for letting her life melt down when the man was lying dead. She stopped in front of the rainbow-eyed unicorn at the top of the stairs. Her stomach pitched like a tiny ship in the middle of an ocean. Sara closed her eyes. She waited out the nausea. Then she took out her iPhone because it offered the only socially acceptable excuse to stand silently with her head bent down.
There was a text from her sister. Tessa was a missionary in South Africa. She’d sent a photo of her daughter building a mud castle with help from some of the local kids.
Sara pulled up the keyboard. She typed, ANGIE IS BACK, but didn’t send the text. She stared at the words. She deleted the last two and wrote: ANGIE MIGHT BE DEAD. Her thumb hovered over ‘send’, but she couldn’t press it.
Sara had testified at several murder trials where phone data came into play. She envisioned herself on the witness stand explaining to a jury why her little sister had sent back a smiley face at the news that Will’s wife might be dead. She deleted the unsent text and stared at the photo of her niece until her stomach settled and she didn’t feel like flinging herself down the stairs anymore.
Sara had never fully understood Will and Angie’s screwed-up relationship. It was something she’d come to accept as one of those things you tolerated when you were in love with someone, like the fact that he refused to eat vegetables or that he was completely blind to the toilet paper roll being empty. Angie was an addiction. She was a disease.
Everybody had a past.
Sara had been married before. She had been deeply, irrevocably in love with a man with whom she would’ve happily spent the rest of her life. But he had died, and she had forced herself to move on. Eventually. Slowly. She had left the small town where she grew up. Left her family. Left everything she had ever known to move to Atlanta and start over. And then Will had come along.
Had it been love at first sight? Meeting Will was more like an awakening. At the time, Sara had been a widow for three years. She was working double shifts at Grady Hospital, going home, then going back to work, and that was her life. And then Will had walked into the emergency room. Sara had felt something stir deep inside of her, like a winter flower poking its head out of the snow. He was handsome. He was smart. He was funny. He was also very, very complicated. Will would be the first to admit that he had enough baggage to fill every airplane in the sky. And Angie was only part of it.
For most of her professional life, Sara had worked as either a pediatrician or a medical examiner. Between the two jobs, she had seen the countless reprehensible ways that people took out their rage on children. Not until Will did she truly understand what happened when these abused kids grew up. Will’s scars were both emotional and physical. He didn’t trust people—at least not enough. Getting him to talk about his feelings was like pulling teeth. Actually, getting him to talk about anything of true importance was like pulling the Titanic through quicksand. With a shoestring.
They had been together for three months before he would even acknowledge the scars on his body. Almost a year passed before he told Sara some of the causes, but not the details, and certainly not the emotions behind them. She had learned to take his cue and not ask questions. She ran her hands along his back and pretended the perfect square imprint from a belt buckle was not there. She kissed his mouth and ignored the scar where his lip had been busted into two pieces. She only bought him long-sleeved shirts because she knew that he didn’t want anyone to see where he’d taken a razor to his forearm.
For Angie.
He had tried to kill himself for Angie. Not because she rejected him, but because as kids, they were both placed in a foster home with a man who would not keep his hands off Angie. She had cried wolf before. She wasn’t the kind of girl the police listened to. At fourteen, she already had a record. So Will had taken a razor blade and cut open his forearm in a six-inch line up from his wrist because he knew that an emergency room visit was the one thing they couldn’t ignore.
This wasn’t the first or last time he had risked his life for Angie Polaski. It had taken Will years to break the hold she had over him. But was that hold really broken? Was he just understandably upset that someone he’d known for almost the entirety of his life was probably dead?
Sara could not stop going back to the lipstick. That’s all she could focus on, because the additional violations the lipstick signified were too much to handle. Will knew that Angie was breaking into his house. He could lay down his life for her, but he couldn’t be bothered to protect Sara’s privacy.
She shook her head. At least she knew where she fell on his list of priorities: right behind Betty.
Sara put her phone back in her pocket. She unhooked her glasses from her collar. The lenses were smeared. The building was insufferably hot. Everything was covered in sweat. She found a tissue in her pocket and rubbed the lenses with purpose.
She supposed one good thing about picking up Betty was that Will would eventually have to come by and get her. Which was ludicrous. Why had Sara given him so much power? She was a grown woman. She shouldn’t feel like she was waiting for some boy to check yes or no on a note that she had slipped inside his locker.
Sara checked the lenses. She squinted at a smudge, about to curse herself for ruining another pair of glasses when she realized the smudge was not on the lens. It was on the unicorn behind it.
She slid on her glasses. She took a closer look. The unicorn was life-sized, if you could assume a unicorn was the same size as a horse. His head was tilted slightly as he gazed down the stairs. The creature’s rainbow eye was about her shoulder height. Centered on the green and blue stripe in his iris was a hole that was around the size of a dime. Specks of gray concrete were chipped out, which is what she had taken for a smudge on her lens. Sara looked down at the ground. Concrete dust covered cigarette butts and crack pipes. The dust had fallen recently.
‘Charlie?’ she called.
He poked his head out of one of the rooms. ‘Yes?’
‘Can you come over here with your camera and some tweezers?’
‘That’s the most interesting proposition I’ve had all week.’ He went back into the room and came out with his camera in one hand and a CSU kit in the other.
Sara pointed to the unicorn’s eye. ‘Here.’
Charlie shuddered. ‘Two things that have always freaked me out: unicorns and eyeballs.’ He took a magnifying glass from the kit and leaned in for a better look. ‘Oh, I see. Excellent catch.’