“I came here to be on your side, Kerry. I read the police reports.” I thought I was being noble.
“You really don’t get it, do you? He tied me up because I asked him to, and more than once, and I loved every second of it. We don’t all have your hang-ups.”
I felt my mouth moving, but no words came out.
“Oh my god. Catch up, honey.” She snapped her fingers for emphasis. “I know your whole story. And I know it’s why he’ll never leave you. Jason loved me. No—he loves me. But he loves his persona more. And he can’t be the good guy—Mr. Save-the-Planet, next mayor of New York—if he leaves his Little Miss Perfect with the tragic backstory.”
“You’re—a monster. Why would you tell me all this?” For all she knew, I could have been recording her. I could testify to every word. “You admitted that you’re lying. I’m calling the DA.”
She grabbed my arm. “No, you’re not. You do that, and I’ll tell everyone what I know. You’re that girl from the house in Pittsburgh. Who’s the monster, Angela? Me, or the woman who makes a man stay with her out of sympathy? You wouldn’t even let him adopt Spencer, so he has no choice. He’s stuck with you. If he leaves, he loses his kid. I know all about you—”
The glass egg was heavy, at least fifteen pounds. I heard her skull crack the first time I hit her. She fell to the floor and was struggling to push herself upright. I hit her one more time and then another, until she stopped moving.
What if I had waited for her to finish the sentence? Maybe if I had heard her out, I would have realized that Jason only told Kerry about me, not that Spencer wasn’t mine. But the sound of my son’s name in her mouth made me certain she knew the whole story.
Or what if I had told my mother less about what really happened that night? I could have simply called her from that gas-station pay phone, told her I was in trouble, and given her the address. She had proven over and over again—first when I went missing, and then when I was found and ever since—that she would run through fire to protect me. And that is probably why I had trusted her, as always, with the entire truth.
She was at the house in a little more than an hour. Just like my instincts had kicked in the next day when Detective Duncan was on our stoop, I saw every piece of a plan. Cleaning the floor. Wiping down everything I touched. Getting rid of the glass egg.
The only thing I panicked about was the dog. I used a dish towel as a makeshift glove to fill his bowls, assuming that Kerry’s absence would be noticed when she didn’t show up to work the next day. I decided that if two days passed, I would make an anonymous call from a city pay phone to check on her. The funny thing is, I don’t think I even saw her as a real person until I looked at that dog and wondered how he was going to feel when he realized his best friend wasn’t coming back.
Mom would drive Kerry’s body all the way to the East End. If anyone ever suspected me, I’d have an alibi of sorts: Spencer’s phone call, plus the movie streamed as soon as I got home three and a half hours later. When that detective showed up at my door asking about Jason, I said he was home with me so both of us were accounted for.
It was a good plan, but apparently not good enough for Mom, who added her own touch by retrieving Jason’s gum from the car and dropping it in the sand only three feet from Kerry’s body on Ocean Beach.
It was already clear that Olivia Randall was planning to argue that Tom Fisher had framed Jason for the murder. It wouldn’t be hard to find witnesses to testify that Jason was constantly chewing that stupid gum, leaving it like bread crumbs to mark his whereabouts. Kerry’s own lawyer would testify that her client had been demanding huge amounts of money from both Jason and Fisher. Combined with the documents FSS had managed to get from Oasis about their Africa dealings, it would be easy to prove that Fisher had at least as much to lose as Jason.
Colin was sticking to his alibi testimony, and he’d be a good witness. Literally, all the state had was motive and a piece of gum. Olivia Randall would soak the courtroom with “reasonable doubt.” As my son had said when he first heard Rachel Sutton’s name: Jason wouldn’t end up in prison; we were rich.
Do you hate me yet?
Maybe not. Technically, I was an accomplice to Trisha’s kidnapping, which makes me—as a legal matter—just as guilty as Charlie Franklin. But I was also his victim. He threatened to kill me if I didn’t find him another girl. I had gotten boring.
There was a reason I chose her. From what she had told me, I figured her home life wasn’t much better than what we could manage at Charlie’s house together.
Even so, the first month was awful. He left me alone while she suffered the brunt of his attention. After that, it sort of evened out. When Charlie was at work, Trisha and I had each other. It was actually tolerable.
But then it became clear Trisha was going to have a baby.
Charlie punched her in the stomach three days in a row, trying to make it go away. Trisha and I made a vow to him and to each other that we would take care of the child growing inside of her. We would do anything and everything that Charlie wanted so that he would let us keep him. We made Charlie feel like we loved him, all for a little boy or girl we didn’t know yet.
And the strangest thing happened: Spencer was born, and this horrible man who took so much pleasure in hurting us loved his baby. He would rush home to hold his son. He was nice to us, if that’s imaginable. Trisha and I took turns going to his room every couple of days. He started letting us go outside, as long as we went one at a time, so each of us had to worry about the other as we walked around in freedom. We told the neighbors we were his nieces.
Considering what I’d been through the last three years, it wasn’t that bad. Then a police officer knocked on the front door, and all four of us were in the SUV while an Amber Alert blast out on repeat across the airwaves. It was that Amber Alert that led to the very worst thing I’ve ever done.
I repeated the official story to law enforcement so many times that the horrific facts became rote. Charlie killed “Sarah” because he didn’t want us to fit the description of two teenage girls and a baby. He pulled over at a boat slip two hours north of Pittsburgh. He ordered me to stay with the baby and Sarah to get out. He had a gun. I heard two shots. He came back to the car alone and told me to “look older.”
It was so close to the truth.
I remember the sting of the splinter that worked its way beneath my skin when I dropped to my knees on the dock. When I wake up in the middle of the night, I still feel the cold metal of the gun barrel against the base of my neck and the warmth of my own urine on my thighs. The story unfolded just the way I told it, but I was the one Charlie had rejected. I was the one he had ordered from the car and marched to the end of that pier.
And once again, I chose to survive. The words seemed to come from nowhere as I stared out over the dark water. “I look older,” I blurted. “I could pass for your wife.”
It was true. I had always been the one who could buy us beer or talk us into a club. Trisha was a year older, but I looked at least three years older than her. And I doted on the baby at least as much as she did. And I had been the one who helped him get Trisha to come home with us. I was the one who didn’t run away. I was smarter, and more cunning, and better behaved.
I was the one he could trust.
I try not to think about the momentary expression of relief that crossed her face when I returned to the car with Charlie. When I heard the two gunshots, I was holding Spencer in my lap, telling him that we were going to be okay.
So do I have any regrets? No. The choices I made brought us here, to this beautiful island, where I have my family, a new job, and enough money to keep us safe. But sometimes I do look out over the Atlantic Ocean and think about Trisha.
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