I slid the thick yellow gloves over my hands and took out the scrub brush, but the ring was twisted, the rock catching on the inside of the rubber any time I bent my fingers. I removed the glove, slid the ring off my finger, and placed it in the middle of the kitchen table, in my direct line of sight. Something to tie me to the outside, a reminder that I had moved on from Cooley Ridge.
I tackled the sink and the counters, vaguely satisfied with myself, meticulously scrubbing and buffing it all to a shine. The ringing phone was a welcome relief. My eyes had started to go blurry, and I wiped my arm against my forehead to brush the hair back, pulled one of the gloves off my hand. “Hello?”
“Hey. Sorry I’m calling back so late,” Everett said.
I sank into the kitchen chair, pulling off the other glove with my teeth. “No worries. I know you’re busy.”
“So, you made it.”
“I made it,” I said.
“How’s it going so far?” he asked.
“Pretty much as expected. Dad’s the same, Daniel’s the same. Dropped off the paperwork for the doctor. I’m tackling the house already.” I stood, doing a quick tidying up before heading upstairs.
“How long until you can list it?”
“Not sure. I don’t want to list it until everything’s fixed. First impressions are everything.” I saw that it was almost midnight and yawned.
“Get some sleep,” he said.
“I’m about to.” I turned off the downstairs light, backing out of the room. Turned to face the window, to see the trees and mountains illuminated in the moonlight as I stood in the dark. Goodbye, I thought.
And thought for a moment that I saw a flicker of light between the trees.
“I’m going to try to get my dad to sign the papers on his own. Doesn’t feel right, taking it out from under him,” I said.
“Well,” Everett said, his own yawn making me smile, “do what you need to do.”
“I always do,” I said.
* * *
TEN YEARS AGO, I’D stumbled through these woods, trying to get back home. Desperate for the safety of the walls—just make it home. As if that could prevent the inevitable. Dad’s car and Daniel’s car were gone, and I sprinted across the yard, holding my arm to my stomach, pain shooting through both. The porch light swinging, and the screen door creaking, and me gasping, alone in the house.
I was alone.
The rest of the night I can handle only in flashes. I’m not sure what that says, that I can stare back at Corinne for minutes on end but not at this. I have to come at it from the side, grazing pieces here and there. Not looking it directly in the eye. I’ve never told it before. This is the only way I know how.
I’m getting there.
* * *
STRIPPING OFF MY CLOTHES in the bathroom in a wild panic, trying to stop something I had no control over—furious that I could not—and the fury giving way to something quiet and hollow the moment I surrendered. When I remembered that the world would not bend to my will, that it never had, and it certainly wasn’t about to start now.
Turning the water on hot, leaving the clothes on the floor, folding up my knees and sitting in the tub, my head resting on my arms, my eyes squeezed shut, letting the water hit me everywhere.
Two days. It had been a hypothetical two days ago in Corinne’s bathroom, had just barely morphed into something real and hopeful in my mind, and now it was gone. Like it had never truly existed.
* * *
DANIEL, KNOCKING ON THE door a while later. “Nic? Are you okay?” More knocking. “I can hear you.”
Holding my breath so I’d stop crying.
“Answer me or I’m coming in.”
The door handle turning, and a cold gust of air, and Daniel sucking in his breath as his shadow stood beside my clothes in a heap on the floor.
“Are you okay?”
Letting out the breath along with a sob. “No, I’m not okay.”
“Tell me what to do. Tell me how I can help.” Tyler had told Daniel I was pregnant after hitting him. I knew from the way Daniel had looked at me with so much regret.
“It’s too late.”
“Get out of the tub, Nic. I can’t help you unless you get out of the tub.”
“I don’t want your help.”
And him: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
His shadow retreating. The door closing.
The water eventually running cold, pulling myself up, grabbing a towel from the bar.
My clothes off the floor and the laundry running downstairs. Wrapping myself in the fleece pajamas I used in the winter, sinking into the center of my bed, hearing Daniel on the phone in his room. “No, Tyler, you don’t understand. You have to come.”
Me calling back through the bathroom between our rooms: “He can’t.”
Daniel hanging up, standing in the doorway to my room, looking as helpless and lost as I felt. “What do I do? What can I do?”
Me, crying again—everything from that night too tangled together—and wanting to go back years, a decade, to a time when every possibility could exist. Saying, “I want Mom.” The most unreasonable request.
And Daniel, expression unreadable, with his chin set, his nose swollen, his eyes faintly bruised, saying, “Well, I’m all you’ve got,” as he came to sit beside me.
* * *
TYLER MADE IT ANYWAY. On foot. Over the river. I heard him downstairs later, with Daniel.
I’d tell him in the stairwell, on my feet. I’d stop crying.
I’d lost his ring. I’d lost everything. And I wasn’t sure if his offer still stood. If he still meant it. It was easier to pretend it just never happened at all.
* * *
EVERYTHING IN THAT BOX in the police station had belonged to me: the pregnancy test, the ring, the stories, even. And in a way, it was fitting. That girl faded to nothing from the curve of the road on the last night of the county fair. She disappeared. She changed her hair and her accent, her phone number, her address. She did not look back.
Do what you need to do, Nic.
Pick yourself up.
Start over again.
PART 3
Going On
It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards.
—S?REN KIERKEGAARD
Two Weeks Later
DAY 15
The sirens were faint in the distance but growing louder, and Tyler was halfway across the room, and his words—body at Johnson Farm—echoed in my mind. I pictured sunflowers. The ghost of Corinne, spinning in the field. Her body resting there now, ten years later.
But Daniel had said he was taking her to a job site. It couldn’t be Corinne.
“Annaleise?” I asked. “Is she dead?”
“Yes,” he said. “She was just lying there in the middle of the field.”
“Was she shot?” I asked, because Daniel had access to Dad’s gun, and he’d been chasing her through the woods. Because I’d found that purse buckle near the river, where Daniel said he’d lost her, and he had her key, which must’ve been inside her bag.
Tyler nodded. “This family found her—the kids had run off after pictures and . . .” He tugged his fingers through his hair, leaving the thought. “This guy I work with, his wife works dispatch, and she got the call. I tried to get there first when I heard. I tried.”
“Oh, God,” I said. “Daniel?”
“I don’t know, Nic,” he said, but he wouldn’t look at me when he said it.
Everett was probably at the airport by now. I couldn’t call to ask for advice again—not about this, and not after everything else.
What was Daniel thinking? The body, all the evidence, leading right back to him. And Annaleise . . . Jackson had told me there were rumors, that Laura had left Daniel for a time because of them. The rumors would spin to fact, into motive, in someone else’s hands. I knew my brother could fall for the wrong person—he’d done it once before—but I couldn’t imagine Daniel allowing Annaleise to take his picture if he’d truly been seeing her. Except someone had gone through her computer late at night, deleting images from months earlier. I’d heard his steps through the woods, seen his shadow in her home. Someone who knew his way in the dark, in these woods, by heart. Daniel. Annaleise must’ve taken them when he wasn’t looking or when he was sleeping. Like all those pictures I’d seen in her files, pictures of girls caught unaware. They had no idea someone was watching. Annaleise, with her big wide eyes behind the camera, fading into the background. You’d never know she caught you.