The distance, like time, just a thing we create.
All the pieces falling in a beautiful crescendo—lining up to bring me safely home.
Three Months Later
Somewhere there’s a storage unit full of painted furniture. And when the money runs out and they can’t reach me because I’ve left no forwarding address, they will auction it off or cart it out to the Dumpster in the parking lot behind the building.
That person will disappear. A ghost in their memories.
I changed my number. It’s just easier this way.
The ring hasn’t turned up. Maybe Annaleise’s brother found it before the police swept through. Maybe her mother hid it to save her from something she didn’t understand. Maybe it’s buried in her purse along with everything else, wherever Daniel left it. Maybe it will turn up one day in the form of a new car, or a redone garage, or a year of college.
Nothing stays lost forever here.
* * *
THEY TOOK ANNALEISE’S LIFE apart, put it back together again. Broke open her family and the people she went to school with, tracked down leads from college, dug into her past. As for me, I was done talking. I didn’t have to speak again. I knew that much from Everett.
Tyler stopped talking, too, and then Jackson and Daniel and Laura, until we slowly became a town without a voice. Could they really blame us after last time?
There were whispers about us. But the whispers I could deal with.
If the entirety of Annaleise’s investigation existed in a box, I imagine this would be all you’d see: a folded-up letter, addressed to the Cooley Ridge Police Department; an autopsy report with the findings: gunshot wound to the chest, bled out, clean and simple; all other evidence washed away; her phone records, which Daniel explained away—I told her to stop calling. She was harassing me—as he rocked his baby in his arms; and lies: He was home with me, Laura swore. Came home from Kelly’s just after midnight. We were here together. I was up sick with heartburn from the pregnancy. He made me pasta to settle my stomach. We were here together the rest of the night.
* * *
THE HOUSE WAS COMING along. We completed the garage first, for Dad. Sometimes I thought maybe there was nothing wrong with him—he was doing better back home, surrounded by the things he knew. But occasionally, he’d wander off, end up across town. Someone always brought him back. And sometimes he’d walk inside in the morning and sit at the kitchen table and call me Shana, like he was existing in some other time. His eyes might drift to my stomach those days, and he might say something like I hope it’s a girl this time. He needs a sister. Someone to protect. It will make him a better man.
* * *
IT WAS A WEEK after we brought Dad home when I noticed I was four days behind on my pills. It was two weeks later when I noticed the same nausea, the same feeling of bone-tiredness, that I’d felt in Corinne’s bathroom two days before everything changed.
Tyler’s been renovating room by room, making a place for us. My bedroom will be the nursery. Daniel’s old room will become Tyler’s office. He had to gut my parents’ room before I could sleep in it—repainting it, putting in carpet and new furniture. I thought of Laura, of the hoops she made Daniel jump through, and I thought I understood.
Despite the tiredness, I still have trouble sleeping in long stretches. Sometimes I can’t differentiate night and day, sleep and wake.
And sometimes the tremble comes back in my right hand. So I press it to my stomach to keep steady. I’m still scared. I feel like it’s all too close to the surface. That it would take only a nudge and our fragile story would tumble down, crack open, exposing us.
But it hasn’t yet.
I think we’ll be okay.
* * *
HOW DO I SLEEP at all? After everything?
I don’t know who it would help at this point to tell: Corinne was beautiful, and a monster, and I loved her once. But in the end, I abandoned her, like everyone else. In the end, she made me kill her.
There. There’s my confession. But she was the most deliberate person I knew—she knew what she was doing. She had to. That’s how I sleep at night.
But sometimes she’s all I can think about. And that night, barreling straight for me. Sometimes when I’m falling asleep, I see her eyes in the headlights, locked on mine.
On those nights, as on this one, Tyler pulls me closer, like he knows.
If there’s a feeling to home, it’s this. A place where there are no secrets, where nothing stays buried: not the past and not yourself. Where you can be all the versions of you, see it all reflected back as you walk the same stairs, the same halls, the same rooms. Feel the ghost of your mother as you sit at the kitchen table, hear the words of your father circling round and round over dinner, and your brother stopping by, wishing you’d be a little better, a little stronger. Just checking in to be sure. And Tyler. Of course Tyler.
It’s four walls echoing back everything you’ve ever been and everything you’ve ever done, and it’s the people who stay despite it all. Through it all. For it all.
Where you can stop fearing the truth. Let it be part of you. Take it to bed. Stare it in the face with an arm tucked around you.
The truth, then.
The truth is, I’m terrified of all I have to lose and how close I will always be to losing it. But it happened before. And I survived it.
I like to believe that’s what Everett saw in me and what Tyler knows. That I survive. It’s only one thing. But it’s also everything.
Pick yourself up.
Start over again.