“Doctor Davis, can you answer the question, please?”
I look up at Detective Thomas and attempt to blink away the memory. I can still feel the stickiness on my hands from the spilt drinks on the counter, the tingling in my legs from sitting there, motionless, for so many hours. So deep in conversation. Oblivious to the world outside of that dilapidated old kitchen. The buzz of the party around us evaporating until suddenly, we were the last ones left. The quiet walk home in the dark, Ethan’s finger hooked gently around mine as the fall wind trickled through the trees on campus. The way he led me up the sidewalk to my apartment, waited on the street corner until I unlocked my front door and waved him good night.
“Yes,” I say quietly, the knot in my throat tightening. “Yes, I know Ethan Walker. But it sounds like you know that already.”
“What can you tell me about him?”
“He was my boyfriend in college. We dated for eight months.”
“And why did you split up?”
“We were in college,” I repeat. “It wasn’t that serious. It just didn’t work out.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
I’m glaring at him now, a hatred boiling in my chest that momentarily startles me. Clearly, he knows the answer already. He just wants to hear me say it.
“Why don’t you tell me the whole story, in your words,” Detective Thomas says. “Start from the top.”
I sigh, glancing at the clock hanging above my office door. Fifteen minutes before my first appointment is supposed to arrive. I’ve told my version of this story a hundred times before—I know he can just look at the department records, probably listen to a recording of me recounting the exact same thing—but I desperately want this man out of my office by the time my appointment arrives.
“Ethan and I dated for eight months, like I said. He was my first real boyfriend, and we got close fast. Too fast for a couple of kids. He was over at our apartment all the time, almost every night. But at the start of that summer, right after classes ended, he started to distance himself. It was also right around that time that my roommate, Sarah, went missing.”
“Was it reported as a Missing Persons case?”
“No,” I say. “Sarah was spontaneous; a free spirit. She was known to take off on weekend trips and things of that nature, but something about it didn’t feel right to me. I hadn’t heard from her in three days, so I started to get concerned.”
“That seems normal,” Detective Thomas says. “Did you go to the police?”
“No,” I say again, knowing how it sounds. “You have to remember, this was in 2009. People weren’t attached to their cell phones like they are today. I tried to tell myself that maybe she just took a last-minute trip and left her phone behind, but then I noticed that Ethan was starting to act strange.”
“Strange how, exactly?”
“Every time I mentioned her name, he got flustered. Kind of rambled a little bit and changed the subject. He didn’t even seem concerned that she was gone—he just offered up vague ideas about where she could be. He would say something like, ‘It’s summer break, maybe she went home to visit her parents,’ but when I said I wanted to call them and make sure she was there, he told me I was overreacting and needed to stop inserting myself into other people’s business. I started to think that the way he was acting, it was like he didn’t want her to be found.”
Detective Thomas nods in my direction; I wonder if he really has heard this all before, from the recording at the police station, but his expression gives away nothing.
“I went into her room one day and started poking around, trying to see if I could find a clue or something as to where she had gone. Like a note or something, I don’t know.”
The memory is so vivid, pushing her bedroom door open with one finger, listening to it creak. Stepping inside, quiet, like I was breaking some kind of unspoken rule. Like she could come barreling in at any moment, catch me digging through her laundry or reading her diary.
“I ripped her comforter off her bed and I noticed that there was a bloodstain on her mattress,” I continue. “A big one.”
I can still see it, so clearly. The blood. Sarah’s blood. The spot taking up almost the entire bottom half of her bed, no longer bright but a burnt, rusty red. I remember pushing my hand into it, feeling the moisture seep up from somewhere deep inside. Smears of scarlet on my finger pads, still wet. Still fresh.
“And I know this sounds strange, but I could smell Ethan on her bed,” I say. “He had a very … distinct smell.”
“Okay,” he says. “Surely, at that point, you went to the police.”
“No. No, I didn’t. I know I should have, but—” I stop, compose myself. I need to make sure I word this correctly. “I wanted to be absolutely certain that there was some kind of foul play involved before going to the police. I had just moved to Baton Rouge to escape my name, my past. I didn’t want the police dragging that back to the surface again. I didn’t want to lose the normalcy that I was finally starting to find.”
He nods, judgment in his eyes.
“But just like I had invited Lena into my house and introduced her to my father, I was starting to feel the same way about Sarah and Ethan,” I continue. “I had given him a key to our apartment. And now she was missing, and it was starting to feel like maybe she was in trouble, and if Ethan had something to do with it, I felt obligated to do everything I could to figure that out. I was starting to feel responsible.”
“Okay,” he says. “What happened next?”
“Ethan broke up with me that week. It came out of nowhere. I was blindsided, but the fact that this was happening right around the time of Sarah’s disappearance felt like proof to me. Proof that he was hiding something. He told me he was getting out of town for a few days, heading home to his parents’ house to work through everything. So I decided to break into his place.”
Detective Thomas raises his eyebrows, and I force myself to keep talking, to push on, before he can interrupt me again.
“I thought I could get some evidence to take to the police,” I say, my mind on the jewelry box in my father’s closet, the physical embodiment of undeniable proof. “I knew from my father’s murders that evidence was critical—without it, there’s just suspicion. Not enough to make an arrest or to even take an accusation seriously. I don’t know what I was expecting to find, exactly. Just something I could put my hands on. Something to make me feel like I wasn’t going crazy.”
I flinch slightly at my own choice of words—crazy—and continue.
“So I broke in through a window I knew he kept unlocked and started looking around. But pretty soon, I heard a noise coming from his bedroom, and I realized that he was home.”
“And what did you find when you went into his bedroom?”
“He was there,” I say, my cheeks flushing at the memory. “And so was Sarah.”
In that moment—standing in Ethan’s bedroom doorway, staring at him and Sarah tangled between his ratty sheets—I remembered their hug at that party, the night we met. I remembered the way she cupped her hand over her lips and leaned in close, whispering into his ear. Ethan and Sarah had known each other from class—that much was true. But I would later find out that wasn’t the extent of their relationship. They had hooked up the previous year, and after a few months of us dating, they started it back up again, behind my back. Turns out I had been right about Sarah. Always taking what I wanted. Introducing us had been a game to her, a way to dangle herself in front of Ethan and then swoop in and reclaim him, once again proving that she was better than me.
“And how did he react to you barging in like that? Breaking into his apartment?”
“Not well, obviously,” I say. “He started screaming at me, saying he had been trying to break up with me for months but I was being clingy. Refused to listen. He painted me as the crazy ex-girlfriend breaking into his apartment … and he took out a restraining order.”