I picture Daniel in my living room just this morning, that necklace tangled between his fingers. The hesitation in his voice as he started to tell me everything, the sadness in his eyes, like he was about to euthanize me—because he was, I guess. I was about to undergo a humane slaughtering right there in my living room. Put her down gently.
“When you told me about your father for the first time,” Daniel had said, “about everything that happened in Breaux Bridge, everything he had done, I already knew. Or, at least, I thought I knew. But there were so many things you told me that surprised me.”
I think back to that night, so early in our relationship, Daniel’s fingers massaging my hair. Me, telling him everything—about my father, Lena, the way he had been watching her that day at the festival, his hands dug deep into his pockets. That figure gliding through my backyard, the jewelry box in the closet, the dancing ballerina and the chimes that I can still hear playing in my mind, haunting my dreams.
“It just struck me as odd. My entire life, I thought I knew who your father was. Just pure evil. Killing little girls.” I pictured Daniel in his bedroom, a teenaged boy with that article in his hands, trying to imagine. The news had painted us all in such black-and-whites: My mother, the enabler. Cooper, the golden boy. Me, the little girl, the constant reminder. And my father, the devil himself. One-dimensional and wicked. “But as I listened to you talk about him, I don’t know. Some stuff didn’t fit.”
Because with Daniel, and only with Daniel, I could talk about how it wasn’t all bad. I could talk about the good memories, too. I could talk about how my dad used to cover the staircase in bath towels, pushing us down in laundry bins because we had never gone sledding. How he seemed genuinely afraid when the news had broken—me, in the kitchen, twisting my mint-green blanket, that bright red bar on the screen. LOCAL BREAUX BRIDGE GIRL GOES MISSING. The way he had held me tight, waited for me on the porch steps, made sure my window was locked at night.
“If he did those things, if he murdered those girls, then why would he be trying to protect you?” Daniel had asked. “Why would he be concerned?”
My eyes started to sting. I didn’t have an answer to that question. That was the question I had been asking myself my entire life. Those had been the very memories I had been struggling to make sense of—those memories with my father that seemed to be so conflicting with the monster he had turned out to be. Hand-washing the dishes and removing my training wheels; letting me paint his fingernails one day and teaching me how to hook a line the next. I remember crying after I had caught my first fish, its little puckered lips gasping as my father dug his fingers into its gills, trying to stop the bleeding. We were meant to eat it, but I had been so distraught, Dad threw it back. He let it live.
“So when you told me about the night he was arrested—how he didn’t fight, didn’t try to run,” Daniel had said, leaning closer, his eyebrows raised. Hoping that I would understand, finally. That I would get it, finally. That he wouldn’t have to say it himself. That perhaps the killing could be self-inflicted; the trigger would go off in my mind instead of on his tongue. “How instead, he just whispered those two words.”
My father, in handcuffs, straining for one final moment. The way he had looked at me, then Cooper. His eyes zeroed in almost directly on my brother, as if he were the only one in the room. And that’s when it hit me, a sucker punch to the stomach. He was talking to him, not me. He was talking to Cooper.
He was telling him, asking him, pleading with him.
Be good.
“You killed those girls in Breaux Bridge,” I say now, my eyes on my brother. The words that I had been turning over and over on my tongue, trying to make sense of their taste. “You killed Lena.”
Cooper is quiet, his eyes starting to glass over. He looks down at the wine, the splash still left at the bottom of the glass, and lifts it to his lips, downing the rest.
“Daniel figured it out,” I say, forcing myself to continue. “It makes sense now. The animosity between you two. Because he knew that Dad didn’t kill those girls. You did. He knew it, he just couldn’t prove it.”
I think back to our engagement party, to the way Daniel had wound his arm around my waist, pulling me closer to him, away from Cooper. I had been so wrong about him. He wasn’t trying to control me; he was trying to protect me, from my brother and from the truth. I can’t imagine the balancing act he had been trying to achieve, keeping Cooper at an arm’s length without revealing too much.
“And you knew, too,” I continue. “You knew Daniel was onto you. And that’s why you’ve been trying to turn me against him.”
Cooper, on my porch, reciting those words that had been chewing at my brain like cancer ever since. You don’t know him, Chloe. That necklace, buried deep in the back of our closet. Cooper had put it there, the night of the party. He was there first, letting himself in with his key. Slipping it silently into the very place he knew it would hit the hardest before making his way outside, hiding in the shadows. After all, I had done this before. With Ethan, in college, suspecting the worst. Cooper knew that with the right memories dug up and replanted in just the right way, they would start to grow in my mind, uncontrolled like a weed. They would take over everything.
I think about Tyler Price, taking Aubrey and Lacey and Riley, recreating Cooper’s crimes in just the right way because he had told him how. I think about how broken you must have to be to let another person convince you to kill. It’s no different from the way damaged women write to criminals with marriage proposals, I suppose, or how seemingly ordinary girls find themselves in the clutches of threatening men. It’s all the same: lonely souls in search of some company, any company. I’m nobody, he had said, his eyes like empty water glasses, fragile and wet. The same way I had found myself, time and time again, tangled between the sheets with a stranger, afraid for my life, but at the same time, willing to take the risk. You’re not crazy, Tyler had told me, his hands in my hair. Because that’s the thing about danger—it heightens everything. Your heartbeat, your senses, your touch. It’s a desire to feel alive, because it’s impossible to feel anything but alive when you find yourself in its presence, the world becoming cloaked in a shadowy haze, its very existence all the proof you need—that you’re here, you’re breathing.
And in an instant, it could all be gone.
I can see it now, so clearly. My brother pulling Tyler under his spell again—this lost, lonely person—the way he always has. He made me do it. There was always something about him, after all. Something about Cooper. An aura that captured people, an attraction that was almost impossible to shake. Like magnets trying to fight iron, that gentle, natural pull. You could try, for a while, shaking under the mounting pressure. But eventually, you just gave in, the same way my anger would always melt as he pulled me into that familiar hug. The same way that swarm of people was always around him in high school, scattering with that wrist-flick of dismissal when he no longer wanted them, needed them, as if they weren’t actually people, but pests. Disposable. Existing for his own pleasure and nothing more.
“You tried to frame Daniel,” I say finally, the words settling over the room like soot after a fire, coating everything in ash. “Because he saw through you. He knows what you are. So you had to get rid of him.”
Cooper looks at me, his teeth chewing on the inside of his cheek. I can see the wheels turning behind his eyes, the careful calculations he’s trying to make—how much to say, how much not to say. Finally, he speaks.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Chloe.” His voice is thick like syrup, his tongue made of sand. “I have a darkness inside of me. A darkness that comes out at night.”
I hear those words in the mouth of my father. The way he had regurgitated them, almost automatically, as he sat at that courtroom table, his ankles chained together, a single tear dripping onto the notepad beneath him.