Connect with Ethan, Sutton. Save your marriage. Do something. You can’t continue to live like this.
The voice in her head had been worse, lately. Whispering, sometimes, things she couldn’t quite catch, couldn’t exactly understand. She needed to up her meds, she knew she did, but she also needed the lack of control that the hypomania brought to her work. If she upped her meds now, she might shut that edge down, and she just needed to get the damn thing done and then she could anesthetize the voice until she needed it again.
It was exhausting, the delicate knife blade of her life. Too many pills and the voices disappeared, too few and she couldn’t make heads or tails of things.
It would be so much easier to simply be dead. If she were dead, she wouldn’t have to finish the book. They would write nice things about her in the trades—Writer Gone Too Soon: The Inevitable Madness of an Artistic Life. There would be stories polished and reprinted about suicide and its impact on writers. Fifty or so writers would try to capitalize on her tragic death to talk about their own battles with depression, and oh, yes, please buy my book.
No. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
She felt light, suddenly. A beam of happiness drove through her. She always had this moment, with every book, when she felt that it would be easier to die than finish. It meant she was going to have the breakthrough that catapulted her to the end.
Sutton wasn’t entirely insane. She knew herself very, very well.
Smiling, she took the empty cup and saucer to the kitchen. Now she was in the mood to connect, in more ways than one. And Ethan never said no to a good lay.
In the kitchen, Ethan was sitting at the table, a book in front of him. A rush of emotion filled her. It was his battered copy of Stephen King’s On Writing, the one book he turned to in times of need. Signed by the author, no less. Of course it was.
He was struggling. That’s why the pages weren’t done. Ethan was struggling, and Sutton was doing everything she could to make his suffering worse. She blamed him. She blamed him for everything. She was a horrible person. Horrid. Evil to her very soul. Only an evil woman would let her husband suffer when she could alleviate the pain and despair with a touch.
Why are you still blaming him, Sutton? It was an accident. Worse, it was completely, utterly random.
But was it? Had he killed the baby to punish her?
Had she killed the baby to punish him? She’d been so drunk. The last thing she remembered was holding Dashiell, crying into his onesie, the soft fleece blanket wrapped around her shoulder, sheltering him. Had she smothered him unknowingly, then set him back in his crib facedown?
She dumped the teacup in the sink with a clatter and walked out of the room without saying a word, ignoring Ethan’s eyes boring into her back.
He had no idea how bad this was. Losing Dashiell was something unrecoverable; not knowing exactly how he’d died was life threatening.
She was broken inside, broken in three parts now. She’d been whole once. Then she’d been torn in two, and she’d barely recovered. And now she’d been torn again, and there was no way to repair the rent. There was simply no way to go on like this. One minute upset, the next happy. Swinging from the branches of her once-perfect life, to and fro, completely unable to control her emotions.
No, she couldn’t continue living this way at all.
She stalked back to her office. Pulled up her Facebook page. Sometimes, when she got herself distracted, a few minutes reading nice things people said to her about her work could get her back on track.
The comment was on the top of her page.
I can’t believe I wasted my money on this trash. Sutton Montclair should be shot. Don’t get me near a gun, ha ha.
Shocked, she read the message over and over again. It had fifty likes, though the vast majority of the comments expressed absolute outrage.
She looked at the username, didn’t recognize it. Clicked on to the page. It was anonymous—no profile picture, no photos or albums, no status updates, only one like to its credit, Sutton’s fan page. Without a second thought, she deleted the comment and blocked the user. She had absolutely no problem with people not liking her work—she had expressed that on many a panel and blog—but there was something ominous about the comment that made her uneasy.
She shouldn’t have done it. She should have told someone, made a note of the username and the comment itself. Hitting the delete button was a very big mistake. When the police tried to track who she claimed was the real stalker, that was the only clue to their true identity. She couldn’t defend herself.
But that morning, so long ago, after drinking her delicious tea and having mixed feelings toward her slightly estranged husband, Sutton had no idea where it was all going to go.
MURDER, SHE WROTE
Now
That night, the evening of the afternoon Sutton took a stranger home to her bed, there was a murder.
A double murder.
On the steps of Sacré-Coeur.
A young American couple was stabbed to death. They were visiting from Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, both blond as sin and blockily built. College students on a year abroad, they were studying at Oxford, in England, but had come to Paris for a mini break. They were boyfriend and girlfriend.
What no one knew was that in the moments before they died, they’d become more. He had just proposed. He—Rick—had given her—Lily—a ring that he’d brought from home, one he’d bought with tips from his job at Jack Rack’s Pizza, where he’d worked every summer and three school nights a week to save up enough to study abroad for a year, and when he met the new girl in town, Lily—Lily, what a lovely, old-fashioned name—he fell madly in love, and knew he wanted her to be his wife. So he asked her to the movies, added two extra shifts a week, and after two rough years without much sleep, used that money to buy a small blood diamond—the best he could afford; beggars couldn’t be choosy about buying cheap blood diamonds versus the much more expensive conflict-free, ethically mined ones—and had been planning this special moment for two months.
Can you see it? He, homegrown Midwestern goodness, on his knees, pledging his eternal troth. She, a hand clapped over her mouth, face suffused with a pleasant blush, happily having the moment she’d long dreamed of, tearily shouting, “Yes, yes, yes!” Him, sliding the small blood diamond onto her finger, and leaning in to kiss her. Their future, set. A perfect moment, years in the making, but as the tableau unfolds, the camera pans back, and a shadow grows. There is a glint of a blade in the moonlight. You almost want to scream at them to watch out, to run, don’t you?