“I don’t like to say his name.” Clara’s eyes were steely. “It doesn’t matter.”
Izzy thought back to that first night after Kristin’s disappearance, the way Clara had come in and muted the TV coverage of the mass shooter. What was that line of poetry she’d quoted? Something about victims rising above with their beauty. Fraught as that night had been, Izzy had never seen Clara so serious as she was now. Gone was her self-deprecating humor and fully in-the-moment presence. In its place was a jittery hand-wringing Izzy had never seen in her friend before. And most unnerving of all, it was being directed at her.
And Paul.
“It haunted me, for a long time,” Clara said quietly. “It wasn’t just the unthinkableness of it. It was the unfairness, that somehow I ended up with Benny—God, I spent that whole damn night mesmerized by the ring on my finger—while Liv, who was not very unlike me at all, ended up … you know. There’s no reason one of us deserved one fate, and the other…”
Izzy tried to imagine what it might be like to try to wipe the picture of a blood-streaked hallway from your mind when the image wasn’t one you’d simply seen on the news but one you’d stood in the middle of—and when the blood belonged not to an anonymous victim but to a friend who moments before had been sitting with you at dinner, laughing, smiling, breathing, living. She felt small by comparison, hung up as she’d been on her own brush with unfairness. Just this afternoon, she’d managed to let go. The wind turning her cheeks pink, the warmth of Paul’s leather coat soaking into her core. And now …
“This is a horrible story,” she said cautiously. “But what does it have to do with Paul?”
Clara bent to open the drawer at the base of the end table, removed a stapled stack of paper with The Color-Blind Gazette laser-printed across the top, and handed it over without a word. Izzy started to read, feeling her heart tighten. How had she missed this? It had gone out to the whole neighborhood? She lifted her eyes to Clara, who nodded.
Her hair fell over her face as she forced her way from one paragraph to the next and questions flooded her mind—too many to voice.
But while the details of the article were troubling, they also could be circumstantial. One thing was certain: This was not “good news,” and even as she read, a back corner of her mind worried over her own interview with Hallie, and whether she’d given the girl any reason to try to seek out the “real story” behind her day-to-day—a thought she impatiently shoved aside. This wasn’t about her. It was about Kristin.
It was about Paul.
She thought of his mention of canceled appointments, his quickly disguised frown. Was this why? What humiliation for him, to have this out there.
She sneaked another glance at Clara, but her neighbor was no longer watching her read, only staring blankly toward the large back windows. A short distance through the darkness, Paul was probably sprawled on his own couch, alone, his ears burning.
When she reached the end, Izzy took a minute to absorb the sight of Clara’s name in the credits and set the paper on the couch next to her.
“Same question,” she said, trying to keep her voice flat. “How does what happened to your friend Liv have anything to do with Paul?”
Clara met her eyes with a look that said she’d hoped she wouldn’t have to spell it out for her. “Izzy, I’ve seen how quickly a relationship can turn deadly dangerous. When no one would have suspected.” She seemed to be choosing her words carefully, though clearly she’d planned to deliver this speech all along.
Izzy thought back to that hike weeks ago, side by side in the ravine, how mystified Paul had seemed as to why he could have been left, how despondent without any lead on the twins. What he’d said about his childhood—it had seemed to her that all he really wanted was a second chance at a family. And to give someone else a second chance at one too. It hadn’t worked out, but plenty of marriages failed. When people got defensive about “blaming the victim,” they didn’t usually mean the man in the relationship. But that was how Izzy was feeling on his behalf now. It just didn’t seem to add up.
“You’re not implying that Paul did off with Kristin and the kids?” Izzy forced a laugh. “There’d have been more to this if the police really suspected such a thing.”
“I’m implying that we don’t know what went on, but the worst is always possible. I’m implying that I’ve missed my chance to recognize the signs of trouble, to intervene and help a friend before, and I’m not about to do it again.” Her voice was taking on a decidedly un-Clara pitch, high and tense.
“You told me yourself, that first night after she left, that you never saw any evidence of domestic violence next door. Don’t you think we would have seen or heard something?”
“I was blindsided by what happened to Liv. In hindsight, I’ve learned abusers don’t always have obvious red flags—bursts of temper, the stuff you see on made-for-TV movies. With Liv’s ex the warnings were more subtle. Always checking in with her, keeping tabs, in a way that seemed a bit obsessive to the rest of us but to her seemed sweet. Trying to keep her to himself—talking her into skipping our happy hours to meet him, for instance, instead of him just joining the group. He had an ego, gave off a vibe that she should be more grateful for things he’d done, even though it was just ordinary relationship stuff no one else would expect a medal for.”
“But plenty of men who are like that are just being sweet, and do just have fragile egos.”
“They usually mellow out as the relationship gets comfortable, though, right? With Liv, this guy got more intense as time went on.” She leaned forward. “I told you Kristin’s sister came to see me. She blamed Paul for their estrangement, said he isolated Kristin from her family, manipulated things, made her overly reliant on him from the very start.”
The last part seemed to be directed at her, which was ridiculous. A gate latch and a taillight were hardly the equivalent of fatherless twins. “That’s her side of the story. Like I said, when it comes to sisters…”
Izzy found herself blinking back tears. She was in no position to be judged through her sister’s eyes—and Penny would rightly say the same of her. Had their closeness ever been what it seemed? Surely if they’d truly been in tune to each other, things would have turned out differently.
“You’re right,” Clara conceded. “But still, with Paul, there’s reasonable doubt. Why did Kristin follow him here, when it meant being farther from her mom, who was terribly sick? She went all in on their life together, so even when it didn’t work out, why would she take the kids from him? Why search online for domestic violence help right before she disappeared? You know as well as I did it didn’t come up around the fire that night.”
Izzy was tired of people trying to figure out why things happened. Why that first date didn’t call back for a second date. Why someone would go into a crowded place with a loaded gun to punish the wrong people for things beyond their control. Why certain lives are rocked by crisis while others glide peacefully by. Why anyone should risk falling in love at all. So much, too much, of our lives spent fruitlessly searching for explanations where there are none.
Clara seemed insatiable in her search for answers. Or maybe she was just caught up in it so tightly she couldn’t break free. But Izzy was tired.
Maybe it was time to stop harping on the whys of the world and instead look for a new who or what.
“I don’t know any such thing,” she told Clara, trying not to let irritation show. “Like I told you, I can’t remember the whole night. I don’t even remember going home.”
Clara shook her head at her. “Well, I can assure you no one mentioned the subject.”