“Just wait. Do you remember the girl who I lived with when you came to visit me at the Allston place?”
Her eyes widened in shock or disbelief. “You mean the last time you spoke to me? You mean the time your creepy roommate sliced through my boyfriend’s arm?” She stepped closer, but all I felt was a surge of relief. Yes, she knew Emmy. Emmy was real, and I could prove it. “What did she do to you, to turn you into this person?”
It wasn’t Emmy who’d done something, it was Aaron. Emmy was just the rebound, the thing I gravitated toward, so unlike everything my life had been. So sure the danger was outside the four walls of the basement apartment and not inside.
“I need you to tell the police about her,” I said. “I’m going to call them, and I need you to tell them.”
“Oh, you need me to? I need you to not print lies about my husband, I need you to not push him to—”
“They weren’t lies!”
“One word from me, that’s all it would take. One call to the DA . . .”
And yet she hadn’t. Was it long-ago friendship holding her back? Was it belief?
Music started playing faintly over the monitor, and Paige looked down at her hip.
“What’s that?” I asked. The faint classical music I’d heard once before when I stood here, from somewhere inside the house. Abruptly, the music stopped.
Paige frowned at me. “The crib toy. I have to go, the baby’s up.”
I was transfixed. The noise on the monitor, the baby saying ma, ma, ma, the sound of him hitting a button, the music starting up again. Transporting me back to the day after the article was published, when I peered in this very window, so curious.
“Get the hell out of here, Leah. If I see you here again, I’ll call the police.”
But I was riveted to my spot. The same music I’d heard the night I stood here six months earlier, finding Aaron swinging from the banister. The baby, pressing the attachment in his crib over and over. The baby was home, in his crib. Paige, not out for her after-work walk with the baby at all . . .
She looked at me and then back at the house—she didn’t know I had been here that evening. She didn’t know what that noise meant to me, what it signified. “Paige,” I said, because I thought I finally understood why she hadn’t pursued a lawsuit after all.
The request for a lawyer. The refusal to speak.
If she hated me enough to file a restraining order, if I’d ruined her family, and her life, and pushed Aaron to his death with a lie—if she truly believed I had done all those things, why had no case been brought against me?
“If I ever see you again, I won’t hesitate,” she said. “I swear it.”
She went back up the steps, to her house, to her life, to her child waking from a nap. I watched as she took those same steps, her hand assured on the banister. I watched her go.
* * *
THE POLICE SAID SHE’D discovered Aaron’s body that evening, after she returned home from her walk with the baby. But that was a lie—she had been here, in this house, when I saw Aaron hanging. All along, she was here.
My God, Paige, what did you do?
Maybe she was somewhere else in the house and didn’t know what was happening. Maybe she made up a story for a simpler resolution, for the police. Or maybe it was something more . . .
The case would’ve taken her down, too. Her way of life. The money that was hers, all tied up in his name. Both their names dragged through the dirt.
Or maybe she knew. Maybe, deep down, she suspected. Maybe she was also to blame for a long period of time when he could’ve been adding more girls to the list. And now, finally, she could act.
Getting a restraining order against me to back her claim.
Taking all the information I’d given her. The pills I had found, that I knew had come from him. A supply he must’ve still had.
He put it in my drink, waited until I passed out. Tried to frame it like a suicide, I’d told her.
The grimy debris at the base of his wineglass, mixed into his drink, to let him go easy.
Or.
To make his limbs go ineffective and his mind scramble to keep up. The practiced knot I knew she could make from spending summers on her family’s yacht.
Standing on my toes, peering in the window, hearing the music play on a loop—she was home that night.
The baby was in the crib, and Paige was home, when Aaron swung, faintly twisting back and forth.
* * *
THE POLICE BELIEVED I had made Emmy up, pulled her out of thin air, created her in the likeness of who I wanted her to be. But suddenly, the curtain was pulled back, and I would see behind the stage, to everyone before their disguises.
I had believed everyone was something other than they were. That Noah was clever and Rebecca was happy. That Aaron was a monster and Paige too naive or blinded to want to see it. I had cast my life and assigned the roles, manufacturing all of them into the people I wanted them to be.
CHAPTER 36
I stood in front of my car in the underground lot, the darkness and the silence surrounding me. Wondering what I’d be returning to, a house that didn’t belong to me, a place where I had no allegiances or ties.
Can you leave it all behind? A life I had just started building for myself; a handful of people; an open investigation.
No, I never could. Not even now.
I had to see things through to the bitter end. Something kept me tethered. The difference between me and her.
* * *
I DROVE BACK TO my house, drove straight through the night, stopping only for gas and restrooms in populated areas with overhead parking lights. It was dawn when I entered our town limits, and I still had off for the day.
Someone had been by my house while I was gone. On the front porch, there was a small potted plant with a single flower. Purple and newly bloomed. I brought it inside with me, surprised it had survived the night frost. I left it on the kitchen table, wondering who could’ve left it and what it signified.
I called Kyle, still staring at the potted flower.
“Leah?” he answered before he heard my voice.
“Hi, did I wake you?”
“Where have you been?” he asked. “I’ve been by your place. I’ve been trying to call you. I thought you up and left.”
I looked at the flower on the table again, wondered if it was Kyle who had left it here. “I went to Boston,” I said.
“Why?”
“To find her. To find out who Emmy was.”
“And did you?”
I paused. “I found out she was playing me even back then. I found out I have no defense.”
“All you have to do is tell the truth. Everything will be fine if you just—”
“I told the truth back then, Kyle. I told it then, and it ruined my life.”
“What are you saying—”
“Kyle? I don’t want to do this. I have information for you. Meet me at Bethany’s place, okay? You know where it is?”
“Yes, I know where it is. Do you?”
“Yes. I do.”
A pause before he answered. “Right. Of course you do.”
* * *