Gloria opens another bottle, shakes out more pills. More and more, until the cup of her palm can’t hold any more.
“You love him, don’t you?” the boy had asked, as he’d been buttoning his pants. He’d shaken his head—in awe, or admiration. “Everything you did for him. You’re the perfect wife.”
That girl in the garage—she’d been cold. There were goose bumps on her bare skin. She’d been wearing nothing but panties and a T-shirt, and her lips were purple.
Gloria presses her face into the towel hanging from the rod. It’s one of the rough ones, and the fibers scratch at her face—she usually saves those for mopping up spills and isn’t sure how it ended up here, but it doesn’t matter this time. She goes over to the shower and turns on the faucet.
The girl, she’d begged for help. And Gloria had gone back inside the house, snapped the padlock back in place. And then she’d made dinner. And now that girl is dead. Finally dead. Gloria saw it on the news, not too long before.
She pulls back the shower curtain, carefully steps into the tub. The water is turned up as hot as she can stand, and she lets it run over her shoulders, burning down her body.
SAMMIE
She’s kneeling beside a steaming pile of her own vomit.
“What the hell am I supposed to do now?” Ethan demands, pacing in front of her, three steps to the left, and then back again. They’re in the living room, where just a while ago they’d been ready to do the dirty, but now it couldn’t have gone further in the opposite direction. The coffee table is pushed out of the way, and Sammie is kneeling where it had stood, one of her knees sunk into the divot left in the rug. Her thighs are spread painfully wide, and her wrists are tied behind her back and to her ankles with a length of twine that Ethan had pulled from his pocket. He was prepared. “Why’d you have to be poking around in things that aren’t your business?”
“I was chasing a story,” she says simply. She’s not crying, her eyes are hot and dry in their sockets, more like loose marbles than what she uses to see. “Besides, the police will catch up with you sooner or later.”
“The police?” Ethan laughs wildly. “Those idiots can’t find their own assholes. I’m not worried about them.”
She’s never seen this side of Ethan. With her, he’s always been kind and sweet, soft-spoken. Not like this. But maybe he’s right. Hoskins and Loren might never catch him. He might go on operating for a long time, the way Seever did.
“Why’re you doing this?” she asks. “You’re a good guy.”
He stops his frantic pacing and stares at her like she’s an idiot. Like the answer should be obvious.
“I started all this for you.”
“What?”
Ethan drops down to his knees on the rug so they are face-to-face, only inches from each other. From this close she can see the blackheads scattered across his nose, the one hair in his eyebrow that’s so much longer than the others. It’s funny, she hadn’t noticed any of that before, when she was ready to sleep with him, but now she’s repulsed. She tries to shift back, to put some space between them, but he has her locked down tight.
“All you’d ever talk about was working for the Post,” he says slowly. His eyes are glowing with a fevered light, and when she tries to look away he pinches her cheeks and forces her to look at him. “About your work on Seever. I knew that if people thought Seever was back, the paper would let you write again. And they did, didn’t they? That’s exactly what happened.”
“You didn’t have to. No one asked you to do any of this.”
“No, no one did,” he says, grinning, his eyes rolling. “But I did anyway. And you got to write again, didn’t you? I’ve never seen you so happy. And I was the one who made you that happy. I was.”
Ethan’s hair is stiff with gel and hair spray, his scalp is shining whitely beneath. It’s the same way Seever always wore his hair. When did he start doing it like that, and why didn’t she notice?
She tilts her head back as far as it will go, until the tendons in her neck scream in protest. Maybe, she thinks, Seever was meant to kill her. She’d asked why he’d let her live, and he didn’t have an answer, there wasn’t an answer; he didn’t let her live, it was just delayed a little. She’d managed to put it off for a few years, but it’s all already been written, and a person can hide from fate for a while but can never be free of it altogether.
Maybe, she thinks, she always belonged to Seever, and she always will.
“I love you,” Ethan says, running his thumb down her exposed throat. It makes her shudder, in revulsion, and in fear, but with something else too. Anticipation? “I love you so much, so I gave you a story to write. I got rid of that Chris Weber. You hate him, you told me that. I did it for you. All of it.”
He tilts his chin up at a childish angle, daring her to argue with him. She doesn’t.
“This isn’t your grandparents’ house, is it?” she asks. Tries not to think about Weber, or Carrie Simms, or anyone else. She’s not going to ask, she’s not giving him the satisfaction.