“What do you mean, I think she’s Kaitlyn’s daughter? Isn’t she?”
I wanted to tell him then and there in the coffee shop about everything, but if I did, I knew he’d confront Franny about it, and then she’d never show up for the interview. And Franny has this way of convincing you about things, of working her way into a person. She’d done it to me, and she’d clearly done it to Joshua. I had no faith that he’d be able to resist her charms, see past her explanations. And I’d been right. Even when confronted with the truth in her interview with Teo, she’d held fast to her story and had come up with excuses. She’d almost convinced me she was innocent.
“I misspoke. And please don’t speak to Franny about this, okay? I’m trying to look out for you and the girls.”
“Is that why you want us to do that interview so much? Because it’s the best thing for me and the girls?”
“Yes, actually.”
“Come on.”
“You’ll have to trust me, Joshua. Please. Come and do your interview tomorrow. Bring Franny. I promise you it’ll be a good thing in the end.”
He’d agreed to come and had texted me this morning that Franny had agreed as well. We’d spent the last two hours watching Teo on the monitor as he got Franny to commit to one version of her story and then slowly picked it apart. Joshua had been angry, wanting to stop the proceedings, but I held him back. As her story started to unravel, he sat there, his shoulders falling, a look of shock that was becoming too familiar to me on his face.
“Are you going to be okay?” I say to Joshua now. “Do you want me to take you home?”
“I can manage it on my own, thanks.”
“What are you going to do?”
“About what?”
“About Franny.”
“That’s between her and me.”
“You’re not . . . You can’t continue to be with her after this?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“But she’s not well. She’s . . . she lied to you from the beginning, Joshua. She lied and manipulated and cheated and . . .”
“Maybe she did. Maybe she didn’t.”
“How can you say that? You saw what I saw.”
Joshua looks wild-eyed, undone. I’ve never seen him like this. “What did I see? A clever man trying to make a sensational end to his film, that’s what. Taking advantage of a vulnerable girl who’s had enough terrible things happen.” He stands, swaying slightly, then steadies himself against the wall. “Franny will be able to explain all of this; we need to give her a chance.”
“I—”
“I gave you a chance. I came down here and subjected Franny to this. Now I want to take her home and discuss this with her privately.”
He pushes past me and out into the hall. He walks into the room next door, where Franny’s crying and struggling to get into her coat. Joshua takes her into his arms.
“It’s going to be okay, darling.”
“Joshua, Joshua, I didn’t . . .”
“Hush now, it’s okay. Don’t say anything more. We’ll discuss all this at home.”
Teo meets my eyes. He shakes his head. I shake mine back at him.
“Needless to say,” Joshua says to Teo, “I won’t be sitting for an interview.”
“I understand.”
“And we’ll be speaking to our lawyer to see what recourses we have.”
“That’s your right, of course.”
“You’ve done a terrible thing here.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“Of course you don’t.”
“Just leave it, Teo,” I say. “He’s not going to listen to you.”
Franny looks up at me from where she’s been hiding her face in Joshua’s shoulder. “I thought you were my friend.”
“Friends don’t lie about who they are.”
“You’re such a hypocrite. You’ve been lying this whole time, too. I saw. I saw in Kaitlyn’s e-mails.”
Joshua pats her on the shoulder. “Let’s leave that now, Franny, all right? Let’s go home.”
“Yes, sorry. Of course I want to go home with you.”
“Good.”
He takes her by the hand and leads her out of the room. When we’re alone, I say to Teo, “Can you believe that?”
“I’m not that surprised, honestly. Franny’s very good at what she does. She has an explanation for everything.”
“She can’t explain away DNA.”
“Sure she can. She’ll just say the lab screwed up the results, that they mixed up the samples. It happens all the time.”
“Does it?”
“Not often, no,” he says. “But all she needs is a wedge of doubt to work with.”
“So this was all wasted effort.”
“I don’t think so. Joshua knows the truth now. What he chooses to do with that information is another thing.”
“I feel like shit.”
“Why? You were only trying to help him.”
“Is that what I was doing?”
He stands in front of me and takes me by the elbows. “You’re much too hard on yourself.”
“Isn’t that always the way with heroes? Never content with the people they’ve saved, always concentrating on the ones they lost?”
His shoulders rise up and down. “Life’s complicated. There are no easy, binary inputs. You can’t expect a particular result where people are concerned.”
“It would be so much easier if you could.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
“So what now?”
His hands move up my arms. “I finish the film. And then, hopefully, you’ll go out with me again.”
“Still on that, are we?”
“Is that okay?”
“Yes,” I say. “But there’s something I have to do first.”
“What’s that?”
“Confess.”
I stop my car in Sara’s driveway with a heavy heart. Today hasn’t gone according to plan, and I feel that I’ve let Kaitlyn down somehow. Not that I owed her anything, but I don’t like failure. No one does, but these issues with Franny felt like something manageable, something salvageable from this horrendous year. I could check off this box and then move on with my life.
I climb the back stairs and knock on the door. Kaitlyn opens it. She’s wearing her coat. Her backpack’s on the floor, the room clean of her meager possessions.
“Were you even going to wait for me to come back?”
“Of course. But there’s a bus leaving in a few hours. I want to catch it.”
“Where to this time?”
“Better if you don’t know, probably.”
“Probably.”
Kaitlyn scrapes her hair back and fastens it with a hair tie. She pulls her hat over it. She could be anyone now, any woman in her midforties. It’s not just her looks, it’s the way she carries herself. She truly has become someone I don’t know.
“How did it go?” Kaitlyn asks. “What did Joshua say?”
“We laid it all out, and Franny tried to explain everything away.”
“Of course she did. But she can’t.”
“I’m not sure it was that simple for Joshua.”
“What do you mean?”
“He didn’t know what to think. He wanted to talk it out with Franny.”
“He what?”
“They left together.”
“He took her back to my house? To be with my kids?”
“For now. I’m sure that when this all sinks in . . .”
Kaitlyn wrapped her arms around herself. “No, you don’t know her. You don’t know her like I do.”
“What are you talking about . . . Wait, what? You know Franny? You’ve met her?”
“We used to . . . correspond.”
“When?”
“Years ago. She contacted me when I was pregnant with Emily. She thought I was her mother. She seemed so lost. So I wrote her back. I tried to help her. And for a while, I thought I was. But then she changed, things changed, and . . .”
“And what, Kaitlyn? Jesus Christ. Why didn’t you tell me this in the beginning?”
“Because I’m not proud of what I did, and you already thought badly enough of me.”
“What did you do?”
“I disappeared. She was getting aggressive about us meeting, wanting me to take a DNA test, all kinds of crazy things. So I cut her off. I changed my e-mail address and didn’t tell her. I think I’m the reason she ended up in that mental institution. I think she tried to kill herself after I rejected her.”