by Sara Shepard
It was only ten minutes to the motel. When Ronnie looked at the odometer, she realized she was going fifteen miles over the speed limit.
Finally she was at the turnoff to the shell-pink motel where she’d put up Vanessa and Esme. Ronnie rounded the corner to the motel, her heart pounding hard. Please be there, please be there, she prayed silently.
The parking lot came into view. A few cars were scattered here and there, but Ronnie didn’t see Vanessa’s battered Mercury. A lump formed in her throat. Her brain stalled. She pulled into the parking lot and drove around the whole thing, even circling to the dumpsters in the back.
She pulled into a space, so distraught she couldn’t think straight. Ask the desk? She darted to a trash can by the automatic doors of the entrance, spying an empty McDonald’s Happy Meal container stuffed into the bin. Had that been Esme’s Happy Meal?
She tried the cell number Vanessa had begrudgingly given her. No answer.
Ronnie placed her hands over her face and felt her legs give out from under her again. This was her fault. All her fault. What kind of mother turned a child over to a stranger? Why hadn’t she stalked this place more carefully? Please, she prayed. I’ll do better. I’ll never leave her out of my sight. I’ll only give her the best. I’ll be a better person, too. I’ll try my hardest. Just bring her back.
And then her phone rang.
She stared at it. The call was from a number she didn’t recognize. She considered just sending it to voicemail—maybe it was a reporter, something about Piper, or maybe a cop following up—but something made her answer. “H-Hello?” she said uncertainly.
“Mommy?”
Ronnie’s heart leapt. “Esme?”
“Mommy!” Esme sounded chipper. “Mommy Mommy Mommy!”
“Oh my God, Esme.” Tears were running down Ronnie’s cheeks. “Honey, where are you? Whose number is this?”
“I’m eating donuts!” Esme said, then giggled. “Don’t tell Daddy Lane.”
“Donuts? That’s fine, honey!” At least Vanessa was feeding her. “Are you on a big highway?” Ronnie tried to keep her voice calm.
“No,” Esme scolded, like Ronnie should know better. “I’m eating our favorite donuts. You know, the ones with the sprinkles?”
Sprinkles? Ronnie thought of the red sugar around Esme’s mouth just days before when they’d gone to the donut shop around the corner. “Where’s Vanessa?” she asked. “Your . . . auntie?”
“She told me to sit here and be good and eat my donut. I’m on a really big phone that makes a lot of beeps!”
Ronnie had no idea what she was talking about. “Can I talk to her?”
“Umm . . .” There was a clunk and some shuffling, but then Esme was back on the line again. “When are you going to be here, Mommy?”
It was all the permission Ronnie needed. She’d never run so fast to get back to her car. She sped through a red light and a yellow light and then another red light, certain that the gods of motherhood were watching over her and diverting all traffic cops to other intersections. She parked in front of a fire hydrant at the curb and burst through the front door of the donut shop and there was Esme, oh my God, Esme, her hair tangled, her eyes bright, red sugar all over her mouth.
“Mommy!” Esme cried, grinning wide.
She jumped from the booth, and Ronnie ran across the floor, and they met in the middle in a giant hug. Ronnie was crying, but Esme was smiling wide. “I missed you, Mommy! When can we go home?”
“Um, hang on, honey.” Ronnie looked around. The shop was empty save for Esme and a worker at the counter Ronnie had never seen before. “Where’s Auntie Vanessa?” she asked. Esme just blinked big cow eyes back. She turned to the woman at the counter. “Excuse me? Which way to the bathroom?”
The counter woman scowled with exasperation. “We don’t have one for customers. Sorry.”
“Oh.” Ronnie checked behind the counter, even stood on tiptoes to see into a back room. “Where’s the person this little girl came in with?”
“My rate’s twenty bucks an hour, you know. She said you’d pay.”
She held out her hand, expectant. Ronnie frowned, but when she fished in her wallet and handed the woman a twenty, the woman seemed satisfied. “What did . . . ?” Ronnie asked, then stopped. She looked out the window. Out on the street, there was no sign of Vanessa’s car. She looked back at Esme, too afraid to ask what had happened.
She sank into the booth, shaken and buzzed. The suitcase they’d packed for Esme that morning was sitting against the window, though when she opened it up to check the contents, all the clothes were rumpled. They looked hurriedly stuffed in, not carefully folded, as they’d been when Ronnie packed. She bent down to sniff the clothes; they smelled sour, the way Vanessa did. Esme’s bathing suit smelled like chlorine. There were a few drawings crumpled up—bright suns, houses, smiling stick figures. And then she saw a folded note, her own name scrawled across the front.
She pulled it out. “What’s this?”
Esme glanced at it and shrugged quizzically. “We made cards. I made one for you!”
As the little girl reached for her bag to find the drawing, Ronnie opened the paper. Vanessa had written what she had to say lengthwise across the page in small, cramped letters.
I can’t. You win.
Ronnie’s eyes bulged. To her surprise, the sudden image she had of Vanessa driving home alone—feeling sad? bereft? unequipped?—made her heart crack. Who knew what Vanessa’s breaking point was, but she’d paid so much money and put forth so much effort, all for nothing.
But then came the elation. She pressed the note to her chest and felt another sob rise up, this one pure joy.
Another piece of paper had been tucked inside the message; it had fluttered to Ronnie’s lap when she’d opened it. She picked it up and unfolded this one, too. At first, she didn’t understand Vanessa’s message. The words swam before her eyes.
You killed him, years ago. But don’t worry. Nobody knows except me.
Ronnie folded the note quickly, sucking in a breath. Was that true? Vanessa had become a stranger to her; Ronnie didn’t know whether this knowledge was a gift or a trick. She wanted to believe that Vanessa was telling the truth. Jerrod was gone. Jerrod was dead. So that was the reality she chose. Vanessa was still her sister. And Vanessa was giving her a gift—two gifts, actually. She turned to Esme and, in a burst of elation, plucked Esme’s half-eaten donut and took a huge bite.
“Hey!” Esme said, grabbing it back. “That’s mine!”
“We’ll get you another,” Ronnie decided, shooing her daughter out of the booth. “We’ll get a whole dozen to take home.”
Thirty-Three
Come on,” Lauren coaxed, her arms outstretched. “Come to me. You can do it.”
Matthew stood five feet away, teetering on two stout legs, holding fast to the edge of the coffee table and looking at Lauren with a mix of uncertainty and determination. His big blue eyes went wide with fascination at his own abilities; he kept breaking into a smile, showing off a new bottom tooth.
“Go on,” Clarissa, who was sitting on the couch, goaded. “You got this!”
Matthew had started flirting with walking a few days ago, not long after Piper’s attack. But Lauren had been so out of it—and so had Graham, apparently—that only Clarissa had witnessed and acknowledged the feat. But Lauren wasn’t going to miss the baby’s first steps. She held her breath as Matthew dared to remove one hand and then the other from the table, suddenly standing alone without support. He lifted his foot as if to take a step, and then toppled down on his butt.
“Oh!” Lauren cried, rushing to help him back up. Her hands were sure on his back now, not tentative as they’d been before. She didn’t have to worry about herself. She would never harm her baby, and she could trust all her instincts. In fact, she scooped him up and held him tightly, probabl
y more tightly than Graham would have liked, just to give him an extra squeeze. And you know what? Matthew squealed with delight.
“Some kids cruise for months before walking,” Clarissa said when Lauren put him back down. “He’ll get there.”
It was Lauren’s first instinct to snap, I know he will. But Clarissa cared about babies and was trying her best. It wasn’t like she’d asked to get mixed up in the family’s dysfunction. Lauren wondered if she’d been too quick to judge her before, because when Clarissa came to work that morning and Lauren told her that Graham was no longer living at the house and had been in jail for assault, Clarissa sucked in a breath and said, “Oh my, Lauren, I’m here for whatever you need.”
There was no suspicion in her voice. No malice, nor any disappointment that it was Graham who was gone and not Lauren. If Clarissa was curious about what happened—surely she had to be—she didn’t press Lauren for details, as Lauren worried she had done with Graham about her postpartum rage.
A story had been released that Graham had been arrested for breaking and entering and aggravated assault—and that he was Piper’s ex—and that he was the lead suspect in Piper’s attack, despite the fact that Graham was still vehemently denying having anything to do with it. What the public didn’t know, however, was the depth of Graham’s cruelty and how Lauren and Piper had both been victims.
Graham had been a suspect from the start—once the police got their ducks in a row and couldn’t get a confession out of Lauren or the others or even get any real answers, they started looking elsewhere. And then, Graham landed in their lap. They’d actually called Graham into the station earlier—the day after Piper’s attack, in fact, when Graham was supposedly at work. That day, they got out of Graham that their child died when he was a baby and that Graham had promised Piper not to expose her lie. It baffled the police why he’d do that; Graham simply said it was out of loyalty: She was my girlfriend, and that was my son.
The police told Lauren that he’d then said—and this was the part that turned Lauren’s stomach the most—“The person you really should be looking at is my wife. She’s violent. She’s capable of hurting someone.” Officer Allegra told her all this in a clinical tone, though when he got to this part and noticed the tears rolling down Lauren’s cheeks, he pushed a box of Kleenex across his desk. Had Graham ever loved her? Was he even capable of love? She thought of his face when Matthew was an infant—the joy, the wonder. He’d been hiding so many lies. It baffled her that a person could do such a thing.
There was something sticky about Graham, Allegra said. Something not quite right. The detective had followed up on Graham’s alibi—he’d told the police he was not at the Ketchup set, as he’d told Lauren, but in LA having a drink with a friend. But they couldn’t track that friend down; Graham was evasive about losing his number. Then, they started to drill into what exactly happened to his child who’d died. SIDS, is what the medical report said; maybe that was all it was. But it was strange that one child died and now there was a new wife with a violent personality . . . and an ex-girlfriend had been attacked. It didn’t add up.
They’d called Graham in again to ask him some more questions—this was the visit Graham told Lauren about on the cacio e pepe night, the one where he purportedly deflected the blame to Andrea and Ronnie.
“He didn’t bring up Andrea or Ronnie,” Allegra said. Lauren was baffled, but only for a minute. Of course he didn’t, she realized. Because I never told him anything. He’d been toying with her memory like it was a ball of yarn. Inventing a slip in her memory that would seal the deal for her to check into the mental facility. Making her think it was her idea after he’d said that she should be the one to decide. And she’d fallen for it.
“We said we didn’t buy his alibi,” Allegra went on. “Said he’d better start telling the truth. Asked if maybe he’d found his ex’s presence a bit of a nuisance and wanted her gone. Asked if he’d specifically chosen Silver Swans to get close to her. Graham denied that, said he had no idea Piper was living here when your family moved in. And then he said that he was pretty sure you had figured out Piper was his ex.”
“That’s not true!” Lauren said. “I had no idea they were together!” She explained how she’d found the recipe book, the picture. Allegra said they didn’t believe anything Graham was saying at that point. He was grasping at straws. They just needed to figure out what he’d done.
Lauren took a careful look at the day Graham made her the pasta. He’d been so calm and collected at that meal—and meanwhile, the cops were closing in. It was another reason why he made up a memory that didn’t exist. He made Lauren doubt her loyalty, her sense of time and truth—going to the rest cure wasn’t just to fuck with her; it was to prove her instability to the police. To exonerate him. If Lauren had gone to the wellness place, it would have only proven Graham’s theory that she was crazy. The police might have even bought it. How close she’d come to doing exactly what he wanted!
After Graham left the police station the morning before he made her pasta, the cops had come to Lauren’s door to corroborate his story—they wanted to know if she’d found out he’d once dated Piper, and so on. But Lauren had hidden in the bedroom; she’d been afraid they were calling about Ronnie and Andrea. Allegra even cruised by Lauren’s house, intending to pay a visit—but caught her just as she was pulling out of the driveway to go to LA to confront Graham. “I followed you,” Allegra said. “All the way to his workplace. Gained access to the premises with my badge.”
Lauren had stared at him. Allegra had been there? She hadn’t known.
Allegra and his partner listened in as Lauren questioned Graham. Her accusations were those not of a woman who’d known for a while that Graham had been with Piper but of someone who was blindsided. Then, Lauren fainted; Graham took off. The team tailing him was so discombobulated that Graham was running that he managed to lose them on the highway. They figured he’d gone back to Raisin Beach, and after trying other likely spots, they went to Piper’s house on a routine check. Imagine their surprise when they found Lauren there as well. And Andrea, and Ronnie.
While in custody, Graham had admitted to “fighting” with Piper back in the day. He’d also admitted that Lauren’s anger didn’t result in harm to anyone but herself and that he’d maybe used it to his advantage to control her—“though she’s blowing it all out of proportion.” They got him to own up to being too rough with Matthew, causing minor bruises and blaming Lauren. But he would not take the blame for North’s death. Again and again, too, he swore he hadn’t been the one to hurt Piper—when pushed, he’d admitted that he’d snuck to her house shortly after making the connection about who she was. He’d tried to break in, desperate to get the photos he suspected she had so that she could never use them against him with Lauren. He hadn’t been successful, though, because he was pretty sure a neighbor down the street saw him lurking around—the guy turned on his porch lights, leashed up his dog, called out “Hey!” a few times. Graham got cold feet, left. A few days later, Piper called him to meet. Hours after that, she was lying bleeding in the hallway of her school.
Did Lauren think Graham had been the one to hurt Piper? So much had been revealed about Graham’s true nature that she could believe anything at this point. Here was a man so deceptive that he threw his own wife under the bus to escape blame.
She kept trying to wrap her mind around who Graham truly was. He hadn’t been manipulative when they’d met—he hadn’t tried to convince her of memories that weren’t there. Only after she had the baby did it start to change. It was a trigger, maybe, from the memory of the baby he and Piper had together? Maybe something changed in his brain chemistry, same as how women’s brains changed after giving birth, and something about parenting made him violently irrational. But unlike Piper, who documented what Graham did, Lauren’s mental state was shakier. Graham was able to use her angry bouts and selective memory to his advantage. He would do anyt
hing to cover up that he was the bad guy—including making her think she was the one to blame. Lauren hated what had happened to Piper, but it had opened a door that might have otherwise remained shut tight. She shivered at the idea of living next to him still, believing so little in herself, trusting him implicitly with the baby . . .
Though as it turned out, Lauren and Piper weren’t the only ones Graham tricked. The day after his arrest, Lauren bit the bullet and called her mom. She was going to find out at some point. “There you are,” Joanne said as soon as Lauren answered. “Why haven’t you called me back?”
“What do you mean?” Lauren had asked.
Her mother told her she’d called often. On the house phone, she said, because she figured Lauren was always home because of the baby. The house phone. Joanne was from the generation who didn’t realize that even though some people still had landlines, few of them actually used them. “Graham kept answering,” she said. “He kept telling me you were busy. Mel called, too, and Gwen—he assured us you guys were great. But it was weird that we didn’t hear from you. We thought you were upset, but Mel started to worry something was wrong.”
On the heels of that, she also got a call from Gracie Lord. “Oh honey, I would have never come to you about this, because I thought you were going through enough,” Gracie started out, her voice heavy with regret. “But I was starting to wonder about Graham.”
“What do you mean?” Lauren asked, still suspicious about Gracie’s relationship with Graham.
“He just started to get . . . strange. We would be in meetings together, and he would bring up things I said, promises I’d made to him. I swore I hadn’t said any such thing, but he had a way of making you doubt your reality. He did it with the writers, too. He’d take credit for ideas that were for sure someone else’s, twisting things so the other writers wouldn’t know which end was up. I was starting to see a pattern in it. Starting to see it was toxic. It’s why we canceled his episode. He wasn’t happy about that.”