You can do anything when you have money. You can kill people, you can invent people, you can appear and disappear with the snap of your fingers.
When Grace died, Talia spent five years stumbling around, looking for purpose. Taking a variety of lovers—some married, some not. Using plastic surgery to climb the social rungs of society until somehow landing, and marrying, a sixty-year-old communications company founder and CEO, Walton Jones. When Walton had a heart attack in his sleep at sixty-four, Talia inherited all $6.1 billion of his fortune.
With an endless bank account and nothing but free time, Talia disentangled herself from her late husband’s life, sold and liquidated everything, and moved back to Pennsylvania.
Back to the one place she’d ever felt truly loved. And safe. With her sister, Grace. Ten years of study and eleven plastic surgery operations later, Talia looked like a passing doppelgänger to Willa Blaine Hudson.
The plan had been, quite simply, to lure them back to the Church House and kill them.
They found files on her computer titled After, filled with real estate listings on isolated South Pacific islands.
“It wasn’t complicated,” the officer told her on the phone a few months later, his voice oddly jovial. “It was all about revenge.”
Penelope rented a townhouse for herself and the kids. She asked Brett, quietly and without fanfare, to get his own apartment. He didn’t even protest, just nodded like she had said, Can you please take out the trash? She wished he would have objected, at least a little. Their life felt reduced to transactions, emotionless and rote. Whatever she asked for in the divorce, he’d give her.
She found him a condo on the other side of town where he could be close to his new office, a new job doing much the same thing as his old job, for slightly less pay.
A few months later, Willa called her. “Pen, the officer from Talia’s case stopped by.” Her voice shook a little at the end, and Penelope felt the gravity of it through the line. They hadn’t spoken much—Penelope wanted to let Willa drive the friendship. Even though she thirsted for it. She’d had a taste of female friendship with Talia—those nights on the patio that had been all a ruse for Talia but had felt so rejuvenating for Penelope. She hungered for the real thing again, but would not push her. “He asked about the fire. ‘Dotting the t’s,’ he called it. I guess that’s a joke?”
Penelope felt the air leave her lungs. She closed her eyes, leaned against the counter. “Whatever you said is fine,” Penelope said but did not feel. She instead felt panic, a gripping vise on her throat. Tara. Linc.
“I said it was Bree.” Willa’s voice was a whisper. “I just thought you’d want to know.”
There again, the crux of all the things she did not deserve and would not ask for.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Then: After
She spent the next six months at her aunt’s house. Alone. She spent two weeks in the house waiting for her imminent arrest, which never came.
The police showed up—twice, actually. Once within a day of the fire. The second time a week later. Both unannounced. She walked them through the night of the fire. She told them about the Ecstasy, the baby, everything. She did not tell them about the fight with Grace. Her throat had grown yellow with bruising, the weather still chilly enough for a turtleneck. If they wondered why she wore a turtleneck—the same black mock-neck—both times they came, they didn’t let on. When the emergency room doctor had asked about the bruises, she’d simply said she didn’t know. She wondered if that kindly doctor would relay the bruising to the police. She waited for it. But they never asked.
“How did you get out of the house?” The officer who asked was gray, older, and kind.
“We just ran outside. We were in the living room half-asleep when Flynn came in with a blanket, dragging it in the fireplace by accident. By the time I realized what was going on, the whole downstairs had gone up. I don’t know why it just exploded like that.”
“About a few decades of linseed oil,” the officer said. “Used as floor polish but highly flammable. Usually not the first time it’s spread, but with so many layers . . .” He opened his palms in a know what I mean gesture. “I want to let you know. A young woman passed away in the fire.”
Penelope tried to arrange her features into something that would pass for surprise. Her heartbeat echoed in her ears, and she clasped her hands together to keep from shaking. “Who?” she whispered.
“A Grace Wilbur?” The officer referred to his notebook. “How did you know her?”
“She was my roommate’s girlfriend.” Penelope, no longer faking it, felt the tears flood her eyes. Could she cry for Grace? Maybe. Grace had been someone’s daughter, sister, cousin. And she could cry for all of them. She could feel Bree’s hand on hers. We did it for the baby. How were any of them supposed to be okay again?
“Do you know how she came to be stuck in the basement closet?” the officer asked her, tapping his pen on the table.
Penelope swallowed and shook her head. “The whole night was a mess. I was in the living room, and then the fire seemed to explode, then we were outside. I saw Jack and Flynn talking to firefighters. Bree, I heard, was taken by ambulance. I spent a night in the hospital but was discharged yesterday morning. I came straight here. I don’t even have a cell phone.” She gulped back a genuine sob. “I haven’t even tried to call anyone. I don’t have their numbers memorized anyway. Is everyone else okay?”
“Everyone else is recovering in stable condition,” the quieter officer said and patted her shoulder before they left. When they came back a week later, they only asked her to recount how she escaped. Not how the fire started, what happened earlier that night, nothing. Just how she got out. She stuttered over her words, but she repeated the story she’d told the first time: she was in the living room, and they just ran out the back door. She and Bree.
If Bree hadn’t told the same story, it would be their undoing.
The officers smiled and thanked her and left again. They never came back.
Weeks turned to months. She started getting out of bed, opening the curtains. She went to the doctor. Her belly swelled to twice, then three times its normal size. She made all the arrangements through an agency called Heart of Adoption, and her caseworker’s name was Jeannette. She went for miles-long walks in the evening, alone, her mind a blank.
“We can’t put a child up for adoption without the father’s consent,” she explained kindly. They agreed to mediation: they’d find Jack and be present when Penelope told him.
When Jeannette called her almost a full month later—Penelope’s belly the size of a watermelon—and asked her to come in to the office, she sounded perplexed.
“It seems as though Jack Avila has left the country,” she explained, and Penelope sat heavily against the chair back, the baby heaving inside her. “Apparently he joined the Peace Corps—an elite subgroup listed as can leave immediately. Often sent into more dangerous territory. I can’t say I’ve ever had this happen. We can’t even contact him.”
“So what happens?” Penelope felt an emptiness, a yawning canyon, open up inside of her. Emptiness felt only mildly different from numbness, and Penelope prodded this as Jeanette talked, the way you’d poke at a missing tooth.
“Let’s make sure you want to go down this path. Pennsylvania adoption laws are some of the least restrictive laws in the country, so we have some time yet.”
Lying in bed that night, Penelope felt the tumble and turn of the baby inside her. Could she care for him? Love him?
She imagined raising Jack’s child. Being a mother, tainted with the knowledge that she had killed someone. Not just anyone, but someone their father had deeply loved. She imagined him with dark hair and blue eyes, and every time she looked at him, she’d see Jack. What she did to Grace. What she did to Jack. She’d see the inferno of that house; the only thing visible above the licking orange flames had been the spire.
She imagined that keeping the baby would ease the achi
ng loneliness inside of her, but then what kind of burden was that to place on a child? She couldn’t see a way out. She wouldn’t ask her own child to save her. How could you love a child when you couldn’t feel?
Penelope had no job, no prospects. Just a little house that smelled of mold and mildew and was filled with cat knickknacks and knitted blankets. She didn’t even have health insurance until she applied for state insurance—which she was only eligible for because she was pregnant. So what happened when she wasn’t pregnant?
Impossible to believe that mere months ago she’d been shopping for a birthday party. Her biggest problem had been an unplanned pregnancy.
She pursued the adoption. They followed the required number of contact attempts and filed “uncontested” in family court. Penelope sat down with a DVD and watched interviews with families. They all seemed fine. Good people from good families.
When she came across the Spencers, she sighed with relief. Alice and Jim. Jim had dark hair and blue eyes and a handsome, jovial smile. Alice taught kindergarten and spoke with a clear, firm voice. There was no giggling nervousness, just a calm sense of peace between them. They held hands. They finished each other’s sentences and laughed together at jokes that only made sense to them. They talked about aunts and uncles and cousins. Joked that they had to rent a fire hall on Thanksgiving.
She signed the contract that day.
When Cole was born, she watched the pulse of his little soft head. She stripped him down to nothing and touched his little feet and his thin little legs. His long hands and his distended belly. She kissed him gently on each temple. Ran a finger up the delicate, impossibly small vertebrae in his tiny back, and he squawked a protest. She sobbed in her hospital bed, not knowing if she was making a mistake.
She wrapped him back up and gave him to the nurse. She went home, alone, her belly empty and aching.
Ten days later, she was leaving ShopRite, her arms laden with groceries bagged by an inexperienced clerk, and two of her bags containing glass jars broke, hitting the pavement with a dramatic crash. She began to cry, her belly still sore from a birth no one knew about.
A man rushed over to help her. He wore a suit and tie and had disarmingly kind brown eyes. He helped her load up her car and asked if he could maybe text her.
His name was Brett Cox.
She’d run from the night of the fire her whole life. She’d built up walls around it, told herself convenient excuses, even justifications. She’d avoided thinking about it entirely and instead let it eat her from the inside out. Sometimes a piece of your soul can rot, she thought. If you can’t get it out, it festers like an infection.
That’s what the fire had been: an infection of the soul. Everything that happened afterward—Cole, Willa, Talia, Brett, Penelope’s new house, also burned—was all touched with poison from that first fire. Penelope owned her culpability in that; she thought about it every night before falling asleep and every morning upon waking and thought maybe she’d continue that pattern until the day she died.
There were many different kinds of prisons, she knew. And sometimes the ones you made yourself could be the most brutal of all.
CHAPTER FIFTY
March 7, 2020
Sometimes she still thought about Jack. She remembered the way she’d once loved him—in her memory they’d been wildly romantic, sepia toned, set to grand music climbing to a crescendo. If Penelope’s defenses had been built of stone, Jack’s were made of feathers. When life got too tough, Jack took flight.
I met him, Pip. The words he’d said at the Church House while Talia had held them at gunpoint.
She was not surprised, then, when a letter came in the mail.
To: Penelope Ritter Cox
From: Parker Avila, cousin to Jack Avila, executor of his will and estate
Penelope, Jack would have wanted you to have this. Regards, Parker
Pip, I met our son. He’s beautiful. He looks just like us—it’s so strange. When he turns his head one way, I see you. The other, I see me. But he’s so much better than us. God, he’s perfect. You did the right thing—you gave him to a real family. He’s happy, Pip. Really, really happy. You did good, kid.
I forgive you for everything, you know. All of it. You should work on forgiving yourself. His contact info is below. He said you can contact him anytime.
All my love, Jack
How did one go about forgiving themselves? If she couldn’t forget the feeling of that hot metal lock turning in her fingertips—the soft click—and the roar as the fire bore down behind her, the feeling of the heat against her back and the flutter in her belly as Cole blissfully flipped in his pulsing cocoon.
Maybe redemption wasn’t bestowed by others. When Jack turned to her, Talia’s gun trained on him, right before he leaped to his death, he had said, with his ironic half smile, Remember Moirai? The three sisters of fate. Penelope had been Lachesis. The middle sister, Clotho’s sidekick, measuring out the quality of their lives, what they’d all become. She was their mirror—Flynn had said it that night of the eulogies. Atropos, the ruthless one, the one to call the shots—that had always been Bree. It was just a game they’d played, Penelope knew that. One of their many jokes, another level to their private language. It was layered and complicated and deeply philosophical and self-important in the way only twentysomethings could be.
But maybe she could be all of them: Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos. She could make her own life, give it quality and weight and length and heart and love and all the things she’d always longed for, even if she hadn’t admitted it. She alone could sever the parts that needed severing, cut out with Atropos-cruel scissors the guilt, the knee-jerk belief that she deserved less, that her life, half-lived, was enough.
Maybe he’d been trying to tell her that?
Which is how she came to be sitting at the coffee shop in Wexford at nine in the morning, the breakfast crowd thick, letting the March air whip around her at an outdoor table when he came loping up. Tall and lanky as his father, his flop of black hair, his blue eyes, but her smile. Her shy humor—she could see it in the dip of his head, the lopsided grin.
They hugged.
He told her about himself. He grew up middle class. The son of an electrician and a kindergarten teacher. Lived in a cul-de-sac where kids rode their bikes all year round, even in the snow. He’d always known he was adopted and didn’t care. He never felt a hole in his heart—he’d read stories of other adoptees, and they had never resonated (Alice, being well adjusted, had put him in group therapy for adoptees, even offered to help him find Penelope, an offer he never cashed in). He never felt bereft, lost. He loved his parents. (Jim died of a heart attack only a year or so ago. Cole missed him every day.)
He had a brother, much younger. Turned out Alice and Jim could have kids—if only they didn’t try so hard. He laughed when he said that part, and Penelope laughed too. He had a lot of cousins—Jim had a huge family. Aunts, uncles, first and second cousins, neighbors that he spent most of his life thinking were family. He’d never known loneliness. “I barely had a moment of peace and quiet,” he said with another sideways smile.
This boy turned man—her boy-man—seemed so self-assured. So confident of his place in the world. It both warmed her and worried her. Would he find her lacking? She hadn’t told Tara and Linc about him, not yet. They had enough to deal with, and she thought it best to wait until they’d met. Maybe he’d never want to see her again—then she could decide. Or she could ask him what he thought. Did he know he had half siblings?
He twisted a napkin around his finger like she’d seen Jack do a million times when he was thinking about something. Genetics is a strange, rare bird, she thought.
“What should I call you?” He laughed again, his father’s good humor.
“Jack always called me Pip. I usually go by Penelope. It’s your choice,” Penelope said, suddenly shy. “Is this the strangest thing you’ve ever done?”
“To tell you the truth, Pip”—and the way he
said her name brought tears to her eyes—“I thought it would be stranger.”
“Because I didn’t contact you for so long?” Penelope asked before she could stop herself. “Or because I left you?”
He looked up at her with astonishment and then shook his head. “I had the most incredible childhood. Better than any of my friends who grew up with alcoholics and dramatic familial arguments. I never had any of that. My whole life, I’ve always known that I wasn’t just wanted. I was chosen.” He reached across the table and took her hand. “I wasn’t an accident, or something that just happened. I’ve always felt like that was something extraordinarily special.”
The way he said it, clipped and soft, reminded her so much of Jack that she almost started to cry, right there at the coffee shop. He didn’t let go of her hand.
“Would you want to . . . do this again? Meet, I mean? Just for coffee, dinner, whatever.” Penelope felt her voice tremble. What if he said no?
“I’d love it.” His face lit up instantly, genuine.
“Are you sure?” Penelope couldn’t help it. When she was nervous, she fell back on old insecurities and wanted to kick herself for asking. “You seem to already have a lot of people in your life . . .”
“No worries,” he said, his hand waving just like Jack’s used to. He sounded just like his father, and Penelope’s heart nearly stopped. He gave her a curious look, his head cocked sideways.
The day was brightening, the sun rising in the sky as morning turned to midday. The brisk air that had knifed through her sweater an hour ago had mellowed to a comfortable chill. At the other tables, people had begun to clear out, the breakfast crowd thinning, paying their bills, heading out to work, waving hello to neighbors and friends, reminding her that Jack had been right, all those years ago.
The Spires Page 28