by Mary Kubica
ternoon. It was a Saturday a month or so ago. He was home. He
watched out the window as Morgan went down the drive.
“I had a habit of staring at her when she didn’t know I was
watching,” he confesses. “It’s because of how beautiful she was.
It was easy to do. Morgan,” he tells me, smiling nostalgically at
the memory of his wife, “was easy on the eyes. Everyone thought
so,” and I remember what Officer Berg said about the men in
town having eyes for her. About Will having eyes for her.
“Yes,” I reply. “She was lovely,” changing the way I think
of him because I can see in his eyes just how much he loved
Morgan.
That day Jeffrey says that he watched as she bent at the waist,
as she stretched a hand into the box to retrieve the mail, as she
made the long walk back up the driveway, thumbing through
the mail as she went.
Halfway up the drive, Morgan came to a standstill. Her hand
went to her mouth. By the time she made it inside, she was as
white as a ghost. She brushed past Jeffrey in the doorway, shak-
ing as she did so. He asked what was wrong, what she found in
the mail that made her so upset. Morgan said only bills—that
the insurance company hadn’t covered a recent doctor appoint-
ment. The balance left for them to pay was highway robbery.
It should have been covered, she snapped, marching up the stairs with the mail in her hand.
Where are you going? he’d called up the stairs after her.
To call the insurance company, she’d said, but she went into the bedroom and closed the door.
Everything about Morgan changed that day. The changes
were subtle. Another person might not have noticed. There was
a sudden propensity toward closing the curtains as soon as the
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sky turned dark. A restlessness about his wife that hadn’t been
there before.
The notes that the police found were all different, slipped in
between the box spring and the mattress that Jeffrey and Mor-
gan slept on. She’d intentionally hid them from him.
I ask what they said, and he tells me.
You know nothing.
Tell anyone and die.
I’m watching you.
A chill runs up my spine. My eyes go to the windows of
homes on the street.
Is someone watching us?
“Did Morgan and your ex-wife get along?” I ask, though even
I can see these threats make no sense coming from an aggrieved
ex-wife. These threats have nothing to do with a woman try-
ing to reclaim the rights to her child. These threats have noth-
ing to do with a husband hoping for a life insurance payout in
the wake of his wife’s death.
These threats are something else.
All this time, I’ve been wrong.
“I’m telling you,” Jeffrey says, becoming agitated now. Gone
is the man who stood smiling at his wife’s memorial service.
He’s come undone. Jeffrey is unwavering now as he states em-
phatically, “Courtney had nothing to do with this. Someone
else was threatening my wife. Someone else wanted her dead.”
I see this now.
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Sadie
“I used the last of the milk on the mac and cheese,” Will tells
me when he gets home, stepping into the house only minutes
after me. Tate is with him. He skips merrily through the front
door, tells Will to count to twenty and then come find him.
He dashes off to hide as Will unpacks a handful of items from
a grocery sack on the counter.
Will winks at me, admits, “I told him we’d play hide-and-
seek if he went with me without a fuss.” Will can turn any er-
rand into an adventure.
In the Crock-Pot cooks Will’s famous macaroni and cheese.
The table is set for five, as if Will bullishly believes Imogen will be home. He carries the gallon of milk he’s just brought home
to the table, and fills the empty glasses in turn.
“Where’s Otto?” I ask, and Will tells me, “Upstairs.”
“He didn’t go with you and Tate?”
Will shakes his head no. “It was only a quick trip for milk,”
he says.
Will turns to me, seeing me perhaps only then for the first
time since he’s arrived home.
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“What’s the matter, Sadie?” he asks, setting the milk on the
edge of the table and coming to me. “You’re shaking like a leaf.”
He wraps his arms around me and I want to tell him about
the discoveries of the day. I want to get it all off my chest, but
for whatever reason, instead I say, “It’s nothing,” blaming low
blood sugar for the reason I shake. I’ll tell him later, when Tate
isn’t just in the next room waiting for Will to find him. “I didn’t have time for lunch.”
“You can’t keep doing this to yourself, Sadie,” Will tenderly
reprimands.
Will reaches into the pantry and finds a cookie for me to eat.
He hands it to me, saying, “Just don’t tell the boys about this.
No cookies before dinner. It’ll ruin your appetite.” He smiles
as he says it and, even after everything we’ve been through, I
can’t help but smile back, because he’s still there: the Will I fell in love with.
I stare at him awhile. My husband is handsome. His long hair
is pulled back and all I can see is that chiseled jawline, the sharp angles of his cheeks, and those beguiling eyes.
But then I remember suddenly what Officer Berg said about
Will having eyes for Morgan and I wonder if it’s true. My own
smile slips from my face and I feel regret begin to brew inside.
I can be cold, I know. Glacial even. I’ve been told this before.
I often think that I’d been the one to push Will into the arms
of another woman. If only I had been more affectionate, more
sensitive, more vulnerable. More happy. But in my life, all I’ve
known is an inherent sadness.
When I was twelve, my father complained about how moody
I could be. High as a kite one day, sad the next. He blamed the
imminence of my teenage years. I experimented with my cloth-
ing as kids that age tend to do. I was desperate to figure out who
I was. He said there were days I screamed at him to stop calling
me Sadie because I hated the name Sadie. I wanted to change
my name, be someone else, anyone other than me. There were
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MARY KUBICA
times I was snarky, times I was kind. Times I was outgoing,
times I was shy. I could be the bully just as easily as be bullied.
Perhaps it was only teenage rebellion. The need for self-dis-
covery. The surge of hormones. But my then-therapist didn’t
think so. She diagnosed me with bipolar disorder. I was on mood
stabilizers, antidepressants, antipsychotics. None of it helped.
after I’d started my family and my career.
Tate calls out from another room, “Come find me, Daddy!”
and Will excuses himself, kissing me slowly before he leaves. I
don’t pull away. I let him this time. He cradles my face in his
hands. As his soft lips brush over mine, I feel something I haven’t felt in a long time. I want Will to keep kissing me.
But Tate calls for him again and Will leaves.
I head upstairs to change. Alone in the bedroom, I wonder
if it’s possible to dream about a place you’ve never been. I take
my question to the internet. The answer isn’t so easy to find
about places. But it is about faces. The internet claims that all the faces we ever see in our dreams are faces we’ve seen in real life.
It’s been over an hour, but Officer Berg still hasn’t called me
back.
I change into a pair of pajamas. I drop my clothes into the
laundry basket. The basket itself overflows and I think that after
everything Will does for us, the least I can do is a single load
of laundry. I’m too tired to do it now but first thing tomorrow,
before work, I’ll throw in a load.
We eat dinner together. As expected, Imogen is a no-show. I
pick at my food, hardly able to eat. “Penny for your thoughts,”
Will says toward the end of dinner, and only then do I realize I
spent the entirety of our meal staring off into space.
I apologize to him and blame fatigue.
Will does the dishes. Tate disappears to watch TV. Otto plods
out of the room and up the stairs. I hear his bedroom door close
from this distance and only then, when I’m certain they’re both
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out of earshot, do I tell Will what Imogen said to me in the
cemetery. I don’t hesitate because, if I do, I might just lose the
nerve. I’m not sure how Will is going to respond.
“I saw Imogen today,” I begin. I fill him in on the details:
how the school called, how I found her alone at the cemetery.
How there were pills with her. I don’t dance around the words.
“She was angry but unreserved. We got to talking. She told
me, Will, that she yanked that stool out from Alice’s feet the
day she died,” I tell him. “If it wasn’t for Imogen, Alice might
still be alive.”
I feel like a snitch as I say it, but it’s my duty, my responsi-
bility to tell Will. Imogen is a disturbed child. She needs help.
Will needs to know what she has done so that we can get her
the help she deserves.
Will goes stiff at first. He’s at the sink with his back toward
me. But his posture turns suddenly vertical. A dish slips from
his wet hands, falls to the sink. It doesn’t break, but the sound
of a dinner plate hitting the sink is loud. I jump because of it.
Will curses.
In the moments of silence that follow, I offer, “I’m sorry, Will.
I’m so sorry,” as I reach out to touch his shoulder.
He turns off the water and comes to face me, drying his hands
on a towel. His eyebrows are lowered, his face flat. “She’s mess-
ing with you,” he says incontrovertibly. The denial is clear as day.
“How do you know?” I ask, though I know that what Imo-
gen told me is true. I was there. I heard her.
“She wouldn’t do that,” he says, meaning that Imogen
wouldn’t help her mother die. But the truth of the matter, I
think, is that Will doesn’t want to believe she would.
“How can you be sure?” I ask, reminding him that we barely
know this girl. That she’s been a part of our life for only a few
long weeks now. We have no idea who Imogen is.
“There’s this animosity between you and her,” he says, as if
this is something petty, something trivial and not a matter of
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MARY KUBICA
life and death. “Can’t you see she’s doing it intentionally be-
cause it gets a rise out of you?” he asks, and it’s true that Imo-
gen doesn’t behave this way toward Will and the boys. But that
doesn’t change things. There’s another side to Imogen that Will
can’t see.
My mind goes back to our conversation this morning about
the photograph on Imogen’s phone. “Were you able to recover
the photos?” I ask, thinking that if he found the photo, there
will be proof. He’ll be able to see it the way that I do.
He shakes his head, tells me no. “If there was a photograph,
it’s gone,” he says.
His carefully chosen words come as a punch to the gut. If there was a photograph. Unlike me, Will isn’t sure there ever was.
“You don’t believe me?” I ask, feeling bruised.
He doesn’t answer right away. He thinks before he speaks.
In time he says, expression thoughtful, arms folded across his
chest, “You don’t like Imogen, Sadie. She scares you, you said.
You didn’t want to come here to Maine and now you want to
leave. I think you’re looking for a reason—” he begins, tiptoe-
ing around the truth. His truth. That I’m manufacturing a rea-
son to leave.
I hold up a hand and stop him there. I don’t need to hear the
rest of it.
Only one thing matters. He doesn’t believe me.
I turn on my heels and leave.
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Sadie
I spend another fitful night tossing and turning in bed. I give
up the fight near five a.m., slipping quietly from bed. The dogs
follow, eager for an early breakfast. On the way out the bed-
room door, I reach for the basket of laundry I left for myself
to clean, hoisting it onto my hip. I walk out into the hall and
down the stairs.
I’m approaching the landing when my bare foot lands on
something sharp. It pokes me in the arch of the foot. I sink to
the steps to see what it is, resting the laundry basket on my lap.
In the darkness, I feel blindly for the offending item, taking it
into the light of the kitchen to see.
It’s a small silver pendant on a rope chain, now coiled into a
mound on my palm. It’s broken, snipped in two, not at the clasp
but in the center of the chain so that it can’t go back together
again. Such a shame, I think.
I clasp the pendant between my fingers, seeing the one side
is blank.
I turn it over. There on the other side is an M. Someone’s
initial. But whose?
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MARY KUBICA
Hers isn’t the first name that comes to me. I think of Mi-
chelle and Mandy and Maggie first. But then the thought arrives,
crashing into me, knocking the wind from my lungs.
M for Morgan.
In the kitchen, I suck in a sudden breath. Did this necklace
belong to Morgan?
I can’t say with certainty. But my gu
t thinks so.
What is this necklace doing in our home? There isn’t one
good reason why it would be here. Only reasons I’m too scared
to consider.
I leave it on the countertop as I turn and make my way to
the laundry room. My hands are shaking now, though I tell
myself it’s theoretical only. The necklace could just as well be-
long to a Michelle as it could to Morgan Baines. Perhaps Otto
has a crush on some girl and planned to give this to her. A girl
named Michelle.
I upend the basket and laundry comes tumbling out, onto the
floor. I sort the laundry, separating the whites and colors into
piles. I grab armfuls of it and begin thrusting it into the wash-
ing machine, too much for one load. But I want to get it done.
I’m not thinking about any one thing in particular, but many
things, though the thing that trumps all is how I can get my
marriage, my family back on track. Because there was once a
time when we were happy.
Maine was meant to be a new beginning, a fresh start. In-
stead it’s had a detrimental effect on everything, Will and my
marriage, our family, our lives. It’s time that we leave, go some-
where else. Not back to Chicago, but somewhere new. We’ll sell
the house, take Imogen with us. I think of the places we could
go. So many possibilities. If only I could convince Will to leave.
My mind is elsewhere. Not on the laundry. I’m hardly pay-
ing attention to the laundry at all, other than this quick, force-
ful way I jam things into the machine, slamming the door. I
reach for the detergent on a nearby shelf. Only then do I catch
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sight of a few items that snuck out, escapees from the washing
machine lying limp on the laundry room floor.
I bend at the waist to retrieve them, ready to open the door
and toss them back in. It’s as I stand, hunched over, scooping
the items into my hand, that I see it. At first I blame the poor
lighting in the laundry room for what it is I see. Blood, on a
washcloth. A great deal of it, though I try and convince myself
that it’s not blood.
The stain is not as red as it is brown because of the way blood
changes color as it dries. But still, it’s blood. Undeniably blood.
It would be so easy to say that Will had cut himself shaving,
or that Tate had a scraped knee or—worst case scenario—Otto