I’m still staring at the photo. A heart? Katherine?
“I know, you thought she was your friend. That’s awful.” Ashlyn touches my shoulder, just one fleeting moment. “Listen, I understand what grief can do. Maybe you were mixing up my daughter and yours. Mixing up my life and yours. So I—I kinda forgive you. You were doing your job, trying to get the biggest story you could, even if you had to be sneaky about it. But see? I’m the innocent one. I’m as much a victim as Tasha Nicole. Except I have to live with it.”
“Huh?” I say. Dex and Katherine? I calculate, looking at Sophie. Bunno is smudgy-white and flop-eared. Not new. He was our gift for her eighteen-month birthday. So Sophie’s maybe just turned three in this? So—not long before. The accident.
A heart? I let the photo fall back onto the still-open box. It lands face up. Dex, Sophie, Bunno, white balloon. The ugly secret on the back is hidden again.
“Let me ask you, and just a thought,” Ashlyn goes on. “Maybe Katherine hired Dex to represent her? For something? She met him while he was with your daughter? And he never told you?”
I can only shake my head. It’s just a photograph. It’s nothing more. Maybe. “Just the two of us,” Dex would insist when they went off together. I thought it was fatherly and adorable. Was he actually keeping me away? So he could meet Katherine?
Ashlyn takes my arm, leads me away from the photo, away from the box, out of the room. “Well. Now maybe you’ll believe me. Seems like you might be her victim, too. Let’s get you some water,” she says. “Or wine.”
We get to the kitchen, my nerve endings fried. I’m trying to calculate what I missed and when I missed it. Or if. I’m sure it’s nothing. It’s just a photograph.
With a heart.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
“Wine,” Ashlyn says, handing me a stemmed glass. It’s one in the afternoon. I down the entire thing, and sit at the kitchen table. In my chair. Dex’s chair, and even Sophie’s, look different, somehow. Dex’s for sure. Did he have another life? And I didn’t know? I mean, we had … I guess they were fights, sure, especially after Sophie. Little stuff. Disagreements. Like everyone does. The white kitchen. Vacations. And of course he stayed late at work, he’s a lawyer. Was that truly why he stayed? When I put my head in my hands, I hear the trickle of more wine being poured.
“I know you must be trying to figure this all out,” Ashlyn is saying.
I look up long enough to take a sip. And another. I wondered, too, about Dex’s cell phone. At some point after the accident I’d found it on the desk, and tried to use our password to open it. I need to save his photos, I’d actually thought that. But seemed like he’d changed the password. Which I hadn’t cared about. Then. But why would he do that? We’d always had the same password. He’d changed it, hadn’t told me. Another sip. Were there other things I missed? Smart, happy, married, clueless me?
“You know, Mercer,” Ashlyn says, pulling her chair, Dex’s chair, closer to me. “I thought I recognized the warning signs. But when you showed me that photo, that proved it. Katherine did not tell you the truth. Or me, either.”
“About what?” I manage to say.
“But you haven’t told me the truth either, Mercer.” Ashlyn doesn’t answer me. “And that’s why you still can’t accept what was going on between your husband and your friend Katherine.”
“Truth about—what? About the book, you mean?” I rally, struggling to keep a clear head. “We talk about this every day, Ashlyn. I thought you trusted me.”
“I do,” Ashlyn’s face has a look. “But you haven’t told me the real story, have you? All this time, you’re trying to get me to confess. So funny.”
“I—”
“Don’t even go there.” She puts up a palm. “When it’s really you who needs to confess, isn’t it?”
“About?”
“‘About?’” She repeats, almost mocking me. “I know it’s difficult, but I’m doing this for you, Mercer. For your emotional well-being. Don’t you want to stop pretending? Be free? Don’t you want to face it?”
“Face—Dex and Katherine?”
“That too, if it’s easier.”
“Easier than what?”
“Why do you think your husband and daughter were killed? And not you?”
I look up, and she’s laser-focused on me. Hard. Taut. Intent.
“I—”
“I won’t try to trick you into confessing, Mercer,” she says. “I’m not cruel. And I know the cops ruled it an accident. Before Katherine told me, I’d assumed Dex was driving, and you were home or someplace. But you weren’t. You were driving.”
Outside it’s pouring rain, one of those relentless downpours that rivers down the windows and extinguishes the sun. The kitchen’s overhead light hits Ashlyn’s face, making dark circles, and lines, and mottling her skin, as if she’s aged twenty years in the last half hour. I might have, too.
“It was raining that day, too,” I whisper. “And they say I must have—”
Ashlyn nods. “I know. I know all of it. Like I said before, Katherine told me the whole thing. Joe told me, too. Everyone knows. People are pretty careful with you. They watch what they say. Joe told me I should be careful, too. Everyone’s worried you’ll go under again. Like you did for all those months.”
The darkness, I call it. But I don’t tell her that.
“But Mercer? Think about it. I’m sorry, but here’s the only reason I’m bringing it up. Don’t you see? I’m trying to prove you’re innocent.”
Innocent. The word hangs in the air.
Innocent? Of what? It was an accident.
An accident means it’s no one’s fault. An accident means there’s nothing anyone could have done. Nothing I could have done.
Ashlyn drapes one arm over my shoulder, the weight of it, a human touch, so unfamiliar.
“I can’t imagine how you feel,” she says. “Crashing your car into a tree. And only you survived. I am so, so sorry. How can you live with yourself? It must be horrible.”
I close my eyes. See the darkness. No. I open them again.
“You still must be thinking,” she goes on, “like every minute, why didn’t I pay attention? Why didn’t I keep my eyes on the road?”
I don’t know which is worse. When she talks, or when it’s silent.
“And if Dex had been driving, you would be dead, you know?” she whispers. “I just thought of that.”
If Dex had been driving, like he always did, I’d be dead. And he’d be the one with three cracked ribs, two black eyes, and a fractured conscience. Would his life be as miserable as mine? Would he have moved on? What a stupid, stupid, selfish thing to think.
“So which would be better? To have you dead? Or your husband dead? You must think about that all the time. Seeing that tree.”
Maybe I’ll just take another drive. Go visit that tree. I can almost picture it, the rain …
“Mercer? You know what? Maybe you didn’t really cause it,” Ashlyn continues after a beat. “Or even the rain. I don’t want to be—well. Could it be that maybe someone didn’t realize you were picking up Dex and Sophie after you left the restaurant?”
“Someone?” I’m at the kitchen table. The shiny white kitchen table. The rain is only outside.
“I mean, you’ve driven in the rain millions of times, right? That very same way? Nothing ever happened before, right?”
“No,” I say. “I mean—I mean, right. No.”
She stands, begins to pace. I feel the warmth on my shoulder where her arm had been.
“I’m so sorry, and stop me if you don’t want to think about this, I totally understand. But did you feel okay after that brunch?”
“Did I … yeah, I guess so.”
“You told me you and Katherine were celebrating her job. What did you have to drink?”
“We had…” I know this, perfectly, I’ve thought about it ten million times. “Prosecco.”
I look up at her.
She raises both
eyebrows.
“One glass,” I whisper. “Or two. With food. But they did a blood test, in the hospital. It was zero percent.”
“Oh, no, no, of course, I knew you wouldn’t drive like that, Mercer. But I just mean—did your drink taste funny?”
What did a glass of wine taste like a lifetime ago?
“Wait.” Ashlyn holds up a forefinger. “Did you get to the restaurant first? Or did Katherine? Had she already ordered the drinks?”
“She had, but—”
“Never mind.” Ashlyn shakes her head. “I’m being stupid. But I just can’t believe it’s your fault, you know? You’d never kill your whole family. I’m just trying to figure out the truth of what really happened.”
The truth? It was an accident, my brain screams. I might have said it out loud, I’m not sure.
Ashlyn sighs. Leans against the kitchen counter by the sink. “I know, honey,” she says. “Listen. Was your car driving okay? Did the police check your brakes, and all that? Can I just say—and just an idea, a little idea—maybe she thought you’d be in that car alone. And crash—alone. And she would have Dex and Sophie.”
“She—Katherine?” My brain struggles to focus. The police said they’d checked the brakes. Must have. “But she couldn’t have been certain there’d be a crash.”
“True. Of course. But she could have simply tried again. But she didn’t need to, did she? If that’s what happened. I’m just putting it out there.”
“But why would she send you to me, then? Why wouldn’t she just stay out of my life?”
Ashlyn gives a big shrug. “Money, for one,” she says. “For two, she gets you on her side, makes you a bestseller, keeps you from being suspicious. I’m just a convenient pawn. She convinces you to focus on me—so you won’t focus on your own loss. And what really happened”
Does that make any sense? How can I remember what happened when my brain sees only darkness?
“Oh, you’re the only one who can do it,” she says in a sing-song voice. “That’s what Katherine told you, right? To get you to do the book? Did you think that was a compliment?”
“Well, I—” I had, in fact. Stupid gullible me.
“Sometimes the tiniest thing reveals the truth, you know?” Ashlyn’s gentle smile is full of sympathy. “After we search and search, the truth simply—appears. A scrap of paper, or an opened door. A photograph of a little girl with a stuffed rabbit and a white balloon. Inscribed with a heart.”
I take a gulp of wine.
Ashlyn’s certainly seen Katherine’s handwriting. She stayed at Katherine’s house.
“You really didn’t write that?” I have to make sure. “On that picture?”
“I almost wish I had,” she says. “Seeing how unhappy it’s making you.”
I drain my entire glass.
Ashlyn refills it.
“This is me, Merce. I know what it’s like to have been set up. Don’t you think it’s weird? Like, ‘suddenly’ you can’t drive? That doesn’t seem wrong? Listen. Katherine is not a good person. I know her. Way better than you do. She takes what she wants, and she wanted your husband. You were a good mother, honey.”
“I was,” I whisper. I wipe the tear, quickly, so she won’t see. “I was.”
“I can tell.” Ashlyn sits next to me again. Clamps one hand on each of my arms. “You would never drive your daughter into a tree. Someone did this to you.”
“Truly?” The rain has stopped. I think.
“Mercer?” She squeezes my arms. Hard. Looks me in the eye. “Trust me. What you need to investigate is not my daughter’s death. It’s your daughter’s death. And your husband’s, too.”
PART 3
THIS MORNING, as I wrote 486 on the bathroom mirror, I thought again about Sophie.
I remembered how I used to read out loud to her from T. S. Eliot. She was too young, but it was just as much for me as for her. And I wanted her to love the sound of words, and their power, as much as I do. In Old Possum’s Practical Cats, Eliot tells how all cats have three names: the one we give them, the one that’s a special name, and the one that only the cat itself knows, “the deep and inscrutable singular name.”
Is that how the truth is, too? With three possibilities. What we think it is. How someone presents it to us. And what it really is. The deep and inscrutable singular truth.
Maybe we can never know that truth, since it’s so inescapably transformed by our own point of view. As a magazine writer and a reporter, my task is to uncover whatever I can, convince whoever I can, to get me closest to the real truth. But that can’t be what a trial is about, since in a courtroom, two sides are offering different versions of the same story.
Same as in a marriage. Two sides, two different versions of the same life.
One of them has to be wrong.
Or maybe they both are wrong.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
The door to Sophie’s room hadn’t made a sound as I opened it this afternoon, the first time in … months, I guess. I heard the still-familiar quiet tap of its edge against the shelves of stuffed animals and books we’d installed too close to the door. I’d kept the lights off, on purpose. Strange enough to be in here at all, much less illuminate everything that used to be. I risked a sniff to see if any Sophie-fragrance is left, baby lotion, or cleaning wipes, but there’s nothing. Not a trace. The shutter-rattling rain won’t stop, and the rumble of thunder underscores my growing unease. The gloom makes Tuesday afternoon feel like Tuesday night.
I’m sitting in the white wicker rocking chair where I’d fed her and cradled her and rocked my baby girl to sleep, the chair where I’d read to her, and heard her say “good night moon” for the first time. The unblinking eyes of her stuffed animals—snuggled bears and a silvery unicorn and a comical plush hedgehog—stare at me in plastic surprise. Bunno is with Sophie. Now I rock alone, and in my lap, instead of my daughter, a flickering iPad shows me videos of a murder trial.
I swish through the files of the witnesses—Overbey, Hilliard, Al Cook. The medical examiner, the crime scene tech. Duct tape guy. Georgia Bryant. The trial plays back, the story resetting and reorganizing and retelling itself, scene after scene presented by Royal Spofford as true, then the second storyteller, Quinn McMorran, offering her own interpretation. For the past week, Ashlyn’s given me her version. Several of them. The same events, each time making a different pattern.
Do the stories of our lives spin out the same way? We think we know the script, and the role we play, and have some inkling of how we hope the story will evolve. But everyone else sees our lives from a different point of view. Like Dex. Like Katherine. Like Ashlyn. The big unknown is the ending, and it’s our human nature that we don’t dwell on that.
Sophie, happily, had no concept of death. Tasha either.
Katherine.
She’s the actor who’s missing in all these scenes. But was she missing? Maybe she lurked behind the scenes, directing or producing. Writing the script. Maybe that’s what she thinks I’m doing now, following her script. But why hasn’t she called? Predictably unpredictable.
I rock silently, the trial flickering forward, playing out again on my lap. I see my own reflection in the screen, overlaying a close-up of Ashlyn.
Katherine. And Dex?
I push that thought away, but its replacement is also disturbing. Have I been so focused on Ashlyn’s guilt that I didn’t see another side of her story? That maybe the jury was right? Every time my brain went there, I’d dismissed it. But if she’s truly innocent, and someone else killed Tasha, it means that person is still alive. Out there.
My mind is going too fast to reconcile this. But—Katherine. The woman from Dayton. The woman who killed my family.
The woman who made me kill my family.
If that’s what happened.
“Mercer?” Ashlyn’s voice. She’s a shadowy silhouette in the doorway. Even Ashlyn, murderer or maybe-not, would not step uninvited across the threshold into Sophie’s room.
> “Yeah.” I click off the tablet. Stand up. We’ll go into another room. Whatever she did or didn’t do, I still don’t want her in this one. “I need some water.”
I close the door.
“Did you decide?” she asks, as we walk side by side down the hall. “What I asked you this morning? We only have a few more days.”
I laugh, the harsh sound mixing with a clap of thunder outside. As if I didn’t know the deadline.
“Do you want to know the truth?” She persists. “Or not?”
That’s the impossible question that possessed me for the last three hours, rocking, watching trial videos, lost in some alternate world. Truth? Or not?
The photo. Dex. Katherine. Dex and Katherine. All the white spaces in our lives that I ignored, or accepted or dismissed. Last minute trips. Sudden errands. Late-night client calls. I’m consumed by a world that contains a new truth. Not only that Dex might be a different Dex. What makes me yearn for the darkness is one soul-crushing irony.
I killed my own daughter—but Ashlyn didn’t kill hers? She’s innocent—and I’m the murderer?
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
We’re back in the kitchen now. We don’t have much choice. Our tiny constricted world is living room, study, backyard. Bedroom, bedroom. Bathroom. Deliveries come, sometimes the mail. Today I got a glossy palm-treed postcard from Patrick and Lita in Aruba, all solicitous. The phone is silent. My emails are mostly ads for investment planners and meal deliveries and the occasional—and instantly deleted—announcement of a “back-to-school bargain.”
Ashlyn and I, we’re trapped here, like a prison. A prison Katherine sentenced us to. She knew she was doing it. But I don’t know why.
“Look,” Ashlyn says, pouring herself wine. And me. “I’ll tell you exactly what happened. Hand to God, I will. Tell you the truth. On Tasha’s soul.”
I blink, incredulous. Stare at her across the kitchen table. She’s swearing on her dead child? Could any mother lie after saying that?
“But it all adds up to one dead certainty, Mercer,” Ashlyn says. “Katherine. Joe. Maybe even Quinn. They’re targeting us now. They’re watching us now. The only way for us to be safe is to let them know we understand. That we’ll never say a word. Or else we’re both next.”
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