Prologue
Getting away with it.
That’s what people call it. Because when you do something terrible, it follows you. Forever. Even when no one ever catches you, blames you, finds out—there really is no escaping the truth.
Maybe that’s because you never imagined that you’d be capable of such a thing. That kind of violence. Look, even now, how mealy-mouthed you are about it.That kind of violence.So polite.
But you murdered someone in cold blood. There’s no getting around that fact.
Premeditated? No. That’s part of the story, too. But when you let yourself remember that night, you feel the rage coursing through your body, so hot it could have melted your skin. It was an act born from pure fury. So, no malice aforethought. But hardly an accident, either.
Justified? You’re not even sure what that word means anymore.
You are far from the only person to blame, though. There were other people involved, the bloodshed an inevitable result of too many strong feelings at cross-purposes. Of love—in the wrong forms at forbidden moments. A collision course of fates.
And so you can distance yourself from each step that led up to the exact moment of violence, but not the moment itself. Not your part in getting there, either. Certainly, you had a role.
It could have ended so differently, too. But you were reckless. You all were, and now you’ve paid the price.
It’s easy to forget that we are all just animals in the end,grunting and huffing and struggling to survive. It’s our base instincts that get us in trouble. Lust, rage, love, jealousy—not reason. Not rational thought.
So much blood, though, my God. You never once thought about what it would be like to kill someone, except abstractly. The way everyone does.Could I do something like that if I had to? To save my own life? To protect someone I loved? To guard what was mine?But who really considers the details? How hot the blood will be on your hands, how strange it feels when it sprays your face. That it will spray in the first place. How it will look on the white bathroom tile after you’ve smeared it with a rag, because right after it happens, before the horror has fully sunk in, you will be thinking you can clean up the mess.
You will be thinking you can make the whole thing go away.
When you find you cannot, you run. From it, from yourself. Maybe you land somewhere on the far end of the world. Sparkling canals on one side, a colorful city on the other. A safe haven, a hiding place. Freedom.
But then you realize: You may have gotten away, but you’re stillwithit. Or, rather, it’s still with you. Wherever you go, it’ll be there, living inside of you. Forever. Even now, sitting here in the warm spring sun, your eyes fixed on so much beauty, the horror of that night still sits in your chest. Some nights, as you lie alone in the dark, you can almost feel it beating like a second heart, nestled right up next to your own.
After
Gretchen
September 12
Gretchen was terribly cold, even with the fleece she’d thought to grab. The thin cotton pajamas she was wearing underneath were just, well, too thin. And the police station thrummed with supersonic air-conditioning. Overkill, even with the worst of the summer heat and humidity still smothering New York City like a damp, foul-smelling blanket. Perhaps this was a tactic the police used—freezing people into confessing.
She suspected the East Village precinct was nicer than others. It had clearly been remodeled. The lovely historic facade retained, but the interior fully modernized. It was harsh and sterile, though, with fluorescent lighting, cold linoleum floors, and too much steel. The whole place also smelled of some chemically lemon cleaner, which, while nauseating, was probably better than many alternatives. Still, three hours of inhaling it was far too much. But that’s how long Gretchen had been sitting on an uncomfortable metal bench, ignored, as uniformed officers milled about, along with a handful of men (and one woman) in dress pants who must have been detectives. Everyone had been calm and polite, at least. Even the extremely intoxicated young man in handcuffs who’d been brought in wearing an oversize hooded sweatshirt and very baggy jeans had nodded Gretchen’s way. Sheepishly, too, as though she were his disappointed fifth-grade teacher.
Then again, she might have imagined that. At this point, Gretchen wasn’t seeing anything clearly. She and Richard had been startled from a dead sleep by the sound of the doorbell.Unfamiliar in their Upper East Side co-op, where people didn’t ring your doorbell in the middle of the night. People didn’t ring your doorbell at all without permission to come to your door. No, the doormen called up in a civilized fashion from the lobby to announce visitors. And Gretchen’s “visitors” almost always came during regular business hours—dry cleaning, weekly flower arrangements, Fiona the decorator, occasionally her Pilates instructor, Ilya. Friends they were hosting for drinks or dinner. Or the children’s friends, back when her kids still lived at home. Now both smack in the middle of their fifties, Richard and Gretchen had lived in the same elegant doorman building on the corner of Fifth and East Eighty-Eighth for the past twenty-two years, overlooking the Guggenheim and just a stone’s throw from the Met. They’d moved there when the girls were just ten and eight and Becks not yet born.
Twenty-two years of being safely tucked away from the chaos of the world, their life as close to perfect as one could reasonably get. Gretchen knew it. She’d known the whole time how wonderful it was. Not a hundred percent perfect. Nothing was perfect. But their family was good. It was her life’s work, and it had all turned out the way she’d hoped—so much warmer and more genuinely loving than her own family. A low bar. Her adult life had rendered her childhood a cold and distant memory. And Gretchen had been appropriately grateful. Wasn’t that supposed to protect them from this kind of…tragedy?
Apparently not. The second she had heard the frantic ringing of their doorbell—obnoxious, really, given that there was no real emergency—she knew something terrible had happened. Itwasterrible, as it turned out. But it hadalreadyhappened. At this point, there was nothing that could be done to prevent it anymore, which made all that noise seem calculated to make them panic.
It had worked.
Gretchen had bolted upright, heart racing.The kids.That was her first thought. Once you had children, they were forever your first thought. But her children were grown now or, in Becks’s case, mostly grown, which meant when tragedy came, it came knocking.
Gretchen had put a hand on Richard, warm and breathing steadily in the bed next to her. He had been her second thought. Safe and sound. Thank God.
There were another two rings, followed by pounding—five, six times in a row.Was the building on fire?Gretchen didn’t smell smoke. She shook Richard, hard. Oh, to be the dad.
“Richard,” she said loudly. “Wake up! Someone is at the door!” He still wasn’t moving. She shoved him and shouted in his ear, “Richard!”
Finally, he startled awake. Then another pound on the door. Richard rolled out of bed in his pajama pants and an old Dartmouth T-shirt. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know.”
