I refused to talk over the phone—not where they couldn’t verify they were who they said they were. The press would claim to be anyone, after all. But Scotland Yard had seemingly anticipated this, and there was a detective on the ground in LA.
I didn’t want to meet them in public, but bringing them to my house was out of the question. There were too many hints of Harper. Even who I had become alongside her felt too telling. I needed a set. A stage. So they came to theGentle Hourlot instead, and I took the interview right there in my trailer, wrapped in my robe, with hair and makeup scheduled for the moment they left.
The woman introduced herself as Detective Inspector Laurel Hunt, which felt an absurdly deterministic name, and it was all I could think as she ran through pleasantries and innocuous questions before she finally reached the point of all this.
“You stayed in the same Richmond hotel as Harper and Joel, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see them?”
“A little. From afar, obviously. Harper and I don’t exactly talk much.”
“How did they seem?”
I considered how best to phrase it, how to position Harper as innocent without giving her a motive. “Harper was just as obnoxiously in love as always. I never paid much attention to Joel as anything other than Harper’s husband, so all I can really say is … he was there.”
She noted that down. “And you’ve had altercations with Harper. Has she always been particularly violent?”
I pressed my lips thin. “This is on the record?”
“Yes,” she said curtly. “And I’d encourage you to tell the truth, Miss Heywood. If this ends up at trial, you might be summoned as a witness.”
Like I might be seeing this as the final opportunity to throw Harper under and not save her.
“Then no, she’s not violent. She never has been.”
“But Cannes and her arrest last month—”
“It’s Hollywood, detective. Don’t believe a thing you’ve been told. We collaborated on Cannes—it made good headlines for us both after I tripped and fell into the basin. Last month was a drunken spat and one I regret to admit I started. I won’t complain about the press spinning it otherwise. Harper isa silly, foppish girl, and it’s ridiculous to seriously consider her capable of thinking about anything bigger than her next manicure.”
———
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Harper snarled, kicking at the tires of her car. We hadn’t even left my garage.
“It’s okay,” I tried. “They might be looking at you as a suspect, but if they’re having to speak to me about it they obviously don’t have much to go on. There’s no need to panic—”
“That’s easy for you to say!” she snarled. “You aren’t the one they’re investigating. You’re just as culpable as I am and no one is even looking at you!”
I could handle Harper having a tantrum, but on that day … Dear god, it had been a year. A year of worrying about the impact on my sobriety, that the one thing holding me together might be ripped from me at any moment, that I’d launched into all of this for her without even thinking about myself, and had shoved my own fear and guilt down so far to help Harper with hers that suddenly it was all-consuming.
“Just as culpable?” I demanded. “I’m not the one who fucking stabbed him, Harper. I have nightmares about it too, you know. I shouldn’t know what congealed blood feels like or what rigor mortis looks like or how much effort a shallow fucking grave takes to dig. But I do because of you.”
She stepped closer to me, all pent-up rage as she snarled,“I don’t remember leveling that blade atyouand forcing you to do a thing.”
“No, I chose you. And that’s the worst part of all of this. I’d always choose you. I’d take your place if I could. If they arrested you, I’d confess.”
Her rage broke like the shallow facade it was, devastation taking its place.
“Don’t you dare,” she said, clutching my wrists.
“I used to care about myself,” I said, the tears springing without warning. I used to care because no one else did. Because if I didn’t, they won.
Well, I lost. I surrendered. I sacrificed it all so when did it end? When did it get to stop hurting? Yes, we’d done a terrible thing, but there had to be somewhere to go, some path forward.
Where was the resolution? The climax, the fall—and the hopeful final beat.
Harper released me only so she could pull me closer, wrap her arms around me, and whisper apologies.
