We settled on the Jaguar.
“If they find his body there, they’ll know,” Harper said, chewing on a nail. “Everyone in our class was there.”
I agreed but we needed to dosomething, and we needed to do it quickly.
“It’s a wood near his house. Anyone could have dumped his body there. Besides, do you really think that retreat is as lodged in everyone else’s memory as it is ours?”
Harper lowered her thumb to smile. “Why Nadine, did something happen there?”
“We happened there.”
She could spout about stolen boyfriends all she liked—that’s where the rivalry sparked and bloomed, the same role, the tension, the woods late at night.
Not the perfect murder, just the perfect story.
And here we were, about to go again.
———
For the first few minutes, we drove in silence. My eyes kept flitting to the cars around us, terrified any might be the police, that we might get pulled over for some inane reason: Harper speeding, perhaps, or simply because they saw our reflections in their mirror and wanted an autograph.
They’d open the boot and find that suitcase. We’d be doomed.
“You haven’t even asked me why I did it,” she said.
My stomach clenched—no, I hadn’t asked. I didn’t need to, didn’t want to, there were too many things that might halt me in my tracks, and I knew that asking might shatter this. I wanted, first and foremost, to help her. Right now Harper’s biggest threat would be me turning against her—so I saw no reason to allow for that possibility.
(I …)
“Would it help if I told you he started it?” she asked, her knuckles paling as she clasped the wheel tighter. “I could tell you he was trying to kill me, that it was self-defense. If it would make this easier for you. I could tell you he hit me. That he’s been hitting me for years. I could tell you he—”
“Harper,” I growled. “If you’re going to tell me, tell me the truth. Otherwise keep your mouth shut.”
She said nothing. I thought she would continue saying nothing, but I noticed her foot was stepping down on the accelerator, the speedometer ticking well past the speed limit.
“Harper,” I said, as calmly as I could, like my heart wasn’t in my throat, like this wasn’t my worst fear magnified, not me behind the wheel but a reckless driver in crisis.
“He was going to leave me,” she said, releasing her hold on the pedal, and we slowed a touch. “He’s been cheating on me for years. And now one of the girls is pregnant, so …”
“Oh.”
Awful, horrendous, terrible. But not worthy of a body in the boot. (Not worthy of Harper doingthisto herself. To me.)
Harper took a breath and steadied her voice again. “Joel is everything. Fire and ice. Love and hate. I thought I could handle it—that he hated me as much as he loved me. That the love made it worth it somehow. But love fades and cruelty sharpens, and I thought maybe if I weathered all he was leveling at me the love might return just as forcefully. Instead he just … left. When he told me it was like the floor gave way. And then his hands were on me at the ceremony, and all I could think about was them on her.”
“Wait, you knew before tonight?”
“A few days,” she said. “So I thought I’d really lay into it, our performance of how perfect things are between us. I’d lean into how much I adore him so that when the news broke, sympathy would be with me and how thoroughly blindsided I must have been.”
“Of course.”
It is exactly what I would have expected of her in this situation—smiles and waves, not the blood still caught beneath my nails.
“She’s pregnant,” she said, simply. “And two years ago, so was I. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want kids, never have. But Joel did. He wasn’t even happy, he was … possessive. I already felt like my body wasn’t my own, like the thing growing inside me was taking over. All those changes, all those risks. And him insisting I see it through? I didn’t want to raise a child, didn’t want my body to break for it, didn’t want to give birth, screaming and in agony beside a husband who saw me only as an instrument of his legacy.”
I thought of him accosting me in Cannes:“She has more important things to focus on than the petty schoolground bullshit going on between you both.”
Oh—that’s what he’d meant.
