Page 128 of Forever Gone

“You made it sound certain.”

“We didn’t know everything.”

“You never said that then.”

“We should have.”

Carol stared at the food between them. “I listened because you sounded so sure. All four of you. For months, I repeated the same advice to other women. Leave. Protect yourself. Don’t look back. Every time one of them listened, I felt less foolish.”

Deb remembered MorningGlory44’s replies after the divorce. The sudden authority. The refusal to entertain compromise.

“You needed other women to make the same choice.”

“I needed it to be the right one.”

Outside, a vehicle passed at the far end of the street. Its tires whispered over dry leaves and faded.

Carol continued, “Then Andrew married her.”

The anger disappeared.

Calm settled across her features with such completeness that Deb’s stomach tightened.

“They went on with their lives,” Carol said. “Karen went away to write a book. Ruth started seeing someone. Linda complained about Phil and then considered crawling back to him. They wrote a few sentences to me and never had to see what those sentences did.”

Deb did not move.

The knife at Carol’s place remained beside the plate, an ordinary table knife with a rounded edge. The concealed object was something else.

“Did you have anything to do with their deaths?” Deb asked.

Carol glanced toward the dark window.

“It was easy, getting to know you all. You were all so vulnerable.” Her words seethed on her lips. “It didn’t take much for each of you to meet me, one by one. For each of you to trust me now that I had a face. To tell me where you were. What you were doing.”

Her reflection sat among the curtains, pale beneath the pendant light.

“Karen always wanted to be a writer,” Carol said. “She believed words gave her authority over other people’s lives.”

Deb’s throat tightened.

“Ruth talked about controlling men after seeing Oliver for a few months. She didn’t understand anything. Linda told me never to go back, then planned to do exactly that herself.”

Those details had never appeared in news reports.

The room tilted by a fraction.

“You killed them,” Deb said.

Carol turned back.

“They spoke. I listened.”

A faint pressure built behind Deb’s ribs. She controlled each breath and kept both hands visible on the table.

“Why did you come here?”

“You know.”