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“I hadn’t dated anyone since my divorce.” Sylvia’s cheeks pinkened almost imperceptibly. “Raising my sons and working full-time to keep the roof over our heads took up all the time and energy I had. By the time they were grown, there just didn’t seem much point to it. As far as friends and neighbors go, well, I didn’t have male friends and the police checked out all my neighbors.”

“Speaking of your neighbors, one of them has said that you had a male visitor about a week before the attack. Someone around your age. She seemed to think the two of you were an item.”

Something flickered in Sylvia’s eyes. It could be taken for confusion but knowing what Josie did about Sylvia, it looked more like apprehension. Doubt, maybe. Then she plastered on a smile that Josie had seen in almost every adult photo of Sylvia West since the investigation started.

“Clearly it wasn’t me she saw. Like I said, I hadn’t dated since my divorce. I told the police she was mistaken. I didn’t have any visitors in the week before the attack, male or female, except for my oldest son and everyone on our street knew both my sons. I certainly wasn’t an ‘item’ with anyone.”

“Stop,” Josie said. “Pause it. Please.”

Trinity quickly clicked the pause button and stared at Josie. “What is it?”

The face she presents to the world.

Josie didn’t say it out loud. She thought about how perfectly made-up Sylvia had been as a teenager after having just given birth to her sons. The smiles in those pictures had been genuine but strained. She adored her sons, though just going by the photos, she seemed to enjoy them more as infants than when they grew older. Now that Josie had a teenager, she could understand why. However, in most every other photo of her, except for some taken with her granddaughters, Sylvia West wore a smile that was pleasing but demure, bright but closed-mouthed, warm but bland. It looked real enough from a picture but it wasn’t.

It was fake. The giveaway was the transition between her last expression to the smile. The tiny intake of breath she took through her nose. The way her eyelids lowered infinitesimally before widening. The way the bow of her lips went rigid before the corners of her mouth lifted.

“Josie?” Trinity said.

Sylvia West only showed the world what she wanted them to see, and the only thing she wanted them to see was a perfectly lovely woman who was perfectly in control. Someone who didn’t crack under stress. Someone trustworthy, steadfast, and caring. As a teenager, she’d been groomed by a much older man, and when she married him, she’d been abandoned by her own mother. Then she was abandoned by him, leaving her penniless with no job skills and two young children to support. Even after her husband left, according to Carter, their grandmother still wanted nothing to do with Sylvia. Allowing anyone to get close meant opening herself up to abandonment again. Even friends could let you down.

Was it privacy or preservation that made her keep Louis Fisher at a distance even after four years together? Maybe it was neither. Maybe she had truly believed he would dump her if he knew about her hoarding. Or maybe she’d had a sixth sense about him and his stalking tendencies but carried on because of all the people on the planet, he certainly wasn’t going to leave her. He had accepted the façade even though he hated it.

Sylvia had never figured out what a healthy romantic relationship looked like, nor had she prioritized it. Instead, she had spent her entire life in the service of others—as a mother and grandmother, as a doula, and later as a member of her church. As long as she was everything to everyone, no one would look closely enough to see her imperfections. The façade kept her safe but still allowed her to be well-loved. Whenever anyone asked too many questions, she simply pled the need for privacy.

As much as the façade kept others out, it allowed her to hide things. She’d managed to conceal her relationship with Louis Fisher for four long years from her family and everyone they knew at church. What else had she hidden?

Trinity waved a hand in front of Josie’s face. “Are you still with me?”

“Look at her.” Josie pointed to the screen. “That’s a fake smile.”

“So? Everyone has a fake smile.”

“She’s lying, Trin.”

Trinity rewound the video and played the exchange again. A frown formed on her face as she watched it a second and third time. “What are you saying? The gentleman caller thing was real? She was seeing someone? Why would she lie about something like that? Especially to the police?”

“I’m not sure.” Trout started snoring. Josie rubbed his belly absently.

“Don’t you have her phone records from back then?”

“Off the record? No. Sylvia was very cooperative, and they had no reason to believe she wasn’t being truthful. She gave them the names of everyone in her life: neighbors, church friends, the family she’d been working for at the time. Basically, anyone she’d had contact with. The investigators had no reason to believe she was being deceitful so they didn’t ask her to consent to having her phone searched or subpoena the records. I would have made the same call.”

“So when Arlene Jones told them she’d seen a ‘gentleman caller,’ and Sylvia said she was mistaken, they believed Sylvia.”

Josie shrugged. “Why not? Jones could very well have been mistaken. She saw the male visitor from a distance, didn’t get a good look at him, and couldn’t remember what day she’d seen him. By all accounts, Sylvia was more credible. You spoke with her at length. Did you have any reason to believe that she was lying about anything?”

“Well, no, but now I do!” Trinity said, voice rising an octave. In response, Trout jumped. His snores cut off but resumed a couple of seconds later. “But if there was a man, why wouldn’t she tell anyone about him? Unless she felt confident that he wasn’t the killer.”

“She might not have wanted to bring him into the investigation,” said Josie. “That would be a huge intrusion into his life. Either that or she didn’t want attention drawn to their relationship.”

“Oh God.” Trinity put a hand to her chest. “Do you think she was seeing a married man?”

“No.”

Everything Josie had learned about Sylvia convinced her that hell would have to freeze over before she got involved with a married man.

But what if the married man had been pursuing her?