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My pulse quickened. Maybe it was nerves. Maybe it just felt good that someone else knew.
“Tell me,” he said. “What did you feel when you did it?”
I stared at him for a long time.
Eventually, his expression softened. “Hypothetically speaking, of course?”
“I suppose at the time I felt satisfied.”
“And now?”
“Now, nothing.”
Henry smiled. Something I had not seen from him, not before and I don’t think since. I almost smiled too. Just saying the words brought great pleasure. Like a release, only not just any release. Like a pressure value, tightly screwed on, had suddenly just blown wide open.
His eyes lit up. “The world needs more people like you.”
“I don’t know about that,” I told him. No one had ever said anything like that to me, I realized.
“You don’t know what you don’t know, Charlotte.”
“Clearly.”
“Men and women—people like us, who are different, who lack a conscience, who possess an absence of the ability to feel guilt—it’s a great equalizer on this planet. A necessity, honestly.”
“What is it you want from me?”
Dangling the proverbial carrot over my head, he went on to explain that he knew what I had done and was prepared to destroy me with his knowledge, essentially taking my family down with me, separating me from my daughter, just as my mother had been taken away. Then a funny thing happened. I was surprised to find I didn’t hate him for it. It was as though my whole life finally made sense, as though everything had led me to that moment.
Chapter Seven
Charlotte
The first time I killed a man, I was nineteen and a sophomore in college. Henry was wrong in his assumption that he was my college sweetheart, but he was close. We had slept together.
His name was Brad, and he was my roommate’s boyfriend. I liked him well enough. Not enough for a second date, but enough that if she had friends over, and he was in the mix, I’d share a drink or two with them.
When she asked if I minded if she dated him, I lied and told her I kind of did. Not because I cared. But because he wasn’t her type.
Megan was sweet and full of life. Brad was sadistic and harbored a secret hatred for women that, like most sociopaths, he managed to push way down deep. In other words, they were perfect for each other.
Megan was easy prey for a monster like him.
Brad was a perfect disaster for her and her idyllic worldview.
One night just after the start of the second semester, this became more apparent, when Megan called me from Brad’s fraternity house asking for a ride. I had been busy studying and wasn’t particularly in the mood for a rescue mission. It wasn’t like I hadn’t warned her.
Everyone at the party was well past the legal limit. She said I was her only hope. It was cold, and she didn’t want to walk. I mentioned that my car didn’t have heat and suggested a cab, but then she started crying and brought up that she’d covered the electric bill the month prior, when my waitressing job was slow.
I was between a rock and a hard place, and it only went downhill from there. The rest was drunk girl blubbering, and I couldn’t make out exactly what she was saying except that she and Brad had had a fight.
When I arrived, Megan wasn’t waiting on the curb like she’d promised. Five minutes became fifteen. A quarter of an hour bled into a half hour. I didn’t have heat in my car, nor enough gas to keep the engine running, so I was forced to either leave her and take the chance of getting another call, or go in after her.
I should have realized then that the evening wasn’t going to end well. Maybe I was bored, or lonely, or maybe I was pissed and looking for a challenge. Maybe it was all of those things.
But I got out of the car. Then I stayed. I eventually found Megan in the back chatting up a group of girls I didn’t know. I never have been one for small talk or superficiality, and I wasn’t at school to make friends. She told me she’d only be a minute. I should have left then. The same guilt that should have led me home instead led me to the keg.
My father was picking up extra shifts to cover my living expenses and tuition, moonlighting at concerts and sporting events, putting up with the exact kind of drunk crowd I was now mingling with.
