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But at the same time, I can’t help but wonder.
All those years, I thought Allison’s death had saved Ben from making a choice—a choice between us two—but now I realize something that should have been obvious: Since when did Ben ever sit back and let life happen to him? Since when was he evernotin control? Ben didn’t do that. He never left things to chance; he never played a passive role in his own life, the way he expected us to. So maybe hewasmaking a choice—maybe, in the end, his choice was going to be me. But then Allison had called him into the bathroom one day, the same way I tried to five years later. She had showed him the test and wrapped her arms around his neck, squeezing, and he’d had the realization that he was stuck, too.
That the choice had been made for him, and it wasn’t the one he wanted.
“He was done with her, Isabelle. She wasn’t the same girl she was when he proposed—and how could he expect her to be? He had taken everything from her that made herher.”
I remember the way he had looked at me that night on the roof, his head bent low. His wife was pregnant, heknewshe was pregnant, and still, he did it anyway. Now all those moments we spent together when she was home alone suddenly look so different, like peeling back expensive wallpaper and finding black mold underneath.
“At the memorial, I snuck away into Allison’s bedroom on the second floor, just to get a breath,” he continues. “To get away from it all. I looked out the window and that’s when I saw you two tangled together on the side of the house. At hermemorial.”
I can feel the humiliation leak through my veins like someone injected me with it. The slow crawl, like venom, from my toes to my legs, my stomach, my chest. My face burns as I imagine the shock, the rage; Waylon’s hands gripping the windowsill as he watched usdefile his sister’s memory in her own home. Flinging his body down the stairs, out the door, intentionally making us stop.
“And that’s when I knew it,” he says. “Seeing you two together at the bar, then again at the memorial. He fucking killed her.”
“Waylon, I’m so sorry—” I start, pushing my fingers so hard into my mug that I can feel the skin burning: a sharp, hot singe.
“I’m not asking you to apologize,” he says, shaking his head. “That’s not why I’m here.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I want him to pay. There wasn’t enough evidence with Allison, but when I heard about Mason going missing, I knew it. I knew he did it again.”
I think about the case file in Waylon’s briefcase. The interview recordings he had been listening to and all those pictures of me, ofus, hidden on his laptop.
He wasn’t looking into me. He was looking into Ben.
“What about the article?” I ask, remembering the other thing I had found there. “The one about Margaret on your laptop. That had nothing to do with Ben—”
“I was curious,” he admits, looking ashamed now, too. “I’ve known about you for years, ever since I saw you that night at the bar, but I didn’t actuallyknowyou. I knew Ben married you and had a kid with you, but I was trying to understand you a little better. Trying to see if you were someone I could trust, if I could tell you who I was and what I thought about Ben. But every time I asked about your past, you clammed up.”
I think about him nudging me along at Framboise or in my dining room, always peppering in those personal questions that I shut down so fast.
“After you told me your maiden name was Rhett, I Googled you and found the article.” He shrugs. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”
I nod, tapping my nails against my mug, thinking. There’s stillone thing, though, that doesn’t add up. One thing I can’t bring myself to accept.
“Why would he hurt Mason?” I ask at last. “Sure, maybe he didn’t want to be with me anymore… but why him? Why our son? He didn’t do anything wrong.”
“How do you think it would look if Ben had two wives commit suicide?” Waylon asks, eyebrows raised. “Harder to get away with, I think. Besides, do you really think he wanted to be a single dad?”
I think about the clench in his jaw as he thought about me leaving, working, the burden of parenthood placed solely on his shoulders for only a matter of days. I think about how quickly things had dissolved between us after Mason disappeared—how I had wanted to work on our marriage, on us—but he had decided almost immediately that it was over, almost as if his decision had been made long before that point.
“No,” I say at last. “No, he wouldn’t want that.”
Ben never wanted to be a father. He never wanted Mason. I knew that going into it, of course, but lots of people have a change of heart when it comes to parenthood—I know I did, that twinge of regret evaporating completely the moment I looked into those bright green eyes. Ben was a loving father on the surface of it, but still, I had cornered him into a life he never wanted.
He wasn’t used to not getting his way.
“Right,” Waylon says, leaning back. “I just thought that by coming here—by talking to you, getting inside your house, your head—I might be able to figure it out. Finally find enough evidence to put that asshole away and stop him from hurting anyone else.”
I don’t want to believe it, but at the same time, it makes sense. Nobody broke into our house. The evidence just isn’t there. But Ben would have known that the battery in the baby monitor was dead. Ben would have been able to walk into the nursery without waking up Roscoe or making Mason cry. Ben would have been able to openthe window from the inside, try to stage an intrusion, before walking out the front door without leaving any prints.
Ben would have been able to come home after, slide under the covers, and wind his arms around my waist, pushing himself close. Pretending that he had been there all along. The realization makes me sick, and that’s when I taste it again: metallic, like blood, thick and sticky and dripping over everything.
Burning my throat, painting my tongue. Coating everything in red.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
