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“Tell me about Allison,” I say at last, leaning forward, because he needs to understand why he’s here. “How did she die, Ben?”
I can see the color drain from his face; his skin, somehow, growing even paler.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“You know what I mean.”
“She killed herself. Isabelle, she—” He stops, swallows, twists his head slightly. “You don’t think I did something to her, too, do you?”
I try to imagine it: Ben, forcing Allison to swallow those pills. Crushing them into a powder and slipping them into her coffee, maybe. Hiding them in her food.
“Izzy,” he pleads. “Jesus, I’ve neverkilledanyone.”
I don’t think that’s how it happened, though. After all, Ben’s words are his weapon. They always have been. He’s always known that the best way to control someone is by planting an idea in their mind and making them believe it was theirs all along. He’s always been good at sprinkling the bread crumbs, one by one, until all those little steps have taken you somewhere else entirely—a place that you don’t even recognize anymore. A place so far gone, you can’t find your way back. He’s always known how to suffocate someone from the inside out; how to starve them, drown them, push them so close to the edge that when they look down and see nothing but empty air beneath them—when they dangle their foot off the ledge and feel themselves starting to fall—the idea of it might actually feel good.
And that deserves to be punished, too, doesn’t it?
I imagine Allison during all of those late nights, pregnant, knowing her husband was out with somebody else. Feeling the same loneliness that I had felt, the same regret, and seeing her life flash through her mind like a movie: Ben, pointing at her in the high school hall and deciding that she was his. Pulling her in and giving her everything she wanted before steering her life onto a different path and leaving her there, stranded and alone, just as another life had started to grow inside her.
I imagine her walking into the bathroom, tears in her eyes, one hand on her stomach and the bottle of pills he left out on the counter, staring at her like a quiet dare. Picking them up and holding them in her hand, knowing that he left them there on purpose. Knowing what he wanted her to do—and, slowly, starting to think that she might want to do it, too.
After all, the violence always comes to us in ways we could never expect: quickly, quietly. Masked as something else. Ben has always known that you don’t have to pull the trigger to get away with murder—sometimes, all you need to do is load the gun and let it go off on its own.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
EPILOGUE
“Tell me a story.”
I can still hear her voice, Margaret’s voice, as she lay on her belly on our living room floor. I can see her legs kicking in the air and those glossy pages splayed out in front of us like a real-life storybook: stories of other people, other places. Being transported into their skin as I read the words out loud, imagining what it might feel like to be someone else. To live another life.
“You’re good, though. At telling the story.”
Waylon and I on that airplane, my eyes pinched shut as he stared in my direction. The floor beneath us vibrating as we took off into the air.
“It’s not a story,” I had said. “It’s my life.”
But aren’t all of our lives just stories we tell ourselves? Stories we try to craft so perfectly and cast out into the world? Stories that become so vivid, so real, that eventually we start to believe them, too?
I had started spinning my own story at the age of eight, a web of lies that became stronger and more intricate as life went on. Those microscopic threads sticky and strong, trapping everything good and devouring it whole. There was something wrong with me. Somethingdark and toxic traveling through my veins. Something evil that that house had injected me with, a deadly venom that turned my eyes to stone. It started as a single sentence muttered to me in the morning—“It scares me when you do that”—and had morphed into something bigger, messier. Something that defined my very existence.
Those footprints on my carpet, my body acting in ways my mind couldn’t control. All-consuming, like marsh fog in the morning, rolling across the yard and swallowing me alive.
Sometimes, the stories we create are about ourselves. Sometimes, other people. But as long as we believe them—as long as we can convinceothersto believe them—they keep their power. They remain true.
I glance up at Waylon now, that green light blinking between us, and feel the weight of the headphones around my ears. We’ve covered it all, finally: Ben and Allison and the way the police were never quite convinced of her suicide. How Dozier had always suspected him but never had the proof he needed to convict. How he had always watched from a distance after that, especially after our son went missing, pushing himself into the trees at the vigil. Interrogating his wife to learn what I knew.
Trying to catch him in a misstep. A lie.
I think about how Dozier had looked at me last week, his eyes darting down to my bandaged hand. He knew what happened to Valerie—deep down, heknew—just like Chief Montgomery knew what happened to Margaret. Whatreallyhappened. But he didn’t want to know that, not really. He didn’t want to know the truth, what actually occurred, but instead wanted to hear what was easier to believe. So he had asked me all the right questions, listened to me recite my lines, then shaped a reality in his mind that was better, more convenient, than the one that really existed, holding his own lie tight against his chest before watching it wriggle away, like something slippery in his hands.
We talked about Ben and Valerie and the plan they hatched together; his ring beneath the couch, and how he had used her to findhis way back to a childless life before killing her when it was over and staging it as a burglary to keep his secret safe. Kasey agreed to be interviewed, too, talking at length about how Ben was quietly controlling. How she had watched me change, slowly, long before Mason vanished, and how he had alienated me from everyone in my life until he was all I had left.
After the news of Ben’s arrest broke, Paul Hayes visited my house, too, asking me to keep a secret of his own.
“That man you saw is my father,” he said, a nervous tremor in his throat. “He’s been living with me now that he’s nearing the end, but we both have records. Pasts that I’m not proud of.”
I remembered again what Dozier had said: the drug charges and his time in jail. It was against the terms of Paul’s parole to harbor another criminal, even though they’re family, so he kept his father stashed in the house, blinds drawn and windows dark, hidden away each day until the sun dipped down and it was safe to come back out.
