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“It’s tough with employees,” Emma sighs. “The girl who quit, we were pretty good friends, or so I thought. It gets complicated.”
Moodily, Emma watches the other waitress, who successfully brought menus to the couple but is now lurking around the pass-through window, flirting with the line cook.
I’m not thinking about her.
I’m thinking about another mutual friend of Emma’s…
“You said you knew Dane’s wife?”
The question slips from my lips.
Emma stops watching the waitress and fixes me with her pale green eyes.
“We were best friends.”
“Really.” My mouth goes dry. “What was she like?”
“Fucking gorgeous,” Emma says at once. “The most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”
“Oh.”
I kind of suspected that would be the case, but I’m still filled with queasy jealousy.
“Lila was the princess of Grimstone,” Emma says wistfully. “Literally—they crowned her the Pumpkin Princess our senior year and she entered the pageant on a whim, didn’t even have a proper dress…here, I’ll show you.”
She pulls out her phone and searches her photos. It takes a moment, but not as long as scrolling back through years of images—she must have them saved in a folder.
“See?” She passes me the phone, showing an image of two girls on a makeshift stage, one short and orange-haired in a puffy pink gown, the other tall and elegant in a simple sheath, with a fall of shining black hair and large, lustrous dark eyes.
Teenager Emma is delightfully awkward with her braces-filled grin, while Lila could pass for twenty-two and already possesses the presence of a classic film star, an Audrey Hepburn or an Ava Gardner. She gazes out from the photo like her image will live forever, though the girl herself is long gone.
“Very pretty,” I say, knowing how pathetically that describes the girl on the screen.
“Everybody loved her,” Emma says, staring at her phone. “Nobody got why she dated Dane.”
“They dated in high school?”
“Off and on—he didn’t go to our school; he didn’t go anywhere. Because of his…thing.”
“His medical condition?”
“So he says.”
“You don’t believe it?”
“You ever heard of that condition before?Ihaven’t—but I sure noticed how much he liked keeping her trapped in his house. The rest of us would go to the beach or boating—she’d want to come, but if she did, they’d have some huge fight after.”
I think of a teenaged Dane, unable to attend school, visited by his wildly popular girlfriend on her way to the beach, her shoulders sun-kissed, the straps of her bikini visible beneath her shirt…I imagine the other kids waiting outside, their voices audible as they chatter excitedly, the guys ribbing and laughing because they’re about to watch Lila undress and swim in that suit while Dane is stuck inside until the sun goes down…
“I thinkhewas the one trapped in the house,” I say to Emma.
She makes a soft, amused sound. “Lila used to defend him, too.”
“You really think he killed her?”
“I know he did.”
“How?”
