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“You hit me on the head,” she realizes. “You left me on a bench, wet and cold and afraid!”
“I wasn’t thinking clearly.” Sarah’s mouth forms a line. “Though when I left, you weren’t on a bench. You were on the ground.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?” Lenna asks.
Sarah shrugs. She looks baffled. “You really hadno ideaI was there until right now?”
Lenna shakes her head. Oh, how she wished she had. It would have changed the course of her life. Though she doubts she would have done anything differently. Because she understands, instantly, Sarah’s rage, especially if she overheard the part about Gillian tampering with her embryos. Gillian manipulated people’s lives. It was infuriating.
But she would have lived her life differently. The past two years, she wouldn’t have been so paranoid and afraid.
“You heard that stuff about the embryos, is that it?”
Sarah winces. A look of great pain crosses her features. “I did.”
Lenna blows out her cheeks. “She got hurt so easily. She thought she was losing me as a friend. She was acting really erratically, especially that last day. I tried to give her a wide berth. I let a lot of things go. I tried to ignore a lot of what she said.”
“Same. And she was having a hard time with losing me as well.”
Lenna takes a breath. “You knew she was faking her job?”
“I figured it out before. The day you saw me, actually, at the office.”
“I had no idea she wasn’t working there. And when I met her in the canyon, I wasn’t angry. Well, Iwas,but I certainly didn’t intend to hurt her.”
“I didn’t intend that, either,” Sarah whispers. “I was just so…” She shakes her head. “That whole thing about the embryos, and then she made this reference to this thing that happened in my past…” She bursts into tears and covers her face.
“Hey,” Lenna says, though she isn’t sure she wants to comfortSarah. Ironic, though: In those few minutes at the trailhead, both of them discovered just how duplicitous this person they cared about was. The curtain was ripped away in one fell swoop.
Lenna clears her throat. “She hurt us both so badly. I’m so, so sorry for what she might have done to you. But I’m not going to hurt you. I won’t tell. I’m leaving, I swear. Can you please move the knife away from my baby?Please?”
The knife trembles. After a few seconds, Sarah wilts to the floor, the knife clattering beside her onto the ground. She shuts her eyes and buries her face in her hands. “This is all so fucked up,” she says.
Lenna stands there, considering.Nowshould she run? But Sarah seems so weak and vulnerable. She kneels down slowly. Sarah lets out a groan.
“I hate her,” Sarah mutters. “So fucking much.”
Lenna nods. Maybe there were signs she should have seen as well. “I bought her lies easily, too. I accepted that things were a certain way just because she said so. It’s like…Iwantedto believe them. I wanted to think she had a good job and was looking out for my best interests. There’s a part of me that is still like,wasshe being a good friend, deep down? In her own twisted way? She was there when I really needed someone.”
“But who sabotages a woman’s embryos?” Sarah shakes her head. “Not that I’m even certain she did.”
“I wish I had warned you,” Lenna realizes. “She joked about it to me, but I never believed she’d do it.”
Sarah shrugs. “It’s over with.” Then she eyes her. “I was sure you saw me on the trail. So you weren’t the one who sent the anonymous tip to the cops?”
Lenna shakes her head. “No, but I heard about it.”
“I wonder who it was, then?”
Tension is still vibrating inside Lenna. It’s the same way she feltin those days after Gillian went missing, certain that the police would add up all the pieces and find her. But…shedidn’tdo anything. She isn’t the killer. It’s weird, realizing that, finally. Everything she thought was true isn’t. She waits for relief to come, but it doesn’t. The trauma, the sadness, the fear, the disappointment—all of it remains.
“How did they end up dropping the case against you?” Lenna asks. Because it hits her then—Sarah actuallydiddo it.
“A patient vouched for me.” Sarah looks away. “I never really got to thank her, that’s the shittiest part. She died shortly after all this went down.” Her gaze flicks to Jacob again. “And you had a baby, huh?”
Lenna nods, touching Jacob’s cheek. “I hoped he’d save me.”
“And has he?”
