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I said nothing.
“Dad, I swear. I swear. It was an accident.”
I tried to remember the last time I’d seen Nina alive. Could it have been in the summer? I tried to picture it, but the only image that came into my mind was of her messing around by our pool, pushing Simon into the water and laughing, but that had been a video clip the police had shown at the press conference. Had I even been at the house when that happened? She’d had a sweet laugh. Joyful. It started like a giggle and grew.
“She was such a beautiful girl.”
“I’m sorry,” Simon choked out.
I walked to the other side of the room and stared out through the glass doors. The moon was up. There was enough light that I could see the pool patio clearly. The chairs were stacked over to the side, covered for winter. Nina and Simon had spent a lot of time in that pool in the summer. Nina had spent a lot of time in this house. Had they been happy together? I tried to remember how many times I’d actually spoken to the girl, other than to say hello or goodbye. Twice or three times, maybe, and even then it had been nothing more than the smallest of small talk. I turned back and looked at my son. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, hunched over. Simon was six foot three. He was taller than me by two inches, and bigger too. He had the body of a man, but wasn’t he still just a boy?
“Why didn’t you call an ambulance? Why didn’t you call me or your mother?”
“You don’t understand. You don’t know what it was like. One minute we were fighting, and then she was just... gone. I held her...” He made a kind of cradling gesture with his hands. “There was blood from the back of her head. It went everywhere. On my shirt. On the floor. Her eyes were open and staring. I didn’t even try to do CPR in the beginning. I should have, but I don’t know how much time went by before I even thought of trying. And then it was like...” His face crumpled and he started to cry again. “It felt like I was defiling her. Pushing and shoving at her dead body. I knew she was dead. She was dead the moment her head hit the stone.”
“You’re not a fucking doctor, Simon!”
“You don’t need to be a doctor to know when someone is dead! She wasn’t breathing. She didn’t have a pulse. Her eyes were open and fixed, and I just knew, okay?”
“So you took her to the woods and you put her in a shallow grave?”
“I was in shock. I must have been, because time went by and then it was like I just woke up. If you’d been there, Dad... There was blood everywhere. All over the rug, all over me. If I’d called the police, no one would have believed that it was an accident. I mean, you have to understand that. Like, the whole world’s all ‘me too’ and ‘believe women’ and that’s all great, okay? I am all for that, in principle. But people have gotten crazy with this stuff. We’re always, always the bad guys, even when we’re not.” He reached out a hand toward me, his face pleading. “Dad, if I called the cops, how was I going to explain it? Here’s my dead girlfriend. Yes, we were fighting but she just happened to fall, nothing to do with me. Except that there’s blood everywhere and I look like a fucking homicidal maniac.”
“So you decided not to try. You decided to bury her.” I hated him for it. For what he’d made me do. But there was no undoing what I’d done. If I went to the cops, how could I explain away my decision to dig that girl up and put her into the water?
Simon stood up. He clenched his fists.
“Yes, all right! I fucking buried her. I put her in the ground. I covered her with dirt. I did that.”
I looked at the floor. I was sick with guilt. My hands were shaking again. My hands had never shaken before Nina. No matter the problem. Once I’d bitten off more than we could chew at the company. I spent millions on a patent for a tool that was obsolete six weeks after we closed the deal. In the six weeks before the patent was superseded, I spent millions more on a facility and on supplies, all of which were suddenly useless. I took on debt that we wouldn’t have the revenue to service. For months, I was staring down the barrel of losing everything, and in all that time my hands didn’t shake once. I was cold as fucking ice.
“Dad,” Simon said. His voice was ragged. He took a step closer to me. I didn’t move. He took another step, and then another, until he was so close that we were almost touching. “Please, Dad.” His voice cracked. And I reached out with my right arm and pulled him to me. He wrapped his arms around me and held on tight, like I might just be able to save him.
“My life is over,” he said. “My life is over. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
We stood there like that for a long time. It felt like that moment should be the end of it all, but it wasn’t. Time passed, and we had to deal with what came next. I let him go. I sat on the bed, and he sat beside me. Sooner or later, Jamie would come looking for us.
“I don’t want to go to prison,” Simon said. “I mean, what’s the point? My whole life in a concrete box. Mom would insist on coming to see me. You know? And that would mess her up. Having to come and see me in some hole of a place and pretend that things were going to work out. We’d all be better off if I just took your gun and ended it.”
“You’re not going to prison.”
The words sat between us. Simon didn’t look at me. He kept his head down and spoke in a voice that was not much more than a whisper.
“Dad, what did you do when you found her?”
I swallowed. “I moved her. To a place where no one will ever find her again.”
He nodded slowly. I did not have a choice about what we did next. If Simon had called me the moment Nina had fallen, we would have had options, but once he put her into the ground those options were narrowed to exactly two. I could choose to help my son, or I could send him to prison for the rest of his life. Because no one was going to believe that it hadn’t been murder.
“Nothing we do now can bring Nina back. What happened was an accident. You screwed up. You didn’t mean to hurt her, and you’re going to have to carry what happened with you for the rest of your life. But you didn’t mean to hurt her. And we need to focus now on keeping you safe. Listen to me, Simon. Once we leave this room, we are never going to talk about this again. You are not to tell your mother. You are not to tell anyone. And if anyone comes after you, we are going to take them down.”
He looked at me with eyes wide and teary. “You can’t do that. I can’t drag you into this, Dad.”
As if I wasn’t already in it. As if I hadn’t sunk her body in the middle of our fucking lake. I saw myself sitting in the dock of a courtroom, trying to explain my actions. I saw the look on Jamie’s face when she found out what her son had done. What I had done.
“You’re not dragging me into anything, because Nina didn’t die in that house,” I said firmly. “You understand? What you just told me tonight stays between us. You are never going to tell another living soul what happened between you. You just stick to your story, no matter what. Even between us, Simon, we don’t say anything else, okay? Because you never know who might be listening.”
Slowly, he nodded. His tears dried up. Hope dawned in his eyes. I gripped his shoulders.
