Black Butterfly. It was Beth who encouraged her to write the story of Pearl Behr and Grace Stevenson, and how their lives intersected with her own. After two years of research, with the help of Hunter Ross, Selena was nearing the final editorial draft. Beth had brokered a book contract with a major house, and the book was slated to publish next year. What had she been before she met Will, Graham, had children? She was a writer, a dream she let languish and die. Now, through the ashes of her life, she rose.
Write it, said Beth. When we narrate our experience, we take control of it. And in controlling the story of our past, we can create a better future.
Graham’s trial and conviction for the murder of Jaqueline Carson, his imprisonment, the boys’ therapy, their crushing pain, her own. It had been a long, dark night of the soul where no light was visible at the end of the tunnel. Through it all, she wrote and wrote.
She kept writing as the truth about her husband—all of it—came out.
After years of affairs with coworkers, women he’d met in bars, strippers, and a pattern of escalating violence toward women—the girl in Vegas was just the beginning—the night Selena threw Graham out of the house, he’d killed Jaqueline Carson.
Graham had been harassing Jacqueline via text since she’d gotten him fired from his job. The night Selena hit him with the toy robot, Graham was desperate and enraged, and he’d waited for Jacqueline outside her apartment, forced her inside when she came home, raped and killed her.
He still claimed he didn’t remember the deed, that he couldn’t remember, either, how he tried to kill Selena, his wife and the mother of his children. He’d wept on the stand. And, truly, Selena could see how his rage turned him into a monster, someone she never met until that final night. When he said that he couldn’t remember, she believed him.
But there was video of Graham struggling to put a rolled up rug into his SUV outside Jacqueline’s apartment, captured by a security camera. Later, a picture of him passing through a toll booth on the way to dispose of the body. Finally, a photo of Graham throwing what turned out to be his bloody clothes in a dumpster, apparently taken by Pearl, who was following him.
It still wasn’t clear to Selena how much Pearl had seen—that night or other nights. Why, if she’d followed Graham and knew he was waiting for Jaqueline outside her apartment, she did nothing to stop it.
But this was something that had come up in therapy. Her doctor had said: “You cannot explain or come to understand the actions of deranged people. You can only accept what has happened and try to move forward, grateful that you have survived them.”
And if not for Cora, Paulo, and Marisol, Beth and Will, as well as the resilient strength of her children, she wouldn’t have. And for all her failings, without Pearl, Selena might not have survived Graham.
But she was still writing, still trying to understand, piecing together what she learned from the trial, from the stories of the women who came forward to testify against Graham. She would keep writing until she had told the whole story, the whole truth and all its many facets.
The clock read nearly two, just another hour before she had to pick up the boys from their new school, a tiny private place where they were coddled and sheltered from the ugliness in their world. She answered their questions the best she could, brought to therapy what she couldn’t, promised herself she’d always be honest with them, no matter how much it hurt.
Oliver and Stephen talked to Graham every Sunday. Weirdly, it had taken on a kind of normalcy—they talked to him about school, their friends, soccer. He moderated their arguments, praised them, soothed them when they begged him to come home. Selena had not brought them to see him, though they’d asked. Neither she nor Graham wanted that, not yet. When they were older. Maybe. Selena didn’t think about Graham. Didn’t talk to him. He was more dead to her than if he had died.
Sometimes she dreamed about him, as he loomed over her, crushing her throat and taking the air from her lungs.
The house she’d found for herself and the boys was isolated on five acres of property, not too far from Cora and Paulo, who helped her in every way possible, and closer to her sister’s house. Their relationship had grown stronger, her sister helping with the kids, Selena doing the same for her. As a result, Oliver and Stephen were closer to their cousins. Family gatherings were more peaceful. No more secrets. No more lies.
Selena had severed ties with her father. She had no room in her life for someone who’d invited so much darkness into his family.
Their other house languished on the market for a time—no one wanted to live where a killer had lived. But people had short memories, and a few months after Graham’s conviction, the story seemed to fade from the public consciousness. The house sold for a bit less than market value. But it was worth it to move on from a place where, as her mother put it, the ghosts of broken dreams lived around every corner.
The house they lived in now, an 1880 farmhouse in an upstate New York town called The Hollows, was a project. It needed work, and it occupied much of Selena’s time and attention when she wasn’t writing or caring for the boys. Which is exactly why she bought it. The last thing she needed was free time.
Outside, she heard tires crunching on the drive. She saved her work and headed downstairs in time to watch Will come through the front door, holding a large bouquet of tiger lilies, her favorite.
He’d recused himself as Graham’s lawyer to become hers after the attack. Another lawyer defended Graham when he went to trial.
Now, Selena and Will were—friends. She knew he wanted more. He knew she was nowhere near ready. She needed space to find herself. Finally.
“What’s this?” she asked, taking the flowers. She gave him a squeeze and a kiss on the cheek.
“It’s—you know,” he started. “Just something to brighten the day.”
“Thank you,” she said. “You’re good to me, Will.”
It was Friday. Will came over most Friday afternoons to play with the boys in the yard, then for pizza and movies. Sometimes, Marisol and her kids joined, as well. It was something they’d set up to create a sense of normalcy for Oliver and Stephen—and it seemed to work. Their therapist said that she was doing all the right things, that the boys were dealing with things in a healthy, normal way. Only time would tell.
But did Oliver seem more sullen and dark? Was the pitch of Stephen’s tantrums more desperate? Would any of them ever be whole again? Would the darkness from their father, from her own father, infect them? Was it wound into their DNA?
These were the things that kept her up at night, worrying about the contagion of secrets and lies, dark impulses, violent tendencies.
At the kitchen table, she and Will chatted a while—about her book, about a case he was working on, what movies they should watch tonight. When he offered to pick up the kids so that she could get a workout, she agreed. The boys were always happy to see Will; he filled a space that was empty in each of them now. And she was grateful for his friendship, to all of them. A good man, if flawed in some ways, if not a perfect match for Selena, an honest and respectful one. Paulo, too, was a strong and positive influence. Her boys had men to look to, role models of the kind of quiet strength that comes from integrity and a heart that can love women well.