He sees nothing, only the darkness peeking between the thick trees. But the birds have stopped chittering, and the forest is still. Waiting.
Shaking off the eerie feeling, he hurries back to the house. He needs to call the detectives.
He needs to call his wife.
Needs to avoid the reporter.
Instead of picking up the phone, he walks the house, just to be sure no one has gotten in. He sees nothing amiss on the first floors, no windows unlocked or screens askew. The second floor is too warm, reinforcing why they don’t turn on the heat until it gets damn cold out.
He stops at the room they’ve slated to be a nursery when the time comes. The first pregnancy, they’d gone hog wild, moving out the guest bed and furniture, painting the room a soft green, adding elegant animal murals—an artist friend of Olivia’s who does the nurseries in her houses came by one sunny afternoon and sketched the animals—giraffes, lions, an elephant peeking from the corner. The sketches are simple lines, just a few strokes, almost a shadow of what they could be. Fitting, really, to have shadow animals in this desolate space.
They haven’t touched it since the first miscarriage. No more blankets and booties bought, no more paint and lampshades. No crib. No nursing chair. Just a shaggy throw on top of the gray carpet and the lurking animals with no one to watch over.
He stands there, leaning against the frame, letting his imagination fill in the blanks of what he should be seeing, until his eyes blur with unshed tears and he has to close the door to lock in the possibilities.
Their lives are coming apart, and he can do nothing to stop it.
15
THE WIFE
Olivia’s phone chiming halfway through Park’s recitation of his moments of glory in graduate school gives her exactly what she needs. With half-hearted apologies and promises to check in later, she excuses herself from the meeting. She has never been as grateful for an expedited granite delivery as she is this morning.
Park looks astonished, but the cops only glance at her, don’t push back at all. She is not their primary target, this she knows. They’ll take advantage of having Park to themselves to dive deeper into his sordid past, all the things he can’t—won’t—admit in front of her. She hadn’t been with him when the murder happened in Chapel Hill. She’d been pining away here in Nashville, going to design school and trying to decide which Bender brother she hated more.
She’s managed not to think about it, but God, Perry is coming home. Could he have picked a worse time to make his grand re-entrance into their lives?
She can’t fathom this situation they’ve found themselves in, and the only way she can cope is to work. She will lose herself in samples and glory in architectural drawings. It is the only way she knows to move forward.
On the way to the build, she dials Lindsey, who answers on the first ring.
“Hey, girl. What’s shakin’？”
“Have you talked to Park?”
“No. I was trying to give y’all some space. Why, what’s happening?”
“Oh, it gets better. Or worse. I don’t know what to call it. Did you know Park donated sperm back in grad school?”
“Um…no. And eww. Sorry, talking about my brother’s sperm isn’t something high on our chat list. So that’s how he has a kid, huh? That’s wild.”
“Yeah. Wild.”
“Are you okay, hon? You sound stressed.”
“Finding out my husband lied to me does that. No big.”
“I thought you said you’d encouraged him to donate at one point during all the fertility stuff.”
“I did. I didn’t want him to be left with no one if we couldn’t stay pregnant, and I was pretty clear with him that if something happened to me, I wanted him to find someone and have a family. That’s not what’s going on here. He did this when he was younger. The kids are nearing adulthood. Some already are. And obviously, one is a murderer.”
“All right. That’s arguably very bad. But why are you mad at him? How is it different? Explain it to me.”
“Technically…” Olivia gathers her thoughts. Lindsey is right. She’s being a bit hypocritical. What difference does it make that he donated sperm then, or now? “When I brought it up, he didn’t tell me. That’s the issue. He had every opportunity to say hey, Liv, just FYI, I donated years ago, don’t worry, my evolutionary trail is covered.”
“But you would have been upset.”
“Damn straight. I’m upset now.”
“Understandable. I’m not defending him, truly. But I can see him not wanting to mention it to you simply because he knew it would set you off. It would set me off. Wait. You said kids, plural. There’s more than one?”
“Are you sitting down? There’s twenty-eight of them. And counting, apparently.”
The string of invectives is enough to make Olivia blush. God, if only she could cut loose like that.
“I feel the same way. I…saw one of them. A girl. In the police file. She’s here in Nashville. She looks just like you, except her hair is red and curly.”
Silence. “Aw, Liv. I’m sorry. This has to be impossibly hard. What can I do? How can I help?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I need right now. It’s all been too much—first I miscarry, again, then Park has a kid who’s a murderer, now there’s twenty-eight of them—it’s like a bad joke the universe is playing on me. All I can do is wonder why. What have I done to deserve this? Why am I being punished?”
She sounds childish and peevish, but she doesn’t care. For God’s sake.
Curly hair, a crooked smile, that dimple in her chin.
“All this aside… Lindsey. One of these kids—your nephew, technically—murdered a woman. What does that mean?”
Lindsey has gathered herself. Olivia can hear the scratching of pen on paper in the background. “It means there’s going to be a media shitstorm. We need to be prepared. I want to reach out to my friend Lucía Perez. She’s one of the best crisis management attorneys I’ve ever seen. She’ll—”
“Wait, what? You think we need a crisis management lawyer? Why can’t you handle things? I don’t want a stranger digging into our lives.” Olivia slumps in her seat, a tear glistening in the corner of her eye. “No. Keep this between us. Please.” She sniffs. “I can’t believe this is happening. As if we aren’t under enough stress.”
“Honey, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this is going to be off the charts. The headlines write themselves. Sperm Donor Child Murderer, The Man with a Thousand Kids, you get the idea. Once they put together the current situation and Chapel Hill? There’s going to be press, and there’s going to be more police, and it’s going to be absolutely insane. I want you protected. You need to have someone who can run interference, who can put together a plan to get you through this. Both of you.”
She trails off.
“What?”
“The mothers…can you imagine how they are going to feel?”
Olivia quietly and carefully hangs up.
A few moments later, her phone chirps discreetly from the dashboard, and seeing it is neither Lindsey nor Park, she depresses the button to attach the call to the car’s speaker.