“Was Liv the one who hurt me?” I asked.
“Alan Stahl hurt you. You saw him yourself,” Marcus said evenly. Too evenly.
“Stop,” I said. I stood. My vision blurred with tears I refused to shed in front of him. “I’m done being lied to. And I’m done lying.”
“Whatever you think you know, I can’t help you,” Marcus said.
“No.” Kimiko stood behind him. Her gray hair had been wrenched back in a bun for the funeral, its flyaway strands unnaturally tamed. She looked not at me, but at her husband. “It has gone on long enough.”
“Nothing good can come of this,” Marcus said, and though he was still looking at the knife, he was speaking to both of us. “Leave it alone. Let her rest.”
“Our daughter is dead,” Kimiko said. “Naomi is still alive, and she deserves to know what happened.”
I had hoped that I was wrong. That I had spun some dark fairy tale out of paranoia and grief. That hope crumpled in the face of Kimiko’s weary expression, the defeat in her voice.
Marcus folded his hand around the knife, as if it could make it vanish. “It wasn’t her fault,” he said.
A sob ripped free of me. My knees went weak; I stumbled. Marcus stepped forward quickly and caught me, steadying me, but I thrashed away from him. “Don’t touch me!” I shouted, slapping at his hands. “Don’t fucking touch me!”
“Naomi, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he said. “We didn’t— We never—”
“We need to go inside,” Kimiko said, coming up behind him. Her lips were pressed in a thin, hard line. She seemed scabbed over with sorrow. “We will tell you everything, but we need to go inside.”
I allowed myself to be gently herded through the door, moving in a haze. In moments I was on the couch, a huge marmalade cat bumping his head against my elbow. I sank my fingers into his fur and he kneaded my thigh with enthusiasm.
Kimiko set a cup of tea in front of me. Marcus stood hovering by the mantel, the knife in his hands, turning it over and over. Kimiko took a seat in the chair opposite me, perching on the edge. “You must understand that we did what we felt was best for our daughter,” Kimiko said. “We had to protect her. Telling the truth would not have helped anyone. It would not have helped her get the treatment that she needed, it would have destroyed her.”
Liv had attacked me. This was the truth, then: an iron nail swallowed whole, the taste of blood and ruin. My throat worked as if to reject it, but it was lodged deep within me. It couldn’t be true. She wouldn’t have hurt me. Not Liv. She was too kind, too gentle. This couldn’t be right.
“We had no idea that Olivia was suffering such strong delusions. She had become convinced that Persephone required a major sacrifice, or something horrible would happen to everyone she loved,” Marcus said. “That game you were playing just fed into her illness until it overtook her. She thought she was saving you. Saving everyone.”
“You knew about Persephone?” I asked. “Did you know that Liv was trying to find out who she was?”
“What do you mean, who she was? She was part of your game,” Kimiko said. “The Goddess Game.”
They didn’t know about the body. “Who else knew?” I asked slowly. “Cass did, obviously. What about her parents?”
“Jim and Meredith knew,” Marcus said, voice tight. “Cass had already lied. There would have been trouble for them. Dougherty had already seized on Stahl. It was Jim who realized we should use that. We could help Liv and stop a serial killer. It was the perfect solution. Jim thought—he agreed that it would only make things worse, if we told the truth.”
No, I thought, that wasn’t why Jim had come up with his brilliant, perfect solution. He hadn’t done it for Liv. He hadn’t done it to cover up Cass’s panicked lie, something that people would have understood readily enough, would have excused with time. He did it because of Jessi.
I could see the threads now. The line that ran from Jessi Walker to me to Olivia. Three of us in the woods. Our blood spilled. Big Jim had killed Jessi. And when Cass told him what had happened, told him about Persephone, he realized that he was going to be in trouble when people learned that Jessi hadn’t just moved on. So: the first lie, and all the ones that followed.
“You were the only wrinkle,” Marcus was saying. “We had no idea what you would say when you woke up. But you didn’t remember anything—and you were so drugged up. We just kept telling you what had happened, and you accepted it. You even seemed to remember it that way. We never wanted to harm you, Naomi. We were so grateful that you were okay.”
“You let me stay friends with her,” I said dully.
“She loved you, Naomi. She really believed that Persephone was going to take you to the underworld and then bring you back. She thought she was helping you.” Marcus’s tone was pleading.
I touched my cheek, the side of my face twisted in a permanent grimace. He dropped his eyes.
“She wanted to tell you. There were many times when she wanted to tell everyone the truth and face the consequences,” Kimiko said. “Eight years ago, when she tried to kill herself, she said that she was tired of lying.”
I’m tired of lying. Why did that sound familiar?
“I hurt Naomi,” Kimiko said, Liv’s voice an echo on her lips. She stared into the distance, her hand holding her cardigan shut at her chest. “It was the only thing she said for almost three days.”
“Liv was basically catatonic at the hospital,” Marcus added. “They were both covered in blood. There was so much blood.” He looked pale at the memory.
Silence settled between us. It lingered, long enough for the conversation to wither, for any sense of connection between us to vanish, until each of us in that room was truly, utterly, alone.
“Naomi, what are you going to do?” Kimiko asked.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have an answer. I gave the marmalade cat one last scratch behind the ears, and I walked out, leaving them to their grief and guilt and fear.
I had reached the end. Or my end, at least. I couldn’t do this by myself anymore. I didn’t even know what I was searching for, why I’d thought that the answers I found would bring me some kind of peace. So Jim was a killer and Liv had almost become one, and there was no truth in any of that. Only sorrow.
The time for keeping secrets was over. I couldn’t hold off any longer—I needed to go to the police. I had to tell them everything.
But I couldn’t just walk in there. Not when it was the mayor I was accusing of murdering a girl—never mind the fact that I’d lied all these years and sent a man to prison for the wrong crime. I had no idea what kind of consequences I was facing. I needed help, and there was no one left to help me.
No—that wasn’t true.
Cody Benham’s business card was in my glove box. I cast around blindly for a minute before I remembered that my phone was long gone, thanks to Jessup Consulting. Instead, I drove until I found a pay phone at the edge of town, next to a bulletin board warning about keeping food where bears could get at it. I dialed the number with shaking hands. He picked up on the second ring with a distracted hello.