“So what does this mean?” I ask, edging myself to the very end of the couch. “Who is she?”
“I don’t want you getting ahead of yourself,” he says, holding his palm out. He digs his other hand into his back pocket, pulling out a small picture. “It could be nothing, but we’re looking into it. Does this woman look familiar to you? Or does the name Abigail Fisher ring a bell?”
I grab the picture and stare at the woman: her mousey brown hair and unassuming eyes. She looks a little older than me—mid-forties, maybe—and I massage the name in my mind, trying to place it. I’ve sifted through so many names over these last twelve months—and that’s when my neck snaps up, my eyes on my dining room. I stand up and walk toward the table, the TrueCrimeCon attendee list still tacked up on the wall.
“Abigail Fisher,” I say, my finger tapping hard against the name when I find it. I try to tamp down the hopeful beating in my chest, but the excitement is palpable in my voice now. A giddiness I can’t contain. “Right here. Abigail Fisher. She was at the conference.”
I look at Dozier, then back down at the picture, and that’s when I realize: the eyes. I’ve seen those eyes before. I remember the way they grew so damp and distant, tears glistening as she watched me on stage, mouthing my every word.
“Oh my God,” I say, rushing over to my laptop and throwing it open. I remember pulling up that article and studying the picture of the audience; the way the camera flash had made their eyes glow, turning them into something ethereal and strange.
The way that woman’s gaze had made me physically shiver, like my body was reacting to some kind of danger my mind couldn’t yet understand.
“Abigail Fisher,” I say again, my heart thumping too hard in my chest as the article loads. Once it does, I twist around and tap at the screen, my fingers dancing wildly, watching Dozier’s expression shift as he processes it, too: his gaze moving from me to the audience, then zeroing in on her. His eyes darting back and forth between the woman in the front row and the woman in the picture he gave me.
The room is quiet for a beat longer, the hugeness of this moment settling over us both. Finally, after all this time, we have a face. A name. A chance.
“Abigail Fisher,” he repeats, nodding his head in a resigned rhythm. “That’s her.”
CHAPTER SIXTY
ONE WEEK LATER
I hear a buzz and glance up, watching as the bulky metal door swings open. My eyes are stinging. Not from sleep, though—or rather, the lack thereof—but from the cheap, fluorescent bulbs above me. From the harsh light of this place.
“Isabelle Drake?”
I glance at the prison guard in front of the door and I raise my hand, smiling meekly. The gash on my palm has healed slightly now, no longer a gaping wound but a thin, puckered scab. I can still see Dozier’s eyes on it, on me, trying to piece it all together in my living room that day. Trying to assemble all the clues into the perfect pattern to make a picture form.
“Last thing,” he had said, swinging around as I escorted him to the door. He couldn’t stop staring at it: that bloody cut on my palm. He was thinking, I’m sure, of Valerie’s lifeless body over that mountain of glass; of those shards, sharp and jagged, and the temper he had seen in me himself. The way it could flare up at any second, leaving me in a blind rage.
“Valerie took a lot from you,” he said, shifting his weight from one leg to the other like he was suddenly uncomfortable. “How does that make you feel?”
I stared at him blankly, the understatement of the century.
“She took my son,” I said, gesturing to the picture still in his grasp. “How do you think it makes me feel?”
“We don’t know that yet,” he responded, though I could see it in his face: the certainty already setting in. The perfection of it: A woman who wanted a child more than anything and another woman who wanted one gone. He could picture it, I’m sure, the way I was, too: Valerie listening to Abigail cry every Monday night, lamenting the unfairness of it all. Yearning to be a mother, the desperation in her voice, while Valerie thought of Mason and all the lies Ben had told her about me being unfit, unworthy. Imagining how his disappearance would solve just about everything.
“It’s for the best,” she had said. “For everybody.”
Dozier sighed, and I could hear his tongue clicking around in his mouth, his fingernails scratching against the fabric of his pants. Fidgeting, deciding.
“I’ll keep you posted,” he said at last, and I knew, in that moment, that my plan was going to work.