His words send a knife through my chest. I inhale, trying to breathe through that familiar, painful twisting.
My sister’s murder.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean—”
“No, it’s fine,” he says. “I get it. It’s a morbid career.”
“What happened to her?” I tread lightly, realizing now that after all of our encounters together—after our conversation on the airplane, our email exchanges, our meal at Framboise, and now this—I have never stopped to wonder what Waylon’s story is. I’ve been so used to being the one with a tale to tell, the one with a tragedy, that I’ve never even thought to ask. “Your sister?”
Waylon shrugs, shoots me a sad little smile.
“That’s the question,” he says. “The one case I’ve been working on since I was twenty-three years old.”
The sun is sinking quickly now, and I glance outside, watching the sky brighten into an unnatural orange one last time before the light is bound to disappear again. With that one single admission, I realize that, for the first time in three hundred and sixty-eight days, I’m not approaching the impending night with the same sense of dread that always comes when it’s time to buckle up, settle in. Ride out the long, lonely hours with nothing but my thoughts, my memories. My mind.
Instead, I feel hope.
I feel it, I really do. Just the faintest little glimmer, but it’s there. Because now I understand something crucial. I understand that Waylon and I may be more alike than I thought. Both of us are victims of the violence, spending our lives in the dark searching blindly for answers; both of us tainted by tragedy, defined by our loss, unable to do what everyone keeps telling me to do: just move past it, move on.
I understand that, unlike the others—unlike the detectives and the neighbors and the true crime enthusiasts—this isn’t just business for him. It isn’t entertainment. It isn’t work.
For him, it’s personal.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THEN
Our air conditioner died this morning. It was overworked, Mom said. It’s too hot.
For some reason, that reminded me of the horse-drawn carriages we sometimes see downtown, the horses’ thick bodies pulling the weight of a dozen people in oversized wagons. The heat of the sun on their necks, muscles bulging. Bits in their mouths, and the smell of manure baking on the concrete. We had seen one collapse once, stumble in the middle of the street and fall to its knees. The tourists had screamed as the coachman jumped down, pried open its jaws, and poured a bottle of water down its throat as blood oozed from a gash in its leg and pooled between the cobblestones.
“Is it dead?” Margaret had asked, looking up at my mother. The horse’s belly was moving, but just barely: slow, heaving breaths that made its nostrils flare.
“No, it’s not dead,” she had said, turning us around, hands on our necks as she led us in the opposite direction. “It’s just too hot. It’s overworked. It’s … tired.”
Margaret and I are sitting back-to-back on the hardwood floor of my mother’s studio now, hair pulled into ponytails, though I can feel my baby curls escaping the grip of the elastic and gluing themselves to my forehead, stuck to my skin with sweat. Mom put us up here earlier, setting out an assortment of paints and blank canvases, entertainment that she knew could last for hours. The morning stretched by in a warm, slow rhythm, and I can tell by the shifting sun that it’s late afternoon now, another day gone.
“I’m hot,” Margaret says, fanning herself with her hand. I turn around and see a bead of sweat drip down her chest, disappearing down the neck of her nightgown. We’re each wearing one of my father’s old work shirts on top of our pajamas, backward, sleeves rolled up to our elbows to create makeshift smocks.
“It’ll be fixed soon,” I say, feeling the tickle of a no-see-um on my leg, nipping at my skin with invisible teeth. I had swung the patio doors open earlier, letting in a warm marsh breeze that did nothing but bring the bugs in.
“How soon?”
“Tonight,” I say. “Maybe tomorrow. Once Dad gets home.”
“I can’t wait that long.”
I glace in her direction again and notice that her cheeks are flushed red, like she’s got a fever or something, but I know it’s just the heat: July in South Carolina is brutal. It can make you feel a little crazy, like you’re being cooked alive.
“Can we sleep outside?”
“No, we can’t sleep outside.”