“Isabelle?”
Waylon answers slowly, curiously, like he’s wondering if I really meant to call. Like he thinks I dialed the wrong number and he’s afraid to hear my voice on the other side of the line. I glance at the clock in my car—it’s still early, well before rush hour—and realize that I might have woken him up.
“Waylon,” I say, trying to calm the tremor in my throat. “What you said to me yesterday—”
“I know, I’m sorry,” he interrupts, his voice breathy and hoarse. I picture him lying in a cold motel room, bed-head hair sticking out in all directions as he fumbles for the lamp in the dark. “I feel terrible about it. I was too harsh—”
“Do you think I hurt Mason?” I cut him off. “Do you think I killed my son?”
“What?” The sharp intake of air, the change in tone, tells me everything I need to know. It’s like my words were a bucket of ice water thrown across his face, startling him awake. “Isabelle, no. Why would you think that?”
I exhale, relief flowing through me.
“I know who you are,” I say. “You’re Allison’s brother. Allison Spencer. Allison Drake.”
The line is silent. I can hear him breathing, thinking, wondering what to say next.
“I’m not mad,” I continue. “I just … I need to know what you’re doing here. And what you think you know about Ben.”
There has always been chatter about Ben, I suppose, the same way there has always been chatter about me. The parents are the two most logical suspects, after all, but I had always dismissed it. Always sided so strongly with Ben. We had been together. We had been asleep the entire night, limbs like tentacles intertwined in the sheets.
But then again, Waylon had asked about that, too.
“So your husband could have gotten up and you wouldn’t have noticed?”
I remember Margaret sliding her little body beneath the dead weight of my arm. Me, waking up in the morning without any memory of her arrival. Without a clue as to what had happened in the night. Before the insomnia, I was always such a heavy sleeper … so how do I really know that he was there all along? How do I really know that he didn’t get up, slip out from beneath the covers, and do something in the night? Something he’s keeping from me?
Maybe some part of me had always wondered, the way I so desperately hoped that our stories aligned. The way I had strained to hear what he was saying on the other side of that wall being interrogated on his own, like there was some flicker of distrust between us that I never wanted to acknowledge. The way I never asked about Allison—about what happened to her, what he thought about it all, like I didn’t even want to know.
Maybe, somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind—the same place where I had exiled those thoughts about Mason and those memories of my childhood, my mother, Eloise; the ones that hurt to think about and were easier to just ignore, or even better, recreate into something altogether different, molding them like putty in my hands until they looked the way I wanted them to—maybe, I had thought it then: the convenience of her death, the unanswered questions. The easy lies he constructed, jumping so quickly from her to me.
“It’s not what I think I know,” Waylon says at last, his voice measured and calm. “It’s what I do know. He was my brother-in-law for ten years, Isabelle. I know him better than anybody.”
“He was my husband for seven,” I respond. “I think I know him pretty well, too.”
“That’s what Allison thought.”
I hesitate, drumming my fingers against the steering wheel. For the first time, I try to put myself in Allison’s shoes. I try to make myself imagine it: how it would feel if Ben did to me what he did to her. What we did to her. If he lied about his whereabouts, spent hours on end with another woman at some dimly lit bar, looking at her the way he had once looked at me: chin tucked low, an intensity in his eyes. A playful grin tugging at his lip, like he was imagining the two of us together in some other, private place. If he texted her late at night, after I was asleep, our naked bodies pressed together but in two entirely different places. If I woke up in the morning and climbed on top of him, oblivious to the fact that he was picturing her instead of me.
In this light, it actually seems worse than cheating. It’s more calculated, more cunning. More manipulative.
“So, what?” I ask. “You actually think he killed her? You actually think he’s capable of murder?”
“Isabelle,” he responds, his voice clinical and cold, as if he’s delivering a diagnosis that he knows will be the end of me, “I know he killed her.”