“It belongs with you,” I say. “With your family.”
She slides it on her middle finger, fanning her hands as she admires how it looks, back in its usual spot. I look behind her, into the hallway, and see pictures displayed on an entrance table, shoes kicked off at the base of the stairs. A baseball cap resting on the corner handrail. I peel my eyes from inside and glance around her yard. The home is small but quaint, undeniably lived-in: a wooden swing attached to a tree branch with two pieces of rope, a pair of Rollerblades leaning against the garage. Then a voice erupts from inside—a man’s voice. Daniel’s voice.
“Soph? Who is it?”
“I should go,” I say, turning around, suddenly feeling like I’m loitering. Like I’m snooping behind the door of a stranger’s bathroom cabinet, trying to piece together a life. Trying to catch a glimpse into the last twenty years, from the moment she had stepped away from that dilapidated old house and started walking, never looking back. How difficult that must have been—thirteen years old, only a child. Leaving her friend’s house and walking alone down that dark stretch of road. A car pulling up behind her, headlights off. Daniel, her brother, driving away slowly, dropping her at a bus stop two towns away. Pushing an envelope of money into her hand. Money he had been saving for that very moment.
I’ll meet you, he had promised. After I graduate. Then I can leave, too.
His mother, those dirty nails scratching at tissue paper skin; watery eyes as she looked into mine. He moved out the day after he graduated high school, and I haven’t heard from him since.
I wonder what those years had been like—the two of them, together. Daniel, taking classes online. Getting his degree. Sophie making money in any way she could—waiting tables, bagging groceries. Then one day, they looked at each other and realized that they had grown up. That the years had passed, and that the danger was gone. That they both deserved a life—and real life—and so Daniel had left, making his way to Baton Rouge, but always finding a way to come back.
My foot hits the top of the stairs when Sophie finally speaks again—I can hear her brother’s voice in hers, assertive and strong.
“It was my idea. To give you this.” I twist around and look at her, still standing there, arms crossed tight against her chest. “Daniel talked about you constantly. Still does.” She smirks. “When he said he was going to propose, I guess it made me feel connected, in a way. Picturing you wearing it. Like one day, we might know each other.”
I think about Daniel, those articles tucked inside a book in his bedroom. Cooper’s crimes the inspiration he had needed to get Sophie out—to make her disappear. So many lives were taken because of my brother; that fact still makes me lie awake at night, their faces burned into my mind like the soot on Lena’s palm. A big, black spot.
So many lives, gone. Except for Sophie Briggs. Her life was saved.
“I’m glad you did.” I smile. “And now we do.”
“I heard your dad’s getting out.” She takes a step forward, like she doesn’t quite want me to leave. I nod, not really sure how to respond.
I was right about Daniel visiting my father in Angola; that was where he had been going during all those trips. He had been trying to get to the truth about Cooper. When he told him about the killings happening again—the girls going missing, offering Aubrey’s necklace as proof—my father had agreed to come clean. But when you’ve already pled guilty to murder, you can’t just change your mind. You need something more; you need a confession. And that’s where I came in.
After all, it was my words that had put my father behind bars; it seemed only fitting that my conversation with Cooper, twenty years later, would be the one to free him.
I had watched my father apologize on the news last week. Apologize for lying, for protecting his son. For the additional lives that were lost because of it. I couldn’t bring myself to see him in person, not yet, but I remember staring at him through the TV screen, just like before. Only this time, I was trying to reconcile his new face with the one I still saw in my mind. His thick-rimmed glasses had been replaced with wire ones, simple and thin. There was a scar on his nose from when the original ones broke, cracking as his head slammed into the cruiser, a line of blood trickling down his cheek. His hair was shorter, his face rougher, almost as if it had been buffed with sandpaper or rubbed against the concrete until it scarred. I noticed pockmarks on his arms—burns, maybe—the skin stretched and shiny, perfectly circular like the tip of a cigarette butt.